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Tips to Optimize Engagement on Your Posts in 2023
In the past, we’ve talked about engagement and how important it is to your social media presence. What we haven’t touched on is how to encourage people to engage with your posts on social media.
You’re putting a considerable amount of time and effort into creating content that you are proud of for your platforms, so it is only fair that your effort doesn’t go unnoticed. Today, we’re breaking down our top 6 tips to help optimize your content and get you better engagement on your posts.
Incorporate Visuals to Your Content
Many platforms require you to have visuals such as Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat but there are others where visual content is optional such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Don’t make visual content optional. In fact, try to incorporate it whenever possible.
If you were scrolling through your Facebook feed and were seeing post after post only containing text, until you came across an engaging photo of your dentist’s office offering free whitening for this week, whose post would you stop to for? If you answered the post with the photo, you are absolutely correct!
Adding any sort of visual such as images, infographics, and videos can help boost your engagement and make your content more appealing. As social media continues grow, visualizing information for efficient consumption has become more common place. People are now shifting from telling a story to showing the story.
They don’t say a picture is worth a thousand words for nothing.
Ask Your Followers Questions
When you’re asked a question, how often are you responding? We would hope that it’s every time, if not most of the time. It’s the same on your social media platforms, you ask your followers a question with the hopes of receiving an answer.
However before you go asking away on your Instagram stories, put yourself in your follower’s shoes and ask yourself two things: 1) Does this question pertain to their situation and 2) Will they know how to answer this question? If either of those answers are no, consider some different options
There are many ways you can ask questions. If you are looking for immediate feedback on an issue, ask on your Facebook and Instagram stories. If you are looking for a way to start a conversation relating to a certain topic, ask it in a post as a visual or in the captions. This is a great way to build up your engagement because as your followers start commenting and answering your questions, you’re also adding to the conversation by responding to your comments.
Keep Your Content Short and Sweet
Save the long-form content for your website’s blog. That is where the SEO keywords are really going to matter. Social media was built on the idea of consuming as much information and content as fast as possible. This is typically why many platforms have character limits.
Make sure your content is concise and to the point to help maintain the reader’s engagement. No one is going to log onto Instagram to see a whole documentary about your practice’s team members. They can go to YouTube or read about it on your blog.
Give the audience their answers quickly. Use the short-form content to be mysterious, and offer only a piece of the puzzle. This will get your audience to interact more with your content.
Encourage the Sharing of Your Content
The only way to boost the shareability of your content is by creating something that people want to link back to. Whether they are sharing it with all of their followers or sending a link via private message, you are the one benefiting from the movement of your content.
Storytelling is a great way to make your content more likely to be shared. Make sure your content is relatable to your followers. Typically when someone is following their dental office on social media they are hoping to learn more about the doctors, facility, or staff. Make sure that you are able to offer some sort of knowledge that they didn’t have before.
Another way to grow your engagement through the power of sharing is through contests. You could start a custom sound through Instagram Reels and tell your patients that they can be entered in a contest by using your sound and sharing your content. Interactive content will outperform non-interactive content.
Learn Your Follower’s Behavior
This one may be a bit trickier than others because it requires you to understand your insights. Thankfully many social platforms have made it easy to find this data.
One of the quickest things you can do to encourage engagement is by posting at the time that your followers are the most active. It only makes sense that if you want someone to see your post, like, comment, and share it, you’ll need to do so when they are online. So why not post when most of your audience is online?
Final Thoughts
One thing to consider when implementing the steps we just highlighted is platform where you are posting. Instagram engagement will look very different from engagement on Facebook and other platforms.
You will need to understand how each of the different social platforms operate before committing to implanting our tips.
Engagement can be tricky because it’s not something that you can always control, but there are steps that you can take to ensure that you are encouraging a response to your content. By focusing on our tips and tricks you’ll be sure to increase your engagement in no time!
—Marie Dubray, Social Media Specialist, Sesame Communications