I’ve created 5 top tips to get you thinking about how you can get your audience to engage with your content. So whether you’re a business owner, a chef trying to increase your profile or a foodie professional – these tips should give you a starting point.
1. If you don’t know, get to know
Knowing who your audience is on your social profile is incredibly important – and should be your top priority. By getting to know your audience and who follows you, you’ll be able to understand, create and tailor your content to what they want to see… Ultimately leading to more engagement!
But how do you do this?
Don’t worry, you don’t have to be an analytics whizz. You could simply take a segment of your followers and note down what industry they’re in (whether it’s a customer, chef, professional, business etc.). This’ll give you a rough idea of what content they may like.
Or you can go onto your chosen platforms, and have a look at the analytics dashboards provided – you can then view demographics. Better yet, just ask! Don’t be afraid to use the tools which social offers you – head on to Instagram stories and ask where your audience is from, what they do, what they’d like to see more of.
Note: Your audience could differ slightly on each platform. For example, your Instagram could have foodies and chefs but your LinkedIn may have business owners/professionals.
2. Post check
Take a look at your recent posts… What posts worked best?
Did one create more likes and engagements than others? Did another generate multiple shares? Take note of what went well and do more of it! Similarly, take note of what didn’t go so well – this will give you an indication of:
- What your audience likes to see
- Help spur on ideas on how to make the content work for your audience.
You can also use the platforms’ analytics to see your top posts, which will help you pull apart your content easier.
3. Take a chance
Don’t be afraid to take a chance on something completely new. Spotted a meme you can edit and get involved in? Try it. Seen a trending conversation online that you have great insight into? Write a blog about it. Want to introduce yourself through a little video? Just do it! There’s no harm in trying something new.
We all know that we can’t always share fun content and sometimes we have to be a bit more serious. Try tailoring that content to be more visually pleasing. You don’t have to be a Photoshop wizard either, there’s easy-to-use, free tools out there that provide hundreds of templates to get you started.
Remember, the beauty of social media is if you try something and it doesn’t work, it’s soon forgotten. You can move on and try something else until you find out what does work.
4. If you don’t ask, you don’t get
Social media is for socialising – so engage with your audience too! You could ask them to send in some photos, invite them to tag you in their posted images, or create a fun poll to get them thinking.
User generated content is a great way to increase brand awareness as well as engagement activity. It gets your audience involved and creates a real feeling of a community. And if you’re a business owner, it creates an authentic representation of your brand and/or product, building confidence in others who have yet to try it.
Don’t forget to engage back – reply to comments, like other people’s posts and give them an insight into who you are too. Be authentic!
5. Work with the platforms
The one thing to know about social platforms is that they beg for you to use their features and functions. So become familiar with what each platform has to offer.
Sometimes your content may be more informative and educational, and that can be really hard to get across in an engaging way. By using the different functions and features on the platforms, you could adapt your content to be more engaging.
If you have some key statistics to share, why not create a poll on Twitter and Instagram stories and get people to guess the right answer? Maybe you’ve recently done some research and want to share it on social without creating a website to sit the blog post on – head over to LinkedIn and post it as an article.
There’s so many fun and engaging features on the platforms, and if you use them the platforms and their algorithms will favour your content, working harder to push your content out.
And that’s a wrap.
So, there it is… 5 ways to help engage your audience! There’s so much more we could cover to help create that all important engaging content but the key thing to take away is to have fun with it. Social media doesn’t need to be serious and scary. Get to know your audience, and let them get to know you!
I’ve added some useful links below to get you started.
How to access analytics on the platform:
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
LinkedIn
Useful links:
LinkedIn – Best Practices
LinkedIn – A content creator’s guide
Instagram features
Twitter features (“Adding content to your tweet”)
Facebook help centre
