5 smart ways to engage your social media followers 👋

Are you interested in cultivating strong connections and fostering a lively community of devoted followers across your social media channels?

Engaging with your audience on social media is a simple, cost-effective, and powerful way to begin!

Engaging with your followers on social media is an important marketing strategy that can also be low-cost and highly effective.

Whether you're selling a product or a service, your target audience most likely lives on social media, so it makes sense for you to meet them where they're at!

Here are some reasons why you should start:

Boosts social media reach

Engaging with your social media followers will boost your reach, exposing your content to a wider audience.

This will signal to the app's algorithm that users like your followers enjoy your content. It will then display your content to more similar users.

Create more brand awareness

The more you engage, the more your brand's presence becomes visible to the online world through an increased social media reach.

The more times people come across your brand, the more they'll become familiar with and recognize your brand, which will help you stand out from others.

Develop a relationship with your audience

Behind the screen, your followers are humans who crave social interactions. Engaging with them on social media will help build trust and create a sense of community.

Gather valuable feedback

Engaging in meaningful conversations with your followers and encouraging them to share their thoughts and opinions is important when it comes to gathering valuable feedback.

Take your followers' feedback into consideration and make decisions based off of what they have to say. This will make them feel valuable and heard.

Drive sales

Building up your presence on social media will build a community. Creating conversions with your followers will help you sell a product or service.

Use the 5 strategies below to engage with your followers on social media!

• Answer any questions your followers may have about your product or service.

• Respond to comments, questions, and direct messages in a timely manner.

• Be authentic with your responses and personalize each message so that followers know that a real human is replying to them, not an automated robot.

• Remember to show sincere appreciation and thank your followers for engaging!

• Repost anytime someone makes with your product or brand.

• Ask permission first and tag their username to give credit.

• Engage with the user, thank them for sharing the post and maybe even give them a follow!

Instagram in particular has great reposting features. Read more about user-generated content (UGC) on Instagram and how brands are using it in this guide: User Generated Content on Instagram [The Ultimate Guide]

Many social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have polling features or question boxes that can help you gather valuable feedback from your followers. When using these features, remember to:

• Ask clear, short questions and use simple language to ensure all followers can understand it to create more engagement

• Ask a variety of questions and occasionally include questions that do not seem directly correlated to your product or service to be more personable.

• Be casual, use humor, trending phrases, slang, or memes if applicable.

Quiz: Smoothie Poll

Choose the best poll question a smoothie company should use in an Instagram poll in the

A. Which smoothie boosters do you enjoy adding?

1. Protein powder

2. Collagen

3. Flax seeds

4. Spirulina powder

B. When do you most crave a smoothie?

1. Morning

2. Afternoon as a mid-day pick me up

3. After a late night workout session

C. Do you love our smoothies?

1. Yes

2. No

• Share special promo codes or limited-time deals with your followers and encourage them to take advantage of these exclusive deals before a certain date.

• Offer BOGO (buy one get one) deals, free shipping, percentage discounts, dollar amount discounts or freebies.

• Initiate fun competitions or challenges they can participate in and win an attractive prize.

• Establish clear instructions, rules, and deadlines.

• Enforce rules such as your followers have to like, share, comment or repost your content in order to be entered in a chance to win a prize. Get your followers to create their own content and use hashtags to be entered into the competition

• Engage with the content your followers share with you during the competition..

• Announce the winners publicly, and thank all participants for engaging.

Watch this short video for some Instagram giveaway ideas:

Here are some things to steer away from when engaging with your followers on social media:

Inappropriate dialogue

Avoid using offensive language or statements that could cause controversy and cause you to lose followers or even worse, get your brand cancelled on the internet!

Posting too little or too much

Post regularly to maintain audience engagement, but ensure not to overdo it. Consistent, valuable, high quality posts are much better than a ton of irrelevant or low quality posts.

Study your social media analytics to see when it's the best time to post, and when your followers are most active.

Ignoring comments

Try to respond to as many comments as you can to make your followers feel seen and heard.

It's especially important to respond to followers who reach out with their concerns or in need of support regarding your product or service, and offer solutions to address the situation professionally.

Dismissing negative feedback

Although it's never fun to read these sorts of comments, dismissing negative feedback may cause the situation to escalate. It is important to acknowledge negative feedback and adress any valid concerns respectfully.

Inauthentic messages or automated messages

Avoid generic-sounding messages and stay away from using automated messages — your followers can probably tell! It's much better to personalize each message in order to build genuine, trusting relationship with you and your followers.

By applying these strategies, you'll create a more engaged community of loyal followers. Discover more ideas on ways to engage your followers by checking out the links below: