Engagement is at the core of social media—it’s what makes it social! To break it down in terms of traditional social interactions, a post is what initiates a conversation and an engagement is a way of another person responding to it. For businesses, creating channels for customer engagement is key to building a strong online presence that leads to stronger relationships, brand awareness, and sales.
You’re probably aware of the most common types of social media engagement such as likes, comments, and shares, but today we’re here to give you some more insight into what goes into social media engagement and how you can start to measure it for your business.
Types of social media engagement
Engagement is a measurement of how people interact with your social media accounts which encompasses many categories across platforms.
Here are some of the most common types of engagement:
Likes
Comments
Shares or retweets
Clicks
Saves
Mentions and tags
Social media is often the first touchpoint for your customers, so driving high-quality engagement is a great first step in gaining their trust.
How to measure social media engagement
With so many different types of engagement, what you measure depends on your social media goals but the measurement small businesses commonly start with is an engagement rate.
Engagement rate is calculated as total engagement divided by total followers, multiplied by 100%. The engagement rate formula is:
Engagement Rate = Total Engagement / Total Followers x 100
To easily find these numbers, use the basic analytics within your business social media profiles. You can find them by tapping on ‘insights’ on your profile.
Instead of manually calculating engagement rates, you can also use tools. Ripl will help you track engagements for the social media accounts connected in the Ripl app so you can see how all your posts are performing in one place.
Tip: Once you start measuring engagement, don’t get hung up on day-to-day engagements as those tend to fluctuate. Instead, we recommend looking at the bigger picture by tracking monthly and quarterly progress. Longer-term engagement measurements lead to more informed decisions for your marketing.
Ways to boost quality social media engagement
As you can see, likes and comments are just skimming the surface of engagement on social media. Here are some tips and best practices to start boosting the quality and quantity of your social media engagement:
Respond to comments and direct messages in a timely manner: Don’t post and ghost! Stay online after you post to respond to immediate engagements.
Include a call to action at the end of your posts: Tell them what to do next, ask an open-ended question.
Consistently post to your feeds: Batching and scheduling content makes it easier to be consistent.
Create different posts for different types of engagement goals: Try keeping a rotation of content like shareable posts, posts that drive followers to comment, and informational posts.
Interact with your followers’ content: You don’t need to wait for your followers to come to you. Find them and engage with their posts as well.
Create more of the types of posts that get more engagement: Once you have enough content to analyze, start creating more of the types of content your audience engages with.
Create authentic and helpful content: Since customers use social media for researching brands, they want them to be friendly and honest on social media.
Because social media platforms encourage engagement, using these tips will also help you with beating the algorithm.
If measuring social media engagement feels new or confusing, remember to start with what you understand and learn as you go. Click here for more quick social media tips.
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