Simple tactics for boosting social media engagement

If you’ve been tracking your business' social media posts and all you see are a handful of likes, a single comment and zero shares, then that means it’s time to tweak your social media content and strategy to one that actually works.

Here are a few tips and tricks to effectively pull up your social media engagement.

Aside from insensitivity to different cultures, beliefs and ways of life, a huge no-no when it comes to social media is posting content your target audience don’t care about. Think about it - why create a social media account for your business if your supposed audience will just ignore your posts? To turn things around, take the time to find out what your customers are interested in and come up with posts that will capture their attention. Whether it be something inspiring, compelling, informative or helpful, come up with original content that will make your audience click the like button, leave a comment and share your post - but of course, don’t forget that these posts must have something to do with your product or services.

Keep yourself up to date with the current online buzz and use it to your advantage. Come up with a content where it’s suitable to use a trending hashtag. This exposes your content to more people, including those who are not yet following you. Take note though to use hashtags appropriately. Using one just for the chance to use it can turn your post into spam where people might just block or report you instead of engage with you.

Visual content remains king of all types of content as proven by statistics. Early this year, Buffer reported that tweets with images have 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets.

A study conducted by Socialbakers.com found that posts with photos saw the most engangement, accounting for 87% of total interactions.

Also, videos uploaded on Facebook automatically come to life without having to click or tap play. According to Facebook for Business, this leads to a 10% increase in people watching, liking, sharing and commenting on videos.

Different social media platforms have different peak user times. On top of that, target markets also have varying social media habits. There are several studies on online user behavior and your Facebook account also provides stats that help you determine the best time for posting. Time your posts during peak hours and notice the increase in engagement. There are several tools to choose from, like Hootsuite or Buffer, to schedule and optimize your social media posts.

Social media is a common and convenient way to reach out to your customers and vice versa. Simply take the time to ask them questions and get their insight. Address questions they’ve posted on your wall or as a comment. Reply with a message of appreciation when they use social media to express how much they like your product or services. The bottomline here is to take that small, extra step to get your customers talking to you or about you.

• Research on relevant content for your target market
• Produce interesting content (whether as an article, graphics or video)
• Engage with the users
• Write blurbs
• Schedule posts

Those are only some of the things you need to do to make your social media pages soar to the top - or at the least be on its way. But who has time for all that as a business owner, especially if this is not even your area of expertise? A practical solution to that is to assign a pro or get a team of them to manage your business’s social media accounts. You can easily find skilled professionals on freelance websites like Freelancer.com to create your content and oversee your social media accounts. One of the best parts about using Freelancer is you can get all these done cost-effectively or within your set budget.

Try these tips and let me know how it worked out for you.

Enjoy our weekly installment from Sebastián Siseles, the international director of Freelancer.com, the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by total number of users and projects posted. View previous posts here .