50 Social Media Engagement Ideas to Boost Key Social Media Metrics

Updated: 20th June 2022

Need ways to increase social media engagement? These social media engagement ideas will boost your social media interactions and key social media metrics.

Are you looking for ways to boost your key social media metrics? As a marketer, your goal is to ensure that your social media engagement strategies are having the desired impact on important social media metrics.

That’s no easy task, but it’s certainly not impossible. In fact, with a little creativity and effort, you can boost your social media engagement and see better results.

In this blog post, we will share several ways to create social media engagement posts that you can use to increase viewership, engagement, and reach.

You can never have too many social media engagement ideas to increase social media interaction. Trying different social media engagement post ideas also helps keep followers engaged; they never know what to expect next.

So, if you’re looking for ways to increase engagement on social media and spice up your social media engagement plan, these 50 social media engagement ideas will help get you started.

What is social media engagement?

Social media engagement is the Holy Grail of marketing. There are many types of social media engagement, and it means different things to different people, but to most marketers, it means getting a response from their target audience.

So what are the social engagement metrics that matter most? Some of the most important social media metrics to track are likes, shares, comments, tags, retweets, replies, mentions, follows, favorites, repins, clicks, upvotes, views, listens, subscribers, and more.

This video from Simplified explains how to read social media analytics, including the different metrics available on each platform, to improve your marketing strategy, track your progress, and determine your successes.

One of the benefits of social media engagement metrics is in providing a way to measure the quality of your content, and whether your audience is responding and engaging with it.

But what engagement truly represents is a two-way dialogue between brands and followers.

Engagement represents a two-way dialogue between brands and followers.

If you’re sharing content on social media networks, do your customers appreciate it and engage with it in one of the ways above? And how can you create more engaging social media posts?

My primary rule of engagement is: If you want to increase social media engagement, be engaged.

If you want to increase social media engagement, be engaged.

Like most people, social media users don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. So start giving, before you expect to receive.

50 ways to increase social media engagement

These 50 ways to increase social media engagement may seem daunting, but it really just means being creative and strategic in how you post and communicate with followers.

#1. Listen to the conversation

Social media engagement is a two-way street. The conversation starts with you listening to what your audience is saying and measuring social media engagement metrics to know where you’re starting from.

With so many social media monitoring tools out there, there’s no excuse for failing to monitor what the audience is saying about your brand.

You can use these social listening tools to monitor where your brand or products are being mentioned, where your website links are being shared, and what kind of sentiment surrounds the conversations about your company and products.

#2. Create exceptional blog content

The time when you could write up a 500-word article, post it on your blog and get a decent amount of shares and comments is long gone.

According to AOL/Nielsen, 27 million pieces of content are shared each day. With such a glut of online content creation and sharing, you need to get your content to stand out from the clutter.

In order to create exceptional blog content, learn the secrets of famous bloggers and the business strategies these professional bloggers used to build successful blogs.

#3. Create stunning images

It’s the age of the visual web. Today visual content is the most engaging form of content online. Research says that using images can result in an 85% interaction rate on Facebook and increase retweets by 35% on Twitter.

But your images can’t just be any old run-of-the-mill kind of content. They need to be stunning, attractive, or tell a story and give your audience a reason to stop their scrolling and engage with them.

#4. Create engaging videos

In 2022, an average person is predicted to spend 100 minutes per day watching online videos and most viewers want to see more videos from brands and businesses.

If you’ve never created video content before, you’re rapidly running out of excuses to do it. With so many streaming video tools, live streaming videos from your phone has never been easier.

Live streaming can help you get ahead of the competition in the social media engagement stakes. These social media tutorials include a number of courses on creating video content to improve social media engagement.

Learn how to make compelling videos that go viral in this MasterClass with MKBHD (Marques Brownlee) as he guides you through creating engaging content that connects with your viewers on any platform.

This Video Production Essentials course covers the entire video creation process from pre-production and shooting your own videos to editing, adding title cards, adding basic graphics, and finding success on YouTube.

Learn how to create beautiful, eye-catching videos for Instagram using free templates from Simplified, an all-in-one design platform for modern marketers, powered by AI.

#5. Create interactive social media posts

Have you ever gotten sucked into one of those silly online tests that tell you which Game of Thrones character you are? (I got Arya 😏).

Or maybe you took a test to find out what color your aura is? Have you ever hated a Facebook friend for sending you a Farmville or Candy Crush request?

 

Some of the most fun social media engagement posts are games, tools, quizzes, and contests. For instance, Kaye Putnam’s Brand Archetypes Quiz based on Jungian archetypes was taken by over 200,000 people.

You can unlock the power of lead-generating quiz marketing to create quizzes for your website that grow your brand and boost quiz leads and conversions.

It may take a bit of investment, but it’s not difficult to come up with interactive posts for social media that offer your audience an engaging experience and help you attract more of your ideal clients.

Woorise is a lead generation and marketing platform to create viral giveaways and contests, landing pages, and engaging forms like surveys and quizzes with ease.

#6. Be an early adopter

The brands that have built a highly engaged and large social media following are the ones that adopted the use of a social media channel before their competitors.

It also helps to adopt the most engaging content formats and, in 2022, short-form video is the future of content creation. That’s because, in 60 seconds or less, you can share your message and keep them coming back for more.

Get a leg up on the competition by becoming an early adopter of the next big social network, and jump on the latest way of sharing content.

In this course, you’ll earn the recipe to master Instagram Reels that will help you grow your influence and followers like crazy.

#7. Start a podcast

Starting a podcast can help you stand out in the crowded social media sphere and build a base of targeted subscribers who enjoy listening to your content.

Smartphones and podcasting apps have made listening, subscribing to, and downloading podcasts extremely easy. Starting a podcast allows you to tap into a less-crowded market to reach potential customers.

“Starting a podcast allows you to tap into a less-crowded market to reach potential customers.”

And the reason podcasts boost social media engagement is that, unlike the written word, hearing someone’s voice unlocks a deeper connection.

Sign up for John Lee Dumas’ Free Podcast Masterclass and Free Podcast Course in which he’ll share the lessons from years of hosting a top-ranked podcast and teach you how to create and launch your podcast.

Also read: 10 Reasons For Starting A Podcast

#8. Ask questions

A very easy way to boost content on your blog, Facebook page, or other social media page is to ask questions of your audience.

Ask them what they like, what they plan to do this weekend, when was the last time they took a vacation, and where they went.

Ask them a fill-in-the-blank question.

People love to talk about themselves and when asked are often more than willing to respond.

Asking the right questions can boost your comments and likes, and responding to their comments can help you establish a two-way dialogue with your fans and followers.

Many AI copywriting tools offer social content writing templates including ones to create engaging questions from scratch so you can boost your social engagement.

#9. Answer questions

Another way to boost your social media engagement is to participate in forums like Quora and Reddit. Answering questions in the domain of your expertise on Quora will establish you as an expert.

Doing an AMA on Reddit will help you engage with people you want to connect to and establish you as a credible source of information on the topic of discussion.

There’s no better way to build a reputation and brand yourself on social media.

#10. Reshare evergreen content

Resharing evergreen content on your blog can boost your social shares and give new life to old content that still has a lot of juice in it.

The Post Planner social media marketing planner tool will help you view a month of posts at a glance, set a schedule for reposting content on social media, customize posts for each channel, and create effective social media posts that get clicks.

The HypeFury Twitter Assistant will help you repost evergreen content, create a personalized schedule of when to tweet based on follower activity, retweet your best tweets, and much more.

If you’ve ever wondered how to revive old posts on your blog, but need an efficient and easy way to do this, check out my post on how to repost evergreen blog content without lifting a finger.

#11. Be authentic

People can easily spot a fake on social media. If you are trying to be someone you’re not, your audience will be put off and move on to someone else.

Just being yourself, having your own personality, and not being afraid to be open and vulnerable is a very attractive quality that will get a whole lot more love and appreciation from your audience.

#12. Start a Facebook group

Facebook groups actually have better visibility in the newsfeed than Facebook pages. When any group member posts to the group, that post will go into all the other members’ news feeds.

Groups work very well for causes and communities that allow every group member to be an active participant in the discussion.

If you can come up with an interesting community or cause that would attract your target audience, a group might give you better engagement than a Facebook page.

#13. Be like Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is the Queen of fan engagement. See how her fans reacted when she sent them personalized Christmas gifts and handwritten cards.

Can social media marketers take a page out of her book and come up with a campaign to personalize promotions to their fans and followers?

It doesn’t even have to cost the earth. The benefit: Creating ecstatic fans and brand advocates.

via GIPHY

#14. Post at optimal times

There are specific times of day when your social media posts will get the most engagement. According to SproutSocial in 2022, the highest times of engagement were Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

“The highest times of engagement were Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 9 or 10 a.m.”

Midweek mornings proved to be a successful time across most social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

However, this data might change depending on your demographic, so it’s best if you use a social media engagement tool to test and track what times work best for your own demographic before blindly following the timings in these reports.

You can use Canva’s Social Media Content Planner to plan and schedule social media posts to go out across your favorite platforms at optimal times days, weeks, or months ahead.

#15. Repost viral content

If you want to pluck the low-hanging fruit and ride on the success of other people’s content, you can repost the new viral video on social media to your social media pages.

It’s already proven to increase engagement, so why not use it to boost yours? The kicker is finding viral content, a task that Post Planner can help you with.

#16. Showcase your fans and employees

People love attention and when you make them the focus of attention on your social media profiles, they’re more likely to engage with your brand. You can do this for both, your fans and employees.

Share the photos that fans post when they tag or check in to your page. Share your employees’ achievements and post fun images of them on the job. They’re more likely to repost or share them with their own friends and followers.

#17. Create a group board on Pinterest

On Pinterest, you can collaborate with other people who share your interests by creating a group board with a single theme and inviting others to add pins to it. A collective effort will increase your engagement and make your board more attractive to other Pinterest users.

Check out these free Pinterest courses for bloggers and learn from experts on Pinterest, to boost your engagement and Repins.

#18. Use hashtags

Hashtags can make your content easy to search for and find, by anyone with an interest – even if they aren’t following you. Tweets with hashtags get double the engagement of tweets without them and are 55 percent more likely to be retweeted.

Engagement drops on Facebook if you use more than two hashtags, so it’s best to use them in moderation on all social networks, except Instagram (where more is better).

#19. Tell stories

Stories have been used since the dawn of humankind to transfer knowledge in an engaging format.

Content that tells stories is inherently more engaging to your audience. Whether it’s in text, image, video or any other form does not matter as long as the story has an emotive appeal.

In the Stories That Sell Course, you’ll learn the foundational principles of killer copywriting, and how to write content that makes your audience nod their heads and open their wallets while staying true to your own voice.

#20. Solve customer problems

The best kind of content for any company in the business of providing solutions is the kind that helps customers solve their problems.

A well-thought-out and executed content marketing campaign should focus on how your customers can use your products and services to make their lives easier.

“How to” content that helps them fix some aspect of their lives will usually get higher levels of engagement.

#21. Photo caption contests

Who doesn’t love a good caption, especially when they wrote it themselves? Photo caption contests play on your audience’s love of snappy and snarky comments.

Use inspiring, provocative, or humorous images for best results, says this post from Social Media Examiner.

#22. Share visual quotes

Visual quotes are one of the easiest content formats to create. They’re also likely to get more likes and shares than other forms of content.

All you have to do is pick an appropriate quote from BrainyQuote or GoodReads, and use Canva’s free online image editing tools and quote templates to create a unique quote image.

Upload it and you’re done! Or you can hire a graphic designer to help you create engaging social media posts.

#23. Engage influencers

If you want to take your social media engagement up a notch, start a campaign to engage influencers. Influencer marketing is a powerful way to extend your reach to a target audience.

Influencers have an audience and can drive traffic to your social media campaigns and promotions. Start building relationships with influencers using these influencer marketing tools, before you ask for any collaborations.

Use outreach tools like the ones below, to reach out to bloggers, social influencers, and digital publishers and offer them high-quality content collaborations.

• Ninja Outreach is the smartest influencer marketing & analysis platform. It allows you to create effective influencer marketing campaigns by filtering through millions of influencers’ insights to find the one that captures your target audience’s attention.
• Intellifluence will help you connect with over 97k Registered Influencers on the world’s largest warm-contact influencer network of real and willing people.

Remember that influencers need to warm up to you, and see that you have something of value to them before they will take an interest in promoting you. You could start out by reviewing their book or products, on your blog, and letting them know.

Give first and you’re more likely to get their interest. A single tweet from the right social media influencer with a large following will get you in front of a much larger audience than you could ever get on your own.

#24. Pay to Play

With the death of organic reach, pay-to-play is the new mantra. Today, most social media networks have paid advertising options to help you boost engagement.

Boost your social media posts using paid advertisements to increase likes and engagement on content that is important to you. You’ll be able to reach a much larger audience than just your page fans, with a greater degree of certainty.

If you need help you can hire a social media advertising expert to help you run your social ad campaigns for you.

#25. Follow the 80-20 rule

If all you do is talk about your products and your company online, your audience will be put off by your self-promotional ways. You need to show them that you’re a source of useful content about your industry.

Mixing in third-party news and content about your industry, along with a few promotional posts about your company, is a great way to do this. The recommended ratio for such sharing is called the 80-20 rule.

That means, for every 4 third-party posts, you should share 1 promotional post. That way you don’t come across as a self-promotional douchebag and retain your audience’s interest so they won’t mind your promotions.

#26. Include a CTA

A CTA is a call to action – a clear instruction that tells your audience how you want them to respond to your post. If you’re running an ad, a CTA is crucial to increasing your ROI.

But even if you’re just posting regular content, you can increase your engagement by asking your readers to respond using any one of the following CTAs below:

• Read more
• Click here
• Subscribe now
• Please RT
• Please share
• Leave a comment
• Post a caption
• Buy now

#27. Organise an event

A great way to increase engagement on social media is to organize and promote an event. It could be an online event, like a Tweetchat or a Google Hangout or a webinar, or an offline event like a conference or retreat.

Once the event is over, share the results of the Tweetchat or Hangout. Mention how many people attended and what conversation took place. If you attended a conference or a retreat, post photos of the event afterward.

People love to share the fact that they attended an event. If you feature other attendees and tag them, they’ll likely share your photos with their own network.

#28. Showcase customer reviews & testimonials

Whenever you receive a great customer review or testimonial, showcase it or share it on your page or profile. It provides social proof and lends credibility to you as a company.

It also lets your customers know that their feedback is valued. Sharing testimonials makes it likely that more customers will come forward to share their own experiences with your brand.

#29. Reward fans for participation

Every brand has a few loyal fans and followers. When you notice a fan liking, sharing, or retweeting you on a regular basis, thank them for their participation.

Regular giveaways and contests that reward loyal fans are a great way to boost engagement and make it worthwhile for them to keep sharing and engaging with your brand.

#30. Keep your posts to the optimal length

Posts that are a certain length are likely to get more likes, shares, and retweets. Here’s the optimal length for content on social media networks.

• Tweets: 240 to 259 characters
• Facebook Posts: <50 characters
• Instagram Posts: <50 characters
• LinkedIn Posts: 25 words
• Pinterest Pin Descriptions: <50 characters
• Hashtag: 1 to 10 hashtags
• Title Tags: 55 characters
• Blogs: 1400 words

This data changes over time, so look up the latest data on the optimal post length for every social network.

#31. Be consistent

One of my favorite commandments to people who attend my talks is that consistency is more important than frequency. This applies not only to how often you blog but also to how often you post on social media.

“Consistency is more important than frequency.”

If you post 3 to 4 times a day for a few days and then post nothing for days or weeks, your followers will see you as less reliable and consistent and your engagement will drop.

Even if you just post once a day, be consistent. Using tools like social media calendars and planners for scheduling social media posts can keep you on track to post even when you’re on vacation.

#32. Give some love

Give to others what you want to receive. If you want others to like, share and comment on your content, you have to give some love first.

Like, comment on, and share posts from other pages you like. It could help you build some great relationships online.

#33. Be visible in Local Search

If you’re a local business and you want to boost engagement on social media, you must have a Google Business Profile so your customers can find you and post reviews of your business on Google. This is especially important given the growing popularity of mobile search.

Once you create and verify your business listing, Google will send you detailed insights and analytics about your Google+ business listing, so you can track engagement.

Also cross-post content to your free Google Business Page so that your customers have a reason to follow you there.

#34. Post less often

If you thought that posting more often on social media would translate into more engagement, you’d be wrong.

This study by Hubspot found that the opposite is often true. As the average number of posts published per week decreases, the average number of interactions per post increases.

So one way of increasing social media engagement might be to keep your posts down to just 2 to 3 a day and let each social media post get the attention it deserves.

#35. Optimize your blog headlines

You can’t understate the power of a good headline. A catchy headline can be the difference between your blog post getting clicked on and read or overlooked. A good practice is to keep title tags around 55 characters or less and blog headlines around 6 words or less.

There are many successful blogs, like Buzzfeed, that use much longer “clickbaity” headlines, but a blog headline beyond 60 characters will get truncated in Google’s search results.

#36. Respond to negative feedback

Whether you engage with your customers on social media or not, some of them will be talking about your brand and products. You can show that you care by responding immediately, or within a reasonable time frame, to customer complaints and bad reviews.

A quick and sensitive response to negative publicity can defuse a situation that could potentially harm your online reputation. Salesforce Marketing Cloud recommends the following tips to respond to negative comments:

• Respond quickly
• Don’t delete
• Don’t feed the trolls

#37. Follow back

If you want to boost engagement on networks like Twitter, you can’t be the kind of person who refuses to follow people back, unless you’re a celebrity (in which case you probably don’t need this list).

Following back valid and genuine followers (not those accounts offering to sell you more Twitter followers) is a good practice. Reading, retweeting, thanking, and replying to your followers is even better because it says you care about them.

If you don’t have the time for this, hire a social media specialist to help you manage your social media community.

#38. Repurpose your content

People vary in the kind of content they like to consume. Some people are visual and prefer videos, images, or infographics, some are listeners and prefer podcasts. Most writers prefer to read text content.

If you create a text post, consider repurposing it into an infographic, a video, or a podcast. And if you have a podcast, consider providing transcripts for the ones who prefer to read.

That way you’ll reach and engage with a much wider audience than if you stick to creating content in a single format.

#39. Build a mailing list

A mailing list of subscribers consists of people who have opted in to receive updates from your company. These are readers who, if nurtured properly, can create repeat traffic to your blog and become some of your most ardent sharers and advocates.

Build your list, and your social media campaign can essentially become network-neutral. Every time you create a new social media profile or page, you can email your list and ask them to follow you there.

#40. Optimize your email signature

Your email signature is an exceedingly underutilized piece of real estate. Using an email signature in Gmail with your social media profiles in your email signature can boost your following and engagement.

#41. Use LinkedIn’s Creator tools

LinkedIn’s Creator mode provides members who meet a set of criteria access to content creation tools that offer more ways to create content and drive engagement with your audience.

Creator mode currently offers access to:

• LinkedIn Live
• LinkedIn Newsletters

I’ve found that publishing my BlogBrandz newsletter using LinkedIn’s newsletter publishing option is a great way to showcase my knowledge and expertise, increase my visibility, and get potential clients to connect with me.

Whenever you publish a newsletter, LinkedIn notifies your network and allows them to subscribe to your newsletter and receive notifications of new posts.

Posts that are viewed a lot, get picked up by LinkedIn Pulse, increasing your views and engagement exponentially within your LinkedIn network.

Here’s how to understand the LinkedIn algorithm so that you get a message from LinkedIn that says “Your post is in the top 1 engagement on LinkedIn.”

You can find many useful tips for publishing on LinkedIn in this Free Hubspot Guide on how to use LinkedIn for business and marketing.

Also, check out these tips to grow your LinkedIn followers and get your content noticed on LinkedIn.

#42. Syndicate your blog content

Content syndication is a quick and easy method to get website visitors, build links to your website, and build your visibility and branding.

For example, my articles on Business2Community regularly get over 10 times more shares than they do on my own site.

If you have just started your blog with a tiny audience, you can grow it by syndicating your content on sites with a much larger audience.

You can create unique content for syndication by using article rewriting tools to rewrite old content and pay to promote your content on different content syndication platforms or websites like the ones below:

WhitePress® helps you publish your articles on more than 38,000 websites and blogs using a simple search engine for a fair price. You can copy and paste your article or order a new one from WhitePress journalists and copywriters.

#43. Guest blog

Guest blogging is a very different ball game than syndication. Recent Google updates have targeted low-quality guest blogs, so proceed down this route with caution.

If you want to use guest blogging to increase your backlinks and social media engagement, you can also outsource your guest blogging campaign using guest posting agencies like the ones below:

• Link-able connects you with elite authors who you can hire to outreach and guest blog on your behalf, all utilizing white-hat link-building techniques.
• Editorial.ai guest posting service will find bloggers willing to publish your guest posts so you can generate links back to your website and improve your website’s rankings and earnings.

#44. Use WordPress’ social plugins

WordPress has a number of amazing plugins that can help you increase your social media engagement. Some of them are:

• Click To Tweet – Increase Twitter sharing with short tweetable snippets
• Facebook Like Box Widget – Boost your Facebook likes and followers
• Official Twitter Plugin – Embed Twitter content and grow your audience

#45. Join blog communities

One way of increasing your social shares and upvotes is by joining a blog community like Blog Engage, Blokube, or Indiblogger to promote your blog.

Each community has its own rules for sharing and promoting content so make sure you follow them before promoting your own blog links.

#46. Don’t ignore SEO

More visits from search engines mean more visitors reading and sharing your content on social media. Follow these bloggers’ SEO tips to optimize your blog and you’ll have a good foundation for more advanced SEO practices.

#47. Provide exceptional social customer service

There’s no excuse today for not answering your customer’s queries, complaints, or comments on your social media channels.

Customer engagement through social media has changed the rules of customer support, and your customers now expect a response in a few hours or less.

Keep your social media customer engagement rates high by hiring social customer support professionals dedicated to your social media channels, to answer customer queries as soon as possible.

#48. Autopost to social media

An analysis of leads generated by HubSpot’s customers indicates that companies that automatically publish their blog posts to social media get 50% more leads than companies that don’t.

Companies that automatically publish their blog posts to social media get 50% more leads than companies that don’t.

So, how can you use this information to maximize your blog’s effectiveness through social media promotion? The Hubspot article has some great ideas, and we follow some of them, including:

• Optimizing our blog titles and content.
• Providing easy social sharing options.
• Using an automated delivery system and
• Posting at the best times to publish on social media.

However, we would add a couple more tips that get good engagement rates on our posts, such as:

• Manually post visual content (images and videos) which are more likely to be shared and go viral.
• Manually respond to comments and posts on our pages.

#49. Use these Instagram engagement hacks

Instagram is a powerful tool, but unfortunately, most people use it completely wrong and therefore get very little engagement.

Simply Measured found that the “love heart” ♥ emoji performs better than all other emojis on the platform. So, if you want to boost engagement on Instagram, use more heart emojis in your posts.

Studies show that of all post types, carousel posts have the highest engagement on Instagram, with particularly high rates for posts that include a mix of images and videos.

“Carousel posts have the highest engagement on Instagram.”

#50. Hire a social media engagement specialist

Increasing social media engagement takes a lot of time and effort. If you have no time to go about implementing the tips here, you should hire a social media engagement specialist and outsource your social media marketing to them.

Share this list of 50 ways to increase social media engagement with your social media manager to get them started with your social media campaign. And if you found this list of social media engagement ideas useful, please click below to share it on Twitter.

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