This is a guide to improve engagement rates on social media platforms.

Goals

The objective for increasing engagement on Social Media profiles is to expand our reach and targeting. It’s known that commenting and liking content relevant of our potential customers improves the amount of people seeing our profile and content. Which in return, increases our followers, engagement, and potential customers.

The first step to increasing engagement is build your lists of research to whom you’re targeting to reach.

Step 1 – Build Your Lists

The best way to start improving your engagement is to perform research building your lists.

For example, let’s say this business – lendahire.com which focuses on helping businesses build outsource teams in marketing, graphic design, video editing, and WordPress website development.

We suggest starting with creating a list of “who” your potential customers are.

Because Lendahire helps business hire internal outsource contractors who specialize in creating ads, landing pages, and other marketing assets, “Marketing” makes a great target market for us.

Anyone posting helpful content pertaining to marketing likely could use our services.

Here are a few more examples of potential areas we could help with.

In the same example as above, this may look like the following:

1. Marketing
2. Graphic Design
3. Video Editing
4. WordPress Website Development

Step 2 – Expand Your Lists

Using our example above, we’ll expand our current category lists into more specific categories to search as hashtags and locate relevant content to comment and engage with.

Marketing

1. Digital Marketing
2. Facebook Ads (Variations – Facebook advertising, Facebook story ads, Facebook marketing)
3. Instagram Ads
4. Google Ads

Notice how for option #2 “Facebook Ads” we added in additional variations that users may be searching and using for hashtags within their posts.

Once you’ve expanded your lists and you have plenty of options to choose from, it’s time to search within the platform and start identifying content to engage with.

Step 3 – Search and Qualify Your List Options

Let’s take our second example here.

If we search #facebookads within Instagram, we’re left with 1,500,000+ posts.

That’s a lot of content to comment on!

Depending on the target market, hashtag size may vary from 10,000 to millions.

There really isn’t a desirable hashtag size.

As long as the content showing up for the hashtag is relevant to the services the business is promoting, it’s good to go.

Step 4 – Consume and Comment Thoughtfully

The next step is to consume the content and respond thoughtfully.

The goals here are to:

1. Consume – Thoroughly scroll through or read the text overlay on the images / post caption to understand what the user is speaking about. Research unknown topics on Google for anything you’re unaware of.
2. Respond – Here we want to utilize conversational-based responses. Asking follow-up questions pertaining to the topic work great because it requires the user to respond to our question which will likely improve engagement or encourage the user to visit our profile to see who they’re speaking to. Another lesser option would be to comment specifically regarding one aspect of the post. See example below.

My response to a specific piece of content within the post are circled in pink above.

Nitin mentions in step 3, the Conversions API.

My response – “Has anyone been seeing much success using the Conversions API?”

This accomplishes a few things:

1. Directly relevant to the post.
2. Thoughtful response.
3. Asks a question.
4. Non-promotional.
5. Casually joining in the conversation.