Social media is one of the best ways to build engagement with your target audience. Surveys have found social media is one of the most favoured methods for consumers to discover new brands and learn more about them. Therefore, creating an approachable brand with engagement encouraging content should be a focus for your business.There are a numerous tips for your campaigns to generate more social media engagement. Here are those tips and how you can implement them in your strategy:

1. Build Useful Evergreen Content!

Content is the foundation of any social media campaign. Build your content up on your blog, landing page and other marketing materials so you can promote them on your social media accounts. The best form of content is evergreen – content applicable to anytime of the year.

Ensure you have a mix of content types. Images and videos are particularly useful for engaging audiences online and can be advertised on the biggest social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, etc but also have their own social media networks with YouTube and Pinterest. Using these specialist networks can also increase your search engine rank as videos on YouTube rank highly on Google searches.

2. Advertise Your Content Right

To increase engagement further, reduce the number of hashtags you use to just two or less per post. Research has demonstrated those who use two or less hashtags in updates have 17% higher engagement.

The same can be said by the level of your posting. Every network has a different level of ecommended content publication. For Twitter, those who post less than eight updates per day will likely have higher engagement. If you use Facebook, post less than three updates per day.

It is also important to note the times you post your updates. Posting at weekends has been proven to be highly effective with up to 20% more engagement, yet so few businesses actively monitor or update their accounts online. Also, not every day is equal when it comes to social media. Tuesday and Wednesday are the least effective for Facebook; while Twitter has a low response rate on Friday after 3pm.

Your target audience is also important to consider. More senior members in a business are likely to be online very early or very late in the day; while you might find junior members of the workforce during their lunch breaks.

3. Share Other Content

If you really want to get your messages shared you are going to have to find and share content created by others. This doesn’t have to be content which is directly related to what you provide customers; but something you know your target audience will enjoy. For instance, if you are a business accounting firm you could share content on human resources and marketing.