8 Effective ways for Social Media Engagement without Ads

Social media had almost 2.46 Million active users in 2017, which is almost 71% of internet users. Social Media Engagement happens more with shares, likes and comments.

With smartphones and mobile phones, active users on social media have increased and are expected to grow. Creating engaging and interactive content for social media engagement has become a high priority.

Plan and implement content in such a  manner that audience find value in the content. Answer questions and needs of followers. Keep them engaged so that they come back to you for more content.

With too much spent on marketing activities, budgets may restrict you to spend more for social media engagement. Ads are not the only source of social media engagement with the audience.

Here are 8 ways you can multiply social media engagement with your audience, without spending on ads.

1. Questions & Answers Sessions

Invite people to be part of questions and answer session on social media. Use live videos, or communities or your business page for. Ask questions related to your brand, product or industry, make the sessions productive.

Creating a two-way communication helps increase engagement with followers or audience. Ask for advice and expectations from your brand. Where do they see your brand in next phases of development?

Create questions focusing on audiences requirements. These help you like a survey to know your to do’s and content ideas. questions should be of 80-100 characters maximum. Easy to answer and in one-two words. Easier the better. They can be fill in the blank types and sometimes off the topic not always.

The more you engage with your audience, more you know them and more content you can create for them.

2. Catchy & Impacting Visual Content for Social Media Engagement

Social media has changed trends from being text-based to more of visual content. If you want to grab your audience attention with content, Being visual is the answer to it.

Different ways of using visuals in posts are trending on social media.  Visual Content will help you convey your message and make your content viral effectively and efficiently.

Infographics, Quote Cards, Informative Screenshots, Illustrative images, Call to Action Images and many other ways visual posts can be shared to gain more audience engagement in big numbers.

Being Serious is not always required. Humorous posts go viral the most. Be funny use memes, comic posts, gif images and add these to your marketing strategy.

Canva a free online designing tool can be used to create engaging visual content, without having designing knowledge.

3. Check Effectiveness of Content

Creating engaging content is the primary input to a marketing plan. Post content on all social media in the initial stage it will help you to study the engagement. The audience on various social media platforms engages differently.

First, analyse the content, measure its effectiveness and success and include in your next plan of action, then use social media data to plan for future strategies. Later on, divide your post content into different segments and relate content engagement and audience behaviour with it.

There are various free and paid tools for analytics.

• Google analytics 
• Social Media Insights of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin
• Hootsuite
• Buffer
• Sprout Social

The above mentioned tools will help you analyse social media content and its effectiveness.

4. Contest & Giveaways on Social Media

Consider this beforehand, too many promotional posts annoy audience and followers. Content should engage your users and limits your promotional content. In addition, content used in a better way helps build relationships and build trust with your brand.

Contests and offers are a good way to get more eyeballs to your posts. More views and engagement will always help you come up with the ranking of your posts and engagement.

In fact, giveaways are like giving back love which your followers give you. Plan for a giveaway after reaching a milestone of followers. Spreading the content of giveaway will indirectly help in getting more audience to post engagement.

Games, request for tips, conversation starter posts are other forms of a contest which help in viewership indirectly.

Many other ways can be used to engage with the audience, the main objective should be we should stick to what we know, so the audience can relate to what the post is speaking about.

5. Survey & Polls

Survey and posts are like quizzes and contest. They should be simple to understand. Creating poll and survey helps to engage with your audience.

Testing audience’s knowledge is not the part of a survey. Know about audience’s new requirements, you can work on these requirements or maybe you can add new features to your products or new ideas to your blog content or articles.

A survey improves engagement among the audience and helps in your post reach or increase click-through ratio(CTR).

6. Increase video content

Videos being the most engaging visual content have a direct impact on sales and posts engagement. Most of the digital sales take place after watching videos of products.

Videos like how to dos, step by step guides or tutorials solve the purpose of sharing information and engagement.

Start with a buzz, create a buzz of video with the use of social media text copy. Add text script to the video to make it available for reading even if the sound is off. Use catchy titles for the video thumbnail.

7. Check your Post Time for most Social Media Engagement

To emphasize, being active on social media all the time or anytime will not improve visibility or engagement on the page. Ultimately, social media gives more results when content is made for the people and number of users are online.

Social presence and being active as per the audience is required. Consider target audience activeness and plan post according to audience presence.

No doubt, Friday post should be of happiness. During weekends people are in a weekend mood this will help connect emotionally with them.

Post Timing for Social Media.

Facebook :

Best Time: 1 PM to 3 PM

Avoid: 8 PM to 8 AM

Twitter :

Best Time : 3 PM, 5 PM

Avoid: 8 PM to 9 AM

Instagram :

Best Time: 8 AM to 9 AM, 5 PM

Avoid : 3 PM to 4 PM

LinkedIn :

Best Time: 7 AM to 8 AM, 5 to 6 PM

Avoid: 10 PM to 6 AM

Offourse post shared during best times give you most shares. A planned content calendar will help you to implement post timings.

8. Customer Service

Creating page engagement, increasing shares, likes etc will always help in building trust with audience and followers.

Customer service of social media is like after sales service is given for a product. Trust and relationship with audience grow stronger with customer service. Respond to customers queries and take feedback frequently. A feedback is like a gift it’s on us how we take it positively or negatively. This interaction adds value to posts and brand.

Engagement with new followers and audiences can be done by introducing yourself to them after the number increases.

A direct message of clients or followers is the most missed part of various businesses. Social media to do list should comprise of checking and replying to messages.

Summarize

To summarize with add content calendar to your to-do list for being Socially Active. Content can help increase views, reach and engagement with these points.

• 1. Questions & answers sessions

• 2. Catchy & impacting visual content

• 3. Check the effectiveness of content

• 4. Contest & giveaways

• 5. Survey & polls

• 6. Increase video content

• 7. Check your post time for most social media engagement

• 8. Customer service

Let us conclude, create marketing strategies for your social media engagement. Share with us in the comments below how effectively it worked for your brand. Let’s discuss other effective ways used by you to increase social media engagement.