Top Tips on How to Increase Engagement with Content in 2023

Crafting an effective content strategy for social media is essential to capturing your audience’s attention and driving meaningful interactions. To increase engagement with content, it’s crucial to understand your audience.

In this piece, we’ve compiled expert tips to help you develop a content marketing strategy for social media. Learn how to increase engagement with content, calculate and track engagement rates, and transform likes into conversions.

What Is Engagement, and How to Measure It

Engagement is a measure of the ratio of the number of reactions users get from interacting with content to the number of followers.

Reactions to a publication can include not only likes and comments, the number of reposts to pages and dialogs, and the number of posts saved to bookmarks.

As you can see, you can calculate the engagement ratio (ER) using the formula: the sum of all reactions to the post divided by the number of subscribers and multiplied by 100. 

Why Increase Engagement 

The higher this indicator is for your posts, the better algorithms will promote it. Posts with good audience engagement are often included in recommendations and are the first to appear in social networks’ search results.

If we talk about Instagram engagement, we can note engaged accounts – these are pages with a high audience engagement rate in interaction with content. Often, we observe them with popular brands and Influencers who use content to increase their brand awareness. 

Tips to Increase Engagement With Content

Next, let’s look at expert content marketing tips on how to increase engagement.

#1 Research Your Audience

What acts as the key to the success of any marketing strategy? A deep knowledge and understanding of your audience. The better you research the tastes and preferences of your potential buyers, the easier it will be to create and promote relevant content and increase engagement.

How do you research your target audience on social media? Here are a few practical ways:

• market research;
• email surveys;
• surveys in forms on the website.

With the help of built-in social media analytics tools, you can get information about key statistics on your target audience. For example, find out gender ratio and demographics. Identify users’ languages, locations, and interests. The statistics will also help you identify your target audience’s potential reach through filters.

#2 Choose the Type of Content

Based on the preferences of your target audience, you can experiment with different types of content. Professional marketers recommend covering as many content types as possible to reach all possible segments of the CA. 

By the reactions to a particular type of content, you will be able to determine how to increase engagement with content and which content brings more engagement and conversions so that you can further focus more efforts on creating a popular type of publication.

First, let’s take a look at a list of content types you can experiment with on your brand’s social media profiles. 

• Blog posts,
• User-generated content,
• Live events and webinars,
• Creative stories,
• Guides and eBooks,
• Videos,
• Infographics,
• Polls and quizzes,
• Raffles and contests.

To clarify, user-generated content means content created by your audience. For example, tagging a brand in a story or product review post. A consumer review of a brand’s product in a video. Lifehacks about using the product in user posts and more.

How to Write Compelling Posts

For your text under any published photo or video to help increase engagement rates, you need to use the following:

• action words;
• numbers;
• questions.

Experts advise always including strong arguments for readers to take a targeted action to interact with the content, as well as show the benefit of any action taken in the text.

Action words (verbs) can be attributed, for example: earn, save, increase, increase, increase, win, and others. Combining them with beautiful and inspiring adjectives like “powerful, strong, fast” is also great. 

Tools for Assessing Content Quality

As always, we wish to give the blog’s readers even more value. In preparing your content, we recommend using auxiliary tools to check its quality. For example, Google EAT.

The Google EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) tool is an online search engine’s guide to the expertise, authority, and trustworthiness of your content for users. It helps marketers, paper writers, copywriters, SMM, and SEO specialists check content for quality for both search engines and end users.

Google also offers a helpful guide on its blog on how to write useful and really valuable content that will rank well and have a good engagement rate. Other than that, if you want to write high-quality papers, you can always utilize professional paper writers.

Here’s a quick overview of Google’s guidelines for evaluating textual content quality.

Check:

• Whether the text answers popular user queries on the topic being discussed;
• Whether the text provides clear instructions on how to solve users’ problems;
• Whether the publication is clear, in-depth, and concise.
• Also, note that search and social networks prefer to promote unique content. That is, you can’t just copy someone else’s text and paste it into your post. Each post must be original (this is what copywriters and SMM specialists are usually hired for).

#3 Use Working Hashtags

Are hashtags still being put up? Yes, and they work!

Hashtags on social media serve as key search terms in search engines. Don’t be lazy to look for and add the right tags to your post if you want to increase engagement with content. By the way, you don’t necessarily have to add words with grids directly into the text. You can also add a comment to the post with selected hashtags, by which the post will appear on the search page of users.

#4 Use Quality Visuals

First and foremost, our brain always pays attention to the visual component of any content. The higher the quality of your visuals, the higher your audience engagement will be.

When creating the visual part of your content, you may need various photo filters and photo and video processing and editing apps. You can also enlist the services of a designer to create unique authoring images and infographics.

#5 Encourage Interaction With Your Content

You can always increase your engagement rate with your stories’ reposts, comments, and tags. How do you get your audience to interact with your content? Have a giveaway, raffle, contest, or quiz. Even a humorous poll or “would you do” or “finish the sentence” style interactivity can go a long way in helping your posts gain engagement.

It should be said here that private giveaways can easily kill a page, as thousands of fans of free prizes may immediately unsubscribe from you at the end of the giveaway. Such activity risks sending the page to a shadow ban. An alternative to massive giveaways is simple and short contests, polls, and quizzes in the stories.

Also, a great encouragement to interact with content from your audience is feedback. Don’t skimp on likes for your subscribers. Always reply to comments. Make reposts of stories that tag your page. Thank users for any manifestation of activity, and do not forget to provide the most active subscribers with special bonuses, discounts, promo codes, and other pleasantries.

Conclusion

Constant analytics of engagement, reach, clicks, and conversions are the key to successfully developing your content strategy. Don’t be afraid of mistakes and failures; try different approaches and formats to increase engagement with content. Follow proven expert recommendations mentioned in this article and create engaging content!