How Small Businesses Can Generate More Engagement on Social Media

Social media is a key advertising channel for small businesses. Ads on Facebook are a cheap way to drive leads to a business’s offer, but there are also businesses growing their social media presence organically.

These businesses are posting away, meeting the demands of potential customers and creating value.

Businesses need to find ways to generate engagement, and this can be difficult for a small business that doesn’t have a staff member to dedicate as a social media manager. Social media is time consuming, so it’s important for small businesses to make sure that their efforts are worthwhile.

How can small businesses generate more engagement?

Speed is Essential

Speed is the name of the game in social media. Responding to a breaking news event three days after it occurred would not generate the same level of engagement as responding in a mere 3 – 4 hours.

If you want to keep your audience engaged and don’t think speed is a factor, consider this one statistic:

• The average user will wait just 4 hours for a brand to respond
• Brands respond, on average, in 10 hours

So, a lot of brands are responding too slowly to their users. Leverage your response time to ensure that your users are fully engaged.

If you don’t mind being a little controversial, you may follow competitor accounts and respond to customer questions when they don’t reply. Let’s assume you asked a local plumber a question days ago that they never answered, but Courtesy Plumbing & Heating responded. You would likely use the company’s services or at least consider them as a result.

Post Content That is Still Relevant

We’ve already touched on this slightly, but you need to post content that is still relevant. The goal is to post current content, and you can use hashtags to benefit from this even further. So, if it’s national pizza day and you’re a pizza place, post pictures, information and even group photos of your employees and/or customers.

If you want to stay relevant, there are listening tools that can help you.

Tools are your friend when staying relevant, so don’t be afraid to setup alerts and use listening tools to drive engagement – everyone else is doing it.

Start Adding Images into Your Posts

Everyone is trying to drill it in social media user’s heads that they need to start adding images into their posts.

Why?

Images are statistically shown to increase engagement. There’s no better or faster way to increase engagement than to add images to your posts. Buzzsumo conducted a study of their own and found that adding visuals into their posts increased engagement by 2.3x.

Attractive images work best, but you’ll also want to use the text portion of a post to add value to your readers.

Video is also a very powerful tool for engagement, so feel free to start uploading videos to YouTube and begin spreading them across your social media channels.

And as a way to say “thank you” to your followers and fans, don’t be afraid to repost a post or post user-generated content. When running contests or promotions, user-generated content can be a very powerful way to gain followers and keep your current follower base engaged.