What makes you read a blog post until the end? What makes you follow a brand on social media? Or, let’s get to the holy grail, what makes you hand over your email to join someone’s list?

I’m going to guess it because you find the writer’s content useful, informative and/or entertaining, right?

When you create content for your website, are you writing for search engines, loading up on keywords? SEO is important to get eyeballs on your content. However, SEO alone doesn’t translate to dollars. Content also needs to be engaging for your audience. This goes for your social media posts too.

After all, remember that humans are reading the content, not robots. Therefore, even though you need to use keywords in the text, it doesn’t mean the content should be boring and generic.

I don’t want to read boring, generic content, do you?

Your website should be at the center of all your online marketing activities, which means the content you put on the website, and in other places, is vital to the performance of your website. Without content, you have nothing. Content is still king, and always will be king. Make no mistake. While content types change, the value of content never changes. When you realize the value of the content that you create, you’ll take the time to create it right.

While content types change, the value of content never changes. Content is still king!
Click To Tweet

Tips to Improve Social Media Engagement

Check Out Your Competitors

How often does your competition post on social media? Do they get better social media engagement?

Do they write all their own blog content or do they have guest bloggers? Do you know whether they’ve hired a ghost writer or if they’re all self-written? How do they share and promote their content?

Understanding how your competition operates can help make you better because you can find a way to make yourself different. If you can see a strategy that seems to be working for your competition, why not give it a try? Nobody said you have to reinvent the wheel!

When you understand how your competition operates, you can find a way to make yourself different.
Click To Tweet

Create and Curate Unique, Valuable Content

Every bit of content you create for your website or blog should be unique. There is a place for republishing other people’s articles (article marketing), if you make it original with your own words and thoughts added. Still, most of the content on your website/blog should be unique to your brand and provide value to your audience.

This doesn’t mean you can’t curate content. On the contrary, if you curate content well, your content will still be valuable and unique. Your blog can be the one-stop shop resource for your audience. 

Publish AND curate unique content to position yourself as a vital resource for your audience.
Click To Tweet

Answer Questions

You don’t have to have people emailing you questions to answer them. Go to where your audience is: forums, message boards, and other blogs. Find questions that are relevant to your niche and answer them on your blog. It’s a great way to find content to write, and your audience will feel like you can read their mind.

For example: Hop on a social site like Quora, Reddit or even LinkedIn. Look for questions people are asking in popular groups. Is there a good bit of engagement around this question? Are there a bunch of answers given? Then that demonstrates the question/topic as hot!

Why not write a blog post that not only answers the question, but elaborates on the subject matter, with tips and additional resources? Then post that blog post as an answer to the original question in the chat. Viola! You have just positioned yourself as an authority in that subject!

Ask Questions of Your Readers

If you want to be more interactive with your audience, end every post, article and video with a question to the viewer. Invite them to answer questions, even give them incentives to do so such as random prizes or a special call out on Twitter. The more you interact with your readers over the content that you offer, the more engaging your content will be. One thing feeds off another.

An easy way to increase social engagement: ask questions and provide answers.
Click To Tweet

Promote, Promote, and Promote Some More

Finally, don’t forget to promote your content via social media. Due to the social nature of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, you can use social media in a way to elicit engagement from your followers.

You can do this by continually sharing important content that you’ve created with them, and answering their questions. Then you can work on promoting those questions and answers as hard as you promote the content that prompted the questions and answers.

Related Article: Why You Should Start Using An Editorial Calendar

We covered tips for creating engaging content. Can you see the common thread, woven between each of these tips?

Dive deeper and get involved in conversations.

Now that you’ve learned how to create engaging content, it’s time to dive deeper and immerse yourself into the social landscape on a deeper level. Drive people back to your website to convert those followers into leads.

Spend time looking at what’s working for your competitors. Don’t be afraid to lurk around and assess the landscape. Did she say lurk? Yeah, I said lurk. You know you do it anyway…

Start asking questions and answering questions. Create content based on what people are talking about, what they’re asking for, and watch your engagement stats go up!

Ciao,
Miss Kemya

The post “5 Ways to Improve Social Media Engagement” was written by Miss Kemya.

Visit Marketing Sparkler to catch up on earlier blog posts you may have missed!