Managing social media pages involves a lot more than merely posting content. Once you do, your followers step in with comments, likes, shares, and more. And you have to manage engagement in a manner that makes your followers feel appreciated for their contribution to the conversation.

Most people don’t use social media for a one-way experience. Instead, they want to connect with people and brands. Your followers expect you to speak back to them and keep the conversation flowing.

What Is Social Media Engagement?

Social media engagement refers to the shares, likes, and comments that a typical post gets from the public. It also extends to:

• The new followers a particular account gets when its posts gain popularity.
• The direct messages that the public sends to the brand’s inbox
• The clicks on shared links
• The mentions on other pages

It’s a standard metric for evaluating social media performance. The degree of engagement tells how much your posts resonate with your audience. This connection also usually leads to sales.

Employ the correct strategies to ensure your social media posts garner maximum engagement. Here are some crucial tips to help manage engagement on social media:

Hire A Marketing Agency

Social media engagement isn’t something you can do effectively an hour or two now and then. And that’s especially true if your pages have a significant follower count. You may not keep up with your customers’ expectations of prompt replies to urgent comments.

As such, hire either an in-house social media manager or outsource your engagement needs to off-site marketing agencies. It might not be advisable to hire an in-house team because of the associated costs. For example, you may need office space for them on top of full salaries and benefits. A good alternative is to outsource the work to social media marketing agencies.

It can be wise to choose an agency operating in the city or town where you do your business. They may be able to better relate to your target audience. So, if you live in a city like Manchester, you’d want to narrow down your search to top marketing agencies Manchester.

These agencies can help you establish your company’s branding, voice, and identity on social media. Their teams often have professional and relevant backgrounds, training, and/or certification. Rest assured that they’ll handle your followers with a high degree of professionality. Moreover, this is their primary work. That means they’re always available online to address your followers’ concerns.

Whichever agency you choose, make a point of thoroughly briefing them on how you want your company to come across on social media. If you’re going to portray a funny, easy-going brand, you wouldn’t want the agency to sound too professional. Share as many details as possible to ensure success.

Determine to Which Type of Engagement to Respond

Don’t feel obligated to respond to every comment on your social media posts. Depending on how popular a post is, you can attract thousands of comments. And it’d be humanly impossible to respond to all of them. Be selective in the types of comments you react to. As a starting point, make sure to respond to the following:

Complaints: If a customer complains about your products or services in public, ensure you immediately address their concerns. This shows you care and are responsive. Thus, followers won’t shy away from doing business with you in the future. But if you ignore such grievances, the public quickly loses trust in your brand.

Questions: Usually, potential customers ask a series of questions before making a final purchase decision. When you get such questions, reply to them promptly. You might win a couple of new customers.

Exceptional feedback: Some customers take their good time to praise your company. They can even write a 200-word testimonial with nothing but positivity. Thank them sincerely and express your wish to continue doing business with them.

Direct messages: Some followers shy from commenting publicly. Instead, they may opt to send direct messages to your inbox. Don’t ignore these.

Viral comments: Some comments generate a whole discussion thread. Join the discussion and keep the conversation going.

For other comments, say, one-word positive feedback, simply like the comment if the social network has that feature.

Automate Your Social Engagement

With the current state of technological advancement, sticking to manual processes can be tedious. This is especially true when it comes to social media engagement. Artificial intelligence has led to the development of tools that can automatically comment and react to comments.

In essence, a typical automated tool studies the words used in the comments and picks the best reply from a pre-written database of typical responses. They work in more or less the same way as chatbots. Such tools can significantly save your precious time. Ensure you customize them to make the responses sound as natural as possible. It should seem like it’s a human speaking and not a bot.

Conclusion

Managing engagement on social media is more than just posting content. It requires time, great effort, and teamwork. For best results, consider hiring marketing agencies that are fully dedicated to such work. Alternatively, use automated engagement tools. All in all, learn which kind of comments to react to.