When it comes to tracking social media success, most people will look directly at the engagement rate. Social media engagement rates can include things like comments, shares, likes, favourites and retweets, basically anytime that someone is physically interacting with a post on social media channels.
However, does a high engagement rate actually mean it’s good engagement? This is where social media statistics still don’t line up.
What’s An Average Engagement Rate?
An average engagement rate is usually between 0.5% – 1%, seems pretty low right? But, with social media being incredibly saturated with millions of accounts, posts disappear down feeds in a matter of moments. Not only that, people’s attention spans are so short that they will only read a very select view posts, let alone interact with them! So, don’t fret when you see a small percentage like this, it can actually be a good thing.
What’s The Problem With Engagement Rates?
For some reason that is still unknown, social media channels don’t track engagements on whether they’re positive or negative. You could potentially have an engagement rate of 30%, but it could all be backlashing and negative comments or just full of spam. However, if you are very lucky you could have that same engagement rate, but it all be positive and actually the post has ended up viral!
It has been heard that some companies will bombard people’s comments with multiple replies when trying to resolve an issue, and this is partly to help increase their engagement rates in a false way, whilst also helping the customer.
How Can We Track Good Engagement?
To really prove whether your posts are being successful, you need to manually check the interactions and delete any spam and try and resolve anything negative, whilst also tracking and taking note of particularly strong interactions.
You Can Strive To Have Successful High Engagements
There are still plenty of positive tactics you can be doing to help encourage higher and positive engagements on your posts. Here are just a few suggestions to get you started.
Make It Easy To Engage
Invite your followers to engage with something that is shareable, relatable or relevant. You can also simply ask for followers views on a topic or for feedback on things in the comments, just try and avoid trigger words that could flag your post as forcefully asking for engagements. For example, don’t drive a competition through asking people to like and share to be able to enter, as on Facebook this is a violation of their terms and conditions.
Post At Peak Times
Do some research into the peak times for you to be posting to reach the largest amount of followers. There are many tools online to track engagement peak days and times for different demographics.
Keep It Short and Sweet
Avoid writing lengthy and fluffy social posts, people will lose interest within the first sentence. Keep it snappy!
Respond To Comments
Don’t forget to reply back to your followers! If there’s a problem, the quicker you can reply, the less stirring can take place. Also, it will make them appreciate your reactiveness, people want things as instant as possible, that’s why the go to social media for customer service now.
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