How to Increase Your Website’s Social Media Engagement

Traffic, in general, is a crucial statistic for any website, social media channel etc. However, there is more and more emphasis on getting engagements since there is a large difference between gaining traffic and gaining an engagement. Traffic could bounce off your website in seconds, making it futile. However, if the traffic engages, then you gain a lot more out of the traffic as opposed to if they bounced off.

For this reason, especially with social media, it is important to make sure that you actively get your audience to engage with you. After all, social media is about engaging with one and another! Here are some tips to help you increase your website’s social media engagement level.

• Ask questions – The way to get engagement on social media is to ask questions, since this will naturally want people reading it to answer, be it self-consciously or via actually replying to your question with an answer.
• Post content at lunchtime and 6pm – There have been lots of studies which illustrate the same results that the highest engagement times on social media are at lunchtime and around 6pm. This makes sense as people turn to their phones at lunchtime while they eat and once they are home after working the day.
• Never lie – Thinking of lying as ‘digging yourself in a hole’. The internet, as we know it, is so transparent that whatever you lie about, be it for ‘x’ and ‘y’ reasons, you can bet your horses that it is not a moment of ‘if’ people realised you lie but ‘when’.
• Don’t link in every tweet/post etc. – The problem with website social media channels is that they tend to want to always have a link to the website or article in each tweet/share, since the website makes money by the web user being on the website. However, from doing this, your audience will become bored by the tweets and posts having the same structure, in terms of a link in it. Links are generally not the best idea to continually use them since they give the impression of that the tweet or post is only complete, in terms of engagement to the web user, once the link has been clicked on and viewed. For this reason, try to incorporate a combination of linked tweets/posts as well as unlinked tweets and posts.
• Respond to trolls accordingly – No matter what industry you are in, you are going to get people abuse your business, your website and even yourself. These ‘trolls’ should not be ignored, but dealt the right way that will benefit yourself, as well as the troll. This can be done be 1) taking note of the comments made (since this is very good feedback to act upon), 2) respond to the troll in a comical but productive way, to undermine the aggresion of the troll and 3) keep up to date with future replies but do not reply back (since replying more than once will encourage the troll to continue).