Mastering Social Media Engagement in 2024: A Comprehensive Guide
By
Jacklyn Lavoie, Marketing Specialist — Otter PR

While people use social media to connect with one another, businesses can also use social media to connect with their audience of potential customers. However, simply posting on social media isn’t enough. To be successful on social media, a business must be able to create quality, engaging content.

What Is Social Media Engagement?

Social media engagement encompasses all interactions users have with a business’s content on social media platforms, including likes, comments, shares, and saves. Engagement is a crucial metric for social media performance regardless of the platform, be it Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, or any other social media a business uses to connect with its audience.

Understanding social media engagement is valuable because it tells a business how well its content resonates with its audience. High levels of social engagement indicate that a business’s content connects with and appeals to the right people, while low engagement means it might be time for the business to take a different approach to its content.

How Social Media Engagement Helps Businesses

Social media engagement can have a tremendous impact on a business’s success through its ability to increase brand awareness. The more people like, share, and comment on a brand’s content, the more people see it. If a person interacts with a business’s content, their followers will see the interaction — even if they don’t follow the business themselves.

Engagement is also a powerful tool for building customer loyalty. Regular interactions through valuable, engaging content create a sense of community and belonging, which can convert into sales. Engaged customers are more likely to become loyal patrons.

Perhaps the most critical effect of social media engagement, however, is that solid engagement inspires trust. If a social media user sees a post with a lot of likes and interaction in the comments section — especially from others they know and follow online — they are more likely to trust the content of that post, making social engagement an invaluable tool in building a brand’s credibility.

Strong social media engagement helps your content gain trustworthiness not only with audiences but also with the algorithms of the platforms themselves. In simple terms, the more views, likes, and comments a social media post has, the more likely the algorithm is to rank that content highly, meaning that it will be able to reach a wider audience. A higher ranking leads to more engagement and followers, which can also boost future content.

Boosting Social Media Engagement

The primary metric a business will use to measure its social media engagement is engagement rate, the formula for which is “Total Engagements/Followers or Impressions x 100.” The total number of engagements can be determined by adding up the number of likes, shares, and saves a post receives.

The business then must decide whether to evaluate engagement based on followers (revealing engagement based on the expected audience) or impressions (the total reach of the post). This formula gives businesses a handy percentage to determine how effective the content is.

According to most sources, an engagement rate between 1 and 3.5% is considered suitable, while an engagement rate between 3.5 and 6% is considered high. For businesses hoping to take their social media engagement to the next level, strategies include:

How Businesses Can Use Social Media Engagement to Their Advantage

Businesses should use their social media engagement (or lack thereof) as a tool to inform their social media strategy. It is essential to monitor what types of posts receive the most engagement and use that to adjust the content strategy and deliver more of what resonates with audiences.

Understanding what content resonates best with the target audience and doubling down on it is also a great way to establish or strengthen a brand’s voice, which is why consistency, relevance, and authenticity are integral to an effective social media content strategy. Regardless of the business’s industry, these are the core qualities social media users seek in their content.

Social media is a tool that can have tremendous benefits for businesses, but only if it is used properly. By understanding social media engagement and adjusting their strategy to maximize engagements, businesses can reap the rewards of an engaged audience.

Jacklyn Lavoie works with Otter PR as a Marketing Specialist with a concentration on social media. She initially refined her organic social media skills by spearheading marketing initiatives for her own online retail store. She has over 3 years of experience in social media management, and graduated Magna Cum Laude from Stetson University in May 2022 with a Bachelor of Business Administration and a minor in Marketing. In her time at Stetson, she balanced academic excellence with a distinguished career as a D1 student-athlete. During her senior year, she earned the honor of being elected team captain, an experience that imparted invaluable lessons in leadership, discipline, and dedication.