5 Engagement Hacks to Grow Your Personal Brand

5 Engagement Hacks to Grow Your Personal Brand

Do you want to get off the engagement roller coaster? Does it feel like one week a specific tactic works, and the next all you hear are crickets chirping?

You aren’t alone.

Engagement seems to be one of every brand’s digital battles. Here are 5 timeless ways to beat various algorithms that seem to be working against you, and finally take engagement into your own hands.

1.) Collaborate with influencers

Arguably one of the quickest ways to grow your social following is to be consistently collaborating, featuring and appearing on other influencer’s videos and content.

Joining forces with other industry relevant influencers helps to boost your credibility and accelerate your exposure. Not to mention, your confidence level and overall network connections will become stronger, your knowledge will deepen, and you will feel like you are making a genuine contribution as you participate in conversations with other industry leaders.

Podcasts, Live videos, collaborative campaigns, and promotions go a long way in terms of boosting your overall engagement as you attract new followers and rise to a position of authority in your community.

Learn to leverage the existing network and communities on social media and watch your engagement skyrocket.

2.) Host Instagram challenges and polarize your audience

It’s easy to forget that social media networks are created to drive conversation and social interactions, and the algorithm rewards those who master building communities as a result of prioritizing both of these things.

Holding challenges to encourage your followers to collectively work toward a similar goal and asking them to post about their experience along the way is a collaborative and conversation building strategy that proves to spark true engagement and brand awareness.

Social media contests help boost engagement in many ways. Encouraging people to participate in a contest that is related to your brand will boost engagement with those who are already loyal followers and can help you to increase subscribers/followers by requiring those that don’t follow or like your page yet to do so in order to participate.

I’ve even seen some brands let the outcome of the contest depend on the votes of their followers! There are different types of contests you can host as well, from simple giveaways to trivia questions to creativity-based competitions.

Here are some helpful tips to keep in mind when hosting creative campaigns:

• People are motivated by free giveaways. One of the best ways to ensure more likes follows or emails is to host a social media contest or giveaway!
• Be ultra clear about your objectives and exactly how you want your audience to participate for the best outcome. You’ll want to define easy, simple rules before you launch your contest. For double engagement, have your followers tag additional friends!
• Let your audience be the judge and vote on certain outcomes This could be as easy as favorites or likes or using Instagram’s survey stories feature. By encouraging your audience to vote, you are generating more engagement and polarizing your audience, sparking further conversations and obtaining more useful information on your followers.

3.) Focus on User-Generated Content (UGC)

One of the most commonly overlooked engagement tactics is to leverage the current content that is already being produced by your followers, and increasing the incentives for people to post content related to your brand.

User-generated content is particularly prevalent on Instagram, where brands can easily re-post and “re-gram” UGC from other users’ accounts.

If you think about it, UGC is a way for you to scale your content marketing without having to scale your team.

You get free content, massive reach, social proof and identify who your true brand advocates are when you double down your efforts on UGC campaigns.

Some examples of how UGC campaigns can be used are:

• Asking general product feedback
• Launching a new feature/product
• Advertising some promotions
• Promoting occasional campaigns

Depending on what industry you represent and what type of audience you have, you can decide the incentive for your UGC campaign. Here are some examples:

• A unique feature on your website
• Special mention on your social media channels
• Surprise free gift
• An early view of your upcoming product/feature
• Any promotional discount on your products

Incentivizing your community to post content about your brand and mission using specific hashtags can increase your impressions, mentions and community size.

Take REI for example. After implementing their #OptOutside campaign, they generated 6 million participants which ultimately resulted in more traffic to their website, visits to their retail locations, and follower brand growth.

Read the full case study HERE

4.) Use video subtitles and closed captions

Video is increasingly dominating the online space, and audio has become a distant friend with the majority of users preferring not to enable sound when watching a video.

For this reason, subtitles have become essential for marketers, enabling core messaging to be delivered on-screen alongside media content.

According to Falcon.IO, Facebook research shows that captioning videos increases average video view times by 12%. Messaging effectiveness is also boosted massively, boasting a success rate of 82% compared to 18% with sound on and zero captions.

Auto-captioning is offered by Facebook (be sure to check any captioning for errors) or, alternatively, you can create your own dedicated captioning files. Pro tip: use a service like rev.com for speedy transcription delivery!

If you have a video editor on your team, consider having them add captions to your videos as part of the post-production process.

To learn more about how to add closed captions, head to this helpful article by Media Cause.

5.) Run social ads

Whether you have a small or big brand, using ads is like turning on a faucet of traffic and engagement. You have the power to control how many people see your content, who those people are, and are able to cater their experience with your brand.

We’re not talking about the “boost post” button here, friends. We’re talking about using the Facebook Ads Manager (Instagram is owned by Facebook) to create targeted campaigns to drive the right interaction.

This could be a post-engagement campaign or a website traffic campaign to drive visitors to your landing pages. There are endless possibilities when it comes to ads, and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune either!

We know this can sound intimidating. To learn how you can utilize ads, check out our previous post HERE.

Final Thoughts

Now that we’ve covered how to boost your engagement by…

• Collaborating with influencers
• Hosting challenges & giveaways
• Leveraging UGC
• Captioning your videos
• Running social ads

You’re sure to see impressive results if you take action!

The most important thing to keep in mind is that growing your engagement is a stepping stone to business growth. It’s a journey, and the algorithms often change as social platform communities grow.

Therefore, focus your efforts on using these engagement tactics as a way to bring your audience into a place that you can fully control; your email list and website.

Happy engaging!

 

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