However, increasing your Facebook engagement can be tricky. You need to know the right strategies to implement and how to get started.

Throughout this article, learn more about what Facebook engagement means, how to calculate your Facebook engagement rate and 13 key strategies for improving engagement on Facebook.

Table of contents:

• What is Facebook engagement?
• How to calculate your Facebook engagement rate
• 13 strategies for improving Facebook engagement

What is Facebook engagement?

Facebook engagement refers to any action that a Facebook user takes on your Facebook page—mainly likes, comments, shares and clicks. Increasing the number of engagements you see like this on your page proves that your Facebook marketing strategy is working and that your content resonates well with your audience.

How to calculate your Facebook engagement rate

You can calculate your Facebook engagement rate with a simple formula:

Facebook Engagement Rate = [(Total Likes + Comments + Shares)/Total Reach] x 100

You can find these metrics via Facebook insights or by using a third-party Facebook analytics tool. In your Facebook page dashboard, you can get a quick overview and grab your numbers from the “Post reach” and “Interactions” sections in order to discover your Facebook engagement rate.

The median Facebook engagement rate is 0.063%. While this engagement rate seems low, if you implement the 13 strategies below, your brand will be more likely to surpass that average.

13 strategies for improving Facebook engagement

Increase your organic reach with these 13 strategies—though don’t forget the power of Facebook ads in the meantime. These 13 organic reach tactics mixed with an ads strategy can ensure your business is reaching the people it needs to on Facebook.

1. Understand your target audience

Knowing who you’re trying to target with your content can help better inform your strategy, direct your messaging and ensure your content resonates with those your business can help the most.

Start by getting a basic understanding of social media user demographics so you know who is on each platform you market on. For example, we can see that Facebook’s basic demographics look like this:

Make sure this lines up with your business’s basic demographics. But then look even further. Who does your business help with its products or services?

For example, if you’re trying to reach men in their 30s, you should:

• Make sure they’re on your platform of choice (in this case, you’re in the clear)
• Create a strategy that caters to that audience
• Keep them in mind when you’re writing your content

2. Know the best times to post on Facebook

The more engagement a post receives, the more likely Facebook’s algorithm is to reward it with reach. This might seem a bit backward but it speaks to the importance of timing your posts to perfection.

By posting when your followers are most active, you instantly increase the likelihood of getting likes and comments.

And yes, there are data-driven best times to post on social media which can clue you in on what your posting calendar should look like.

The key here is to not just post at random and expect engagement. With the help of the chart below and analyzing your past post engagement, you can zero in on a schedule that makes sense.

We recommend using a Facebook scheduling tool to plan your social media calendar days or weeks in advance. It’ll keep you from forgetting to post and give you the flexibility to test different posting times.

Plus, by taking advantage of Sprout Social, you can discover optimal times for your specific brand to publish, rather than relying on global data. Just simply use the “Optimal Send Times” dropdown to see when Sprout’s AI recommends you share your posts.

3. Post consistently

While the next post talking about quality is just as important, you also need to post consistently. While global data showcases that some brands post around 4-5 times per day on Facebook, that’s a lot of content to share and also remain consistent.

What you need to do is figure out how many times your team can reasonably post each day or each week—and do so consistently. Consistent content creation increases your likelihood of appeasing the algorithm and getting your content seen by more people.

If you’re posting on a consistent and reliable basis, you’re on the right track.

4. Focus on quality content

Next, make sure your content is engaging, fun and quality to increase the chances that your audience interacts with your content. In this endeavor, many brands make the mistake of putting themselves in a box when it comes to their content.

Let’s say you’re running a Facebook page for your sandwich shop. Should you exclusively post content related to sandwiches?

Of course not.

For starters, there’s only so much that can really be said on a day-to-day basis about your brand or product. As soon as your content starts to feel repetitive or stale, your audience will tune out.

Here’s some food for thought: your Facebook content isn’t all about you. It’s about your audience. They might like you, but that doesn’t mean they only want to hear about you all day long. Once you start to embed that idea into your strategy, increasing Facebook engagement becomes much more realistic.

And if you’re struggling to find ideas for fresh content, you can start by asking yourself a few questions.

What’s trending?

Pulling from pop culture and current events is a smart move if done tastefully. Check out how HubSpot put out an awesome post to coincide with Valentine’s Day.

Do you have any fun facts?

Infographics and shocking statistics are prime for discussion and debate, both of which are huge pieces of Facebook engagement. Activity in the comment sections spells good news to the updated algorithm.

Have you shown off your brand’s personality?

Like it or not, Facebook has become a hotbed for memes and humorous content. Although humor might not be the perfect fit for every brand, funny content typically performs well and is a lighthearted way to diversify your posts.

It might be tempting to simply talk about yourself, but that’s not going to drive much engagement. Strive to stick to the common rule of content curation that says only 20% of what you post should be self-promotional.

Besides, filling your feed with a variety of content will always keep your followers looking forward to what’s next.

Oh, and if you want to have instant access to fresh pieces your audience will love, tools such as content suggestions from Sprout can do the digging so you don’t have to.

5. Respond to your customers

Improving your Facebook page engagement isn’t a “one and done” affair. If someone takes the time to comment on your content, make sure you’re taking the time to respond.

People overwhelmingly want to interact with brands, which is the reason why so many businesses that reply to comments score more interactions.

If nothing else, taking the time to reply to fans shows that you’re listening to them. This is a good look from a branding perspective and also encourages more interaction among fans in the future.

If you don’t have time to respond to each and every inbound message, you can create a Facebook chatbot to do so for you, or use a third-party messaging tool to keep all of your social media messages in one easy-to-organize place.

6. Improve your use of images and video

Visual content totally crushes it on Facebook—plain and simple—and Facebook isn’t shy about how much they love video content on their platform.

Other than links, photos and videos are one of the most common post types on the platform, signaling that people would much rather engage with a visual than a wall of text. So if you want to improve Facebook engagement, get visual.

However, the type of images and videos you post make a massive difference in terms of performance.

Many budding businesses make the mistake of relying on stock photos or videos pulled from elsewhere rather than creating their own content.

Instead, brands should strive to show the personality behind their business. There’s a reason why photos “in the wild” are so popular from big brands, as are stories from employees.

After all, it’s the social network, not the stock photo network.

Also, keep in mind that images can be powerful tools to encourage serial scrollers to stop in their tracks and look at your posts. Images containing striking colors and stunning landscapes typically do well, as evidenced by brands like GoPro who kill it with their photo content.

In addition, Facebook encourages brands to upload videos—rather than share video URLs—to drive discussion among their followers.

This means simply copy-and-pasting a link to your recent YouTube video as a post isn’t going to cut it.

Instead, brands should upload and publish videos within their Facebook posts whenever possible. Whether it’s animations, commercials or jumping on Facebook Live, regularly publishing video content on Facebook is a smart move supported by the platform itself.

7. Consider user-generated content

User-generated content, or UGC, is content that is created by your audience that you then share on your own feed. This type of content is highly engaging and fun for your audience to see their own content shared by a brand they love.

If your audience hasn’t given you any UGC to choose from, there are a few strategies you can use to change that.

First, put out an ask. Make a post asking people to share photos or videos of your products. Consider gamifying it or turning it into a contest where you randomly select a winner out of the people who commented or messaged you with their UGC and provide them with a gift card or free product.

Second, consider hiring a UGC creator. This is different from an influencer as it’s someone who is hired specifically to make content for your brand to share on its page, rather than promote your brand to their own followers. This can be a great way to start off your UGC journey even if it’s not quite as authentic as the real thing.

8. Use Facebook analytics to inform your strategy

Sometimes the key to increasing Facebook engagement is to look inward.

Let’s say you have a post that knocks it out of the park. Tons of likes and shares, and plenty of love in the comment section.

Rather than treat that post as an anomaly, you should instead take steps to recreate the same social magic again.

Maybe it was an unexpected meme. Perhaps it was an epic case study.

Either way, you should have a pulse on your top-performing content instead of playing guessing games. Again, your fans’ activity is key to understanding what to post.

To better break down that activity, take a close look at your Facebook analytics to see firsthand what’s receiving the most reach. The answer might very well surprise you.

9. Leverage employee advocacy

Instead of solely relying on your brand page to share your latest content, why not ask your employees to do some of the heavy lifting?

Use an employee advocacy tool like Sprout’s Employee Advocacy platform to curate your latest articles, videos and other content for them. Then, all they have to do is log into their dashboard and they can share the content to their personal Facebook page.

Through Employee Advocacy, you can even add suggested text for your team to use in their Facebook post which makes it super simple for them to just find the content they want to share and publish. On top of that, they can share it to Twitter and LinkedIn as well.

The best part is employees are ready and willing to share your content. Some of the most common barriers noted in our employee advocacy launch checklist that prevent them from doing so are lack of bandwidth, hesitation and lack of confidence or simply forgetting. Employee advocacy removes these barriers, making posting more seamless.

And the benefits of advocacy go way beyond just reaching more people. Sure getting impressions is nice, but what you really want is for people to read the articles and engage. According to LinkedIn, employee-posted content gets twice as high of a click-through rate than company-shared content.

If you’re not using employee advocacy, you’re missing out on easy engagement on Facebook. If you’re interested in learning more, check out Employee Advocacy by Sprout.

10. Learn how the Facebook algorithm works

The Facebook algorithm is a set of rules that dictates what content appears in the news feed. It does this by looking at four things for each individual user:

• Inventory: Facebook takes inventory of all the content that could appear in a feed.
• Signals: Facebook uses signals like type of content and how often a user has interacted with that content to decide if it should appear in their feed.
• Predictions: Facebook uses predictive analysis to predict what each user wants to see in their feed.
• Relevancy scoring: Facebook uses relevance scoring to dictate how relevant content is to a user.

With these four criteria in mind, Facebook’s algorithm will push content into its users feeds.

To increase the chances of your content appearing, you need to make sure it’s relevant to your target user, a common type of content and an engaging piece of content that makes it likely for your audience to interact with your posts.

11. Create Facebook stories

Facebook stories are another great type of content to create to engage with your audience. Because stories show up in a different part of the feed—at the very top—they can provide you with yet another way to reach and engage your followers.

Facebook stories are disappearing posts that stay on your feed for 24 hours. These can be images, videos or graphics that show off your product, share company announcements and even engage your audience through polls, Q&As and more.

Incorporate consistent Facebook stories into your strategy to further increase your overall engagement.

12. Partner with influencers

Influencer marketing is another great way to engage your audience. By partnering with influencers that have a large Facebook following, you can get even more eyes on your business. Influencers can share photos and videos of your product or service on their Facebook pages, tagging your business.

You can easily reshare or repost that content to increase engagement from the people who are coming over to your page. This, in turn, increases the chances that more of your content will appear in their feeds.

13. Get verified

Finally, get verified! Getting verified proves your business’s credibility, making it more likely that people will want to follow your page and interact with your content. Verification puts a blue check by your brand name so that every user knows you have an authorized Facebook page.

In order to get verified, follow these steps:

• Make sure your page fits the criteria
• Open the verification request form
• Upload the necessary documents to provide authenticity
• Add articles that prove your brand is of public interest
• Completely fill out the form

And then you wait. You can reapply if you’re rejected, but check out our Facebook verification guide to gather tips for increasing your odds.

Start ramping up your Facebook engagement

The post 13 Strategies to increase Facebook engagement appeared first on Sprout Social.

The good news is you can add Instagram hashtags to Reels the same way you add hashtags to posts to boost visibility, reach and engagement.

In this post, you’ll find a curated list of the top Instagram Reel hashtags for travel, fitness, food, fashion and other categories. We’ll also talk about the value of using Reel hashtags for Instagram and share tips for finding the best hashtags for your brand.

Let’s dig in.

Table of contents

• Why use hashtags in your Instagram Reels
• Tips for finding the right Instagram Reel hashtags for your brand
• Best Instagram Reel hashtags for 2024
  • Top Instagram Reel hashtags
  • Fitness Instagram Reel hashtags
  • Travel Instagram Reel hashtags
  • Food Instagram Reel hashtags
  • Fashion Instagram Reel hashtags
  • Funny Instagram Reel hashtags
• Use Instagram Reel hashtags to grow your brand

Why use hashtags in your Instagram Reels

Using hashtags can do more than just get more eyes on your content. Hashtags are also excellent targeting and analytics tools. Here are three benefits of using Instagram Reel hashtags for your business:

Make your content easier to find

Hashtags can put your content in front of a larger audience, including users who don’t follow you on Instagram. Adding them to Reels offers the same benefits as adding hashtags to posts. It helps people interested in your topics or themes easily find your videos.

This, in turn, gets your content more engagement in the form of likes, comments and shares—the holy grail of social media success. Take it a step further and engage with users who interact with your hashtags to strengthen your brand’s relationship with its audience.

Finally, by monitoring trending hashtags and incorporating them into your posts, you can help your content ride the wave of current events, conversations and Instagram trends. This not only gets you more exposure, but also positions your brand as relevant and up-to-date.

Target your niche demographics and audiences

Your videos might go viral, but not everyone on Instagram is a potential customer. Adding hashtags to Reels lets you target niche communities and specific demographics with your content—people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services.

As a result, you’ll attract more qualified leads and boost visibility among your target audience, ultimately translating into higher ROI for your business.

Use hashtag analytics to refine your Instagram content strategy

Analyzing the performance of different hashtags can provide valuable insights into what resonates most with your audience.

By tracking Instagram metrics like reach and engagement for Reels with specific hashtags, you can refine your strategy and better understand consumer preferences and behavior.

Sprout Social’s Hashtag Tracking tools can help you pinpoint exactly which hashtags work best for your Instagram strategy. Track your most-used and top hashtags or manually add hashtags that are important to your brand to keep tabs on performance.

Tips for finding the right Instagram Reel hashtags for your brand

You know the value of using Reel hashtags on Instagram—but how do you find the right ones? Follow the best practices below to add hashtags that are relevant to your brand and resonate deeply with your audience.

Know your buyer personas

Before you start writing down hashtags, you need to truly understand your target audience. What does your ideal buyer look like? Which accounts do they follow on Instagram? What type of content do they like to engage with?

Dig into original research and analytics to find out key characteristics of your potential customers. Note the hashtags used in Reels these people are interacting with the most.

Then, use these insights to guide your own hashtag strategy. Incorporate relevant hashtags in your Reels that align with the niches and interests of your target audience.

Remember—you are a business creating content to achieve certain goals, whether that’s brand awareness, lead generation or sales. Targeting everyone and anyone is not going to get you results. Focusing on users who match your buyer personas will.

Analyze your competitors

Keeping an eye on your competitors’ content can give you ideas for hashtags you can use in your own Reels. Watch for videos that get the most engagement or views. What hashtags are they using? How many hashtags are they adding to their videos? Are they going after niche keywords or broader hashtags?

Streamline this process with Instagram competitor reports.

Sprout’s competitive analysis features can help you with that. Our tool allows you to track competitor posts, engagement rates, the hashtags they’re using and more. Better yet, compare their metrics with your own to benchmark performance and set realistic goals.

Use competitor analysis to inspire your own content and hashtags. But don’t always copy hashtags off other accounts and Reels—keep experimenting. You might stumble upon some highly engaging hashtags your competitors might be neglecting.

Use branded hashtags on Reels and other content

Capitalizing on existing hashtags is great—but what about creating your own hashtag?

Using branded hashtags in Reels and posts can help you build brand awareness and instill a sense of community in your followers. Branded hashtags are also one of the best ways to encourage user-generated content.

For example, Canva launched a branded hashtag challenge to encourage creators to use the software and share their designs:

Best Instagram Reel hashtags for 2024

Looking for inspiration? Below is a list of 250+ top hashtags for various industries like fashion, travel, fitness and food. We’ve also added popular hashtags for viral and funny Reels—all relevant to brands and marketers.

Top Instagram Reel hashtags

#explore

#viral

#trendy

#reel

#viralreel

#viralreels

#trendingsound

#fyp

#reeloftheday

#trendingreels

#trendingnow

#inspiration

#viralvideos

#viralcontent

#viralmemes

#growth

#success

#businessstory

#brandstory

#luxurybrand

#luxury

#luxurylifestyle

#budgetfriendly

#springvibes

#trendalert

#newarrivals

#musthave

#shopnow

#smallbusiness

#womeninbusiness

#instagramseller

#sellersofinstagram

Fitness Instagram Reel hashtags

#gym

#gymmotivation

#gymlife

#gymtime

#gymlifestyle

#gymworkout

#gymreels

#gymvideos

#gymtips

#gyminspiration

#gymgoals

#fitness

#fitnessmotivation

#igfit

#getfit

#stayfit

#fitfam

#fitspo

#fitlifestyle

#fitinspiration

#fitspiration

#fitnesschallenge

#supplements

#preworkout

#workout

#workoutmotivation

#workoutvideos

#workoutathome

#homeworkout

#workoutoftheday

#bodybuilding

#bodypositivity

#bodypositive

#plussize

#weightloss

#transformation

#weightlossmotivation

#weightlossjourney

#dietplan

#healthybodyhealthymind

#fitmeals

#healthylifestyle

#selfcare

Travel Instagram Reel hashtags

#travel

#instatravel

#travelgram

#budgettravel

#travellife

#travelling

#traveltheworld

#backpacking

#travelwithme

#wanderlust

#hiddengems

#travelinspiration

#shetravels

#dametraveler

#sheisnotlost

#thetravelwomen

#womenwhoexplore

#travelsolo

#solotravel

#solotraveler

#vacation

#romanticgetaway

#beautifuldestinations

#luxurytravel

#luxuryhotels

#forbestravelguide

#sustainabletravel

#sustainabletourism

#responsibletravel

#vanlifemovement

#vanlifediaries

#vanlifeexplorers

#vanlifer

#skoolie

#rvlife

#motorhome

#homeiswhereyouparkit

#camperlife

#staycation

#travelbucketlist

#adventuretravel

#lifeofadventure

#hikingadventures

#getoutside

#outdooradventure

#camplife

#cabinlife

#digitalnomadlife

#nomadiclife

#workandtravel

#wellnesstravel

#wellnessretreats

#traveltherapy

#slowtravel

#foodtravel

#traveleats

#livelikealocal

#besthotels

#beautifulhotels

#hotelsoftheworld

Food Instagram Reel hashtags

#food

#foodstagram

#healthyfood

#foodie

#foodgasm

#instafood

#comfortfood

#recipes

#cooking

#foodstyling

#whatifeedmyfamily

#familymeals

#familydinner

#healthymeals

#healthysnacks

#diet

#easyrecipes

#foodrecipes

#foodideas

#dinnerrecipes

#healthyeating

#lowcaloriesmeals

#easymeals

#chickenrecipes

#mealprepping

#mealprep

#recipeshare

#vegan

#bestofvegan

#feedfeedvegan

#healthyvegan

#plantbased

#plantbasedfood

#vegetarianrecipes

#eatyourveggies

#vegandessert

#healthydessert

#dessertrecipe

#fakeaway

#recipeoftheday

Fashion Instagram Reel hashtags

#fashion

#fashionstyle

#fashionreels

#fashiontrends

#slowfashion

#highfashion

#sustainablefashion

#prelovedfashion

#secondhandfashion

#handmadeclothing

#madetoorder

#bespoke

#custommade

#vintagestyle

#vintagefashion

#vintageclothing

#unisexfashion

#unisexclothing

#styleinspiration

#ootd

#outfitinspiration

#lookoftheday

#thriftstorefinds

#thriftfinds

#thrifthaul

#thriftedfashion

#thriftedstyle

#inclusivefashion

#streetwear

#streetweardaily

#streetstyle

#streetfashion

#howtostyle

#nycfashion

#grwm

#getreadywithme

#athleisure

#activewear

#gymwear

#diyfashion

#fashiontech

#wearabletech

#capsulewardrobe

#lessismore

#minimalista

Funny Instagram Reels hashtags

#funny

#funnyvideos

#funnyvideosdaily

#funnymemes

#funnymemesdaily

#memestagram

#funnyreels

#funnyisfunny

#funnymoments

#comedy

#comedyvideos

#comedyreels

#sketchcomedy

#dailyfluff

#dailylaugh

#dailydose

#standupcomedy

#relatable

#relatablereels

#jokes

#hilarious

#funnyclips

#funnyvids

#justforlaughs

#humor

#humour

#laughoutloud

#laughing

#smile

#memes

#haha

#lol

#lmao

Use Instagram Reel hashtags to grow your brand

Adding hashtags to your Instagram Reels should be a no-brainer. Hashtags are the easiest way to categorize your content, drive visibility and boost engagement on your videos.

But what’s more important is using the right hashtags. You need keywords that align with your brand and match the needs and interests of your target audience. Only then can you expect to see business growth and results from your social media efforts.

This is where hashtag analytics can help. Track your most-used and top hashtags, competitor hashtags and trending keywords your audience is loving. Use the data to guide your Instagram strategy and watch views and engagement on your content skyrocket.

The post 250+ Instagram Reel hashtags to boost engagement for your brand appeared first on Sprout Social.

Reach and follower counts can be considered important metrics, but social media engagement shows how much your content actually resonates with your intended audience. If your videos are getting people to leave comments or share them with their audience, that’s a good sign they are finding your content relevant and engaging.

Throughout this article, you’ll learn more about what exactly TikTok engagement entails, how to calculate your TikTok engagement rate and how to improve your TikTok engagement.

• What is TikTok engagement?
• How to calculate your TikTok engagement rate
• 10 valuable ways to boost your TikTok engagement rate

What is TikTok engagement?

TikTok engagement is defined as any action that a viewer takes on your TikTok video. These include:

• Liking your video
• Leaving a comment
• Sharing your video
• Bookmarking your video
• Clicking on your TikTok shop link
• Watching more of your videos
• Following your account

Even a video view can count as engagement, though the previously mentioned actions indicate a deeper level of engagement from the viewer.

What is a TikTok engagement rate?

Your TikTok engagement rate is a social media metric that helps you to understand what percentage of your video viewers interact more with your video. This metric provides helpful insight into how effectively your content engages your viewers.

If you have a low engagement rate, you may need to explore different content ideas to see how you can better resonate with your audience and entice them to leave comments or share your videos. It’s important to track metrics like this, especially when running TikTok campaigns or influencer partnerships.

Having a clear understanding of how people are engaging with a specific influencer lets you know whether you want a partnership with a TikTok influencer or not. Moreover, your engagement rate metric for your own brand will likely be a big part of your social media reporting to illustrate that your social media team is producing quality content that resonates with your brand’s audience.

How to calculate your TikTok engagement rate

While you can access data surrounding specific TikTok engagements within your TikTok analytics—or other analytics tool of choice—you’ll have to calculate your engagement rate yourself.

The formula for TikTok engagement rate is:

TikTok Engagement Rate = [(Total Likes + Comments + Shares)/Total Number of Views] x 100

You can calculate your engagement rate per video or for all videos published over a specified time range.

Let’s go over an example.

If you use TikTok’s built-in analytics, the Overview section provides you with a detailed look into your engagements over a specified time period (either 7 days, 28 days, 60 days or a custom time frame you can select):

Head over to the Reach tab, to find your total video views for a specific time period as well.

You can also use a tool like Sprout Social’s analytics to easily calculate your engagement rate. Log into your account and head to your TikTok Profiles dashboard to get a clear look at your report.

Sprout Social’s data makes calculating engagement rate easy, as it already combines all of your engagements. Rather than having to add those up as part of the formula, you can simply plug in the engagements and video views numbers.

Using the data from Sprout Coffee Co., if we enter those numbers into our TikTok engagement rate formula, we get these results:

[190,024/1,112,731] x 100 = 17.1%

Multiplying your engagement right by 100 at the end helps the final result come out in percentage form, a typical format for your social media reports. Give it a try by signing up with Sprout Social for a free trial.

10 valuable ways to boost your TikTok engagement rate

While 17.1% from our above example is a pretty fantastic engagement rate, that may not be the case for your business. And that’s okay!

But you’re probably looking for a few tips to increase those numbers. Implement some of these tips into your TikTok strategy to help boost your engagement.

1. Quality content beats quantity

Above all else, quality content is the way to go. While you may have seen stats about how TikTok recommends posting 1-4 videos per day, but if those videos aren’t high quality, no one is going to want to watch them.

Instead, aim for a consistency that is realistic for your team but doesn’t sacrifice quality. Plus, RivalIQ’s TikTok benchmark report found that most brands are posting around 1.75 videos per week—a rather sustainable frequency as opposed to multiple videos per day.

Take sustainable candle shop, Mala the Brand, as an example. The brand posts one video per business day, so up to five days per week (or fewer if there is a national holiday).

The brand’s strategy is simple but solid. The social media manager creates a number of posts sharing behind-the-scenes content, new scent updates, tips, business information and answers to customer questions. It’s good content that doesn’t feel rushed just to push content out.

Keep this in mind as you build out your own TikTok content strategy.

2. Post at the right times

Even if you’re consistently sharing quality content, posting at the wrong times means your audience might not even have a chance to see and interact with it.

However, you need to know more than just the best times to post on TikTok. You need to know the best times to post for your specific audience. A TikTok scheduling tool like Sprout Social can help.

When you get ready to publish or schedule your TikTok videos through Sprout Social, you can access a feature called “Optimal Send Times.” This analyzes your followers and provides you with the best times to post based on when your audience is most active.

3. Inviting viewers to share what they think in the comments

Invite engagement on your video by asking viewers to leave TikTok comments. This is a great way to be able to hold conversations with your audience by reading and responding to their comments.

But more than that, TikTok allows users to respond to a comment with a video, helping you to further engage with your audience. Let’s take a look at this example from Gushers. The brand posted a video with a number of random food combinations, and someone replied with a comment that says, “Pretzel gushers.”

In response, Gushers created a video response trying out the new food combo:

This video generated almost 1,000 views and a number of new comments. Try to engage your audience by asking for comments and responding to them when you receive them.

4. Post consistently

Yes, quality over quantity. But, consistency is also key.

When you’re creating a TikTok content strategy, you need to have a plan for how you can regularly pump videos out. Quality might be the most important factor in your videos, but having a consistent schedule so your videos are regularly showing up in feeds is a close second.

Consider batch-recording your video content to make it easier to post more consistently. This way, you can create a week or so worth of videos at one time, rather than having to pull out your recording equipment every single day.

5. Define your niche and stick to it

Find your niche. Sure, you might sell candles. Or cookies. Or burrito bowls. But what specifically will dictate the type of content you share?

As a candle company, you might focus on behind-the-scenes content that showcases how you make each of your products. As a cookie bakery, you might focus on showing off your different best selling cookies. And if you sell burrito bowls, you might, like Chipotle, make memes a big part of your strategy.

The bottom line is this—you want to choose a specific niche and focus for your content. This way, your audience comes to know what to expect from your brand and they can enjoy each video or post you put out.

Let’s take a look at Gymshark, a fitness apparel store. This brand’s TikTok strategy doesn’t even center around video content. Every single one of Gymshark’s posts is an image carousel with motivational text overlaying each image.

This simple and consistent strategy garners the brand hundreds of thousands if not millions of views on each video. Find your own niche and use it to grow your audience.

If you’re not sure where to start, consider browsing the For You page to see what other brands and creators are doing. This can be a great way to gather inspiration for your own TikTok marketing campaigns.

6. Make the most of user-generated content

User-generated content is another great strategy for increasing engagement. Consumers trust user-generated content, with 86% saying they trust UGC over influencer content and are more likely to buy from a brand sharing UGC.

UGC is a type of content—in this case, a TikTok video—that someone has created that mentions your brand or showcases your product or service somehow. You can then reshare this content on your own feed as a form of social proof, letting your audience know that you have happy customers and that they could be one, too.

Here’s a great example from Dunkin’. One of Dunkin’s customers shared a video of them enjoying a Valentine’s Day-themed donut. Dunkin’s team found it and commented asking if they could repost it on their own feed—the perfect step to take before sharing UGC with your audience:

Monitor your brand across different social media platforms to see if anyone is posting videos mentioning you or your product. If you’re not finding any organic UGC, consider putting out an ask for your customers to share photo or video content you can use. Or, you might even look into hiring a UGC creator to help you compile some great content.

7. TikTok ads can increase engagement

Running TikTok ads is also a great way to reach a wider audience, grow your audience and subsequently increase your overall engagement. There are a number of different types of ads, ranging from brand takeovers to sponsored hashtags. But one of the best types of ads to increase engagement is the in-feed ad.

This is just like a TikTok video that you pay to promote. Viewers can head to your profile, leave likes, add a comment and more.

Take a look at this in-feed ad run by integration software Zapier. It draws people in by showcasing something useful that can be done with its tool. It includes all of the components of a regular post—video, caption and hashtags.

People can even swipe over to view the profile. A website will pop up first as the CTA for viewers to learn more. They can take action on your website, but then they can also head to your profile afterwards, potentially watching more of your videos or following your account.

Put together your own TikTok ads strategy so you can reach a wider audience and increase your engagement.

8. Hook the viewer

It’s incredibly easy for viewers to continue scrolling through their feed if your video doesn’t immediately interest them, hook them or draw them in. There are many different ways to do this, and we’re going to walk you through a few different examples to give you a better idea of how to create your own attention-grabbing video content.

First, take advantage of popular TikTok sounds in your content. When different sounds are used often—especially in a way that’s recognizable and enjoyable—it makes people stop scrolling to see the sound used in a fun new way.

Take a look at Capri Sun using the popular TikTok sound from The Kardashians of Kris Jenner showing off her china collection to a friend. Many brands and creators use this sound when showcasing something cool—and Capri Sun did just that when showing off its new straws.

Another way to grab attention is to hook the viewer with a great story. Dive right in with a strong story hook in order to get them to stop scrolling—or use a text overlay to explain more about your story so people want to hear the full thing.

While not a brand, you could also take a page out of creator Alana Fineman’s book. She shares different restaurant skits and starts every video with the same line—”Time for another restaurant story.” And it pulls in her audience and gets them ready for story time every time.

Also, keep an eye out for various TikTok trends that your brand can jump on. These are more likely to pop up in the For You page if they’re timely enough and they’re also more likely to catch a viewer’s eye.

Finally, consider hopping on a TikTok challenge as long as it’s still relevant to your business. Or, create your own challenge and challenge your audience to give it a try.

Here’s an example of a video that isn’t a challenge, but easily could be turned into one. Essie created a fun and nostalgic ’90s nail art TikTok post. The team easily could’ve turned this into a challenge by asking followers and nail influencers to create their own ’90s looks.

While there doesn’t necessarily have to be an incentive, one great way to increase engagement and participation is by offering a prize to the best (a more subjective choice) or the video that gets the most likes (a more straightforward option).

9. TikTok SEO will increase your visibility

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and TikTok is a search engine. In fact, 40% of Americans are using TikTok as a search engine—so you need to pay attention to TikTok SEO as a part of your marketing strategy.

Some tips include:

• Using TikTok’s predictive search to help you come up with video ideas based on what people are looking for
• Incorporating your video’s focus keyword(s) naturally into your video caption
• Adding hashtags that use your video’s focus keyword(s)
• Having a good understanding of the TikTok algorithm and key ranking factors

Make sure you’re including SEO within your content strategy to increase chances of your video reaching your audience and increasing engagement.

10. Hashtag campaigns

Finally, consider running a hashtag campaign to help spread the word about your business and its products or services even more. A hashtag campaign creates a branded hashtag, then asks viewers to use that hashtag in their own video content to spread the word.

Here’s a great example that’s pretty popular—#CanvaTok. This is a hashtag that graphic design tool Canva uses within its own video captions. But many other designers and small businesses on the app also use it to show off their different creations.

Creating a hashtag campaign can take some time to build up. You need to use it enough within your own videos for it to start to catch on, while also using CTAs to get your audience to use that TikTok hashtag within their video captions as well.

Boost your TikTok engagement rate

Ready to boost your TikTok engagement rate? Start implementing these 10 engagement strategies and learn how to keep track of your overall engagement rate.

To learn even more about TikTok marketing, head over to check out our ultimate guide to creating a TikTok marketing strategy that will work for your business.

The post How to boost your TikTok engagement rate and calculate it appeared first on Sprout Social.

Skillful brand storytelling requires using insights about your audience so you can connect with them, iterate your storytelling and, ultimately, impact your marketing strategy and brand reputation.

You can use feedback from your audience on social media to build brand loyalty and make your brand’s story unforgettable. In this article we’ll cover why a brand story is so important and show you how to create a strong narrative that resonates. And we’ll share four brand storytelling examples to inspire you.

What is brand storytelling?

Have you ever felt so connected to a brand that using their product or service made you feel like the person you aspire to be? That’s successful brand storytelling.

At its core, brand storytelling establishes emotional connections with people based on the values you share with them and their needs, desires and aspirations. Innovative brand stories convey empathy, create experiences and demand urgency.

“Telling a brand’s story begins with finding its truth. Whether in social or broadcast or any medium in between, consumers will seek out brands that feel authentic to both their values and what they want from a product or company. Once we’ve mined that truth we then convert it into an outward-facing message that can be disseminated and interpreted in every channel to every audience.”

— Peter Levin, Creative Director at Finn Partners

Your brand’s story impacts your entire public relations strategy—from the way your executives should sound or respond to a crisis to how you build your social media presence. Your story should be a throughline across channels.

Why do you need a brand story?

There are several benefits of having a brand story. An effective brand story will connect you to your target consumers, support your social media marketing efforts and inspire your customers to take action.

A brand story connects you to your customers

Customer care goes beyond fulfilling support inquiries and answering questions before people make a purchase—it’s about nurturing an emotional connection with customers and fostering loyalty. A brand story enables you to shed light on these empathetic customer touch points and merchandizes your brand’s values.

Storytelling is a core element of social media marketing

Brand storytelling is a cornerstone of social media marketing strategy. Every post on Instagram or video on TikTok or YouTube Shorts ladder up to your brand narrative. For example, if you were to post a behind-the-scenes look at how your brand sources materials on social media, that’s a part of your brand story.

Brand stories inspire action

Effective brand storytelling not only evokes an emotional connection, but it ignites your target audience to interact with your brand. Whether it’s purchasing a new product or becoming an advocate, authentic brand storytelling can inspire you to take action.

How to create a strong brand story

Where should you start when creating your brand’s story? Here are six steps to follow to help your story make an impact.

Start with your customer

To craft a brand story that’s compelling, you’ll need to define and consider your target audience. Use buyer personas or archetypes that embody the traits of your target audience. Think of your customers as the protagonist of your story. What problems do they face? What are their wants and needs? What are their behaviors and interests?

Through user surveys and research like social listening, you can uncover more about your customer and shape a stronger brand story.

Use narrative techniques

People are drawn to stories. The foundation of good brand stories is the same as your favorite movies, shows and books. Characters. Settings. Conflict. Climax. Resolution. By incorporating these five essential elements into your brand’s story, you make it possible to build emotional connections with your audience. And when you emotionally connect with them, you increase brand recall and transform your audience into brand evangelists.

Have a clear purpose

Your brand’s story needs to have a defined purpose so you can guide the narrative in the right direction. Try to narrow down the purpose of your story into one or two sentences. What is your brand trying to accomplish? For example, an organic personal care brand may want to help people embrace self-care through eco-friendly products.

Lean into authenticity

The most compelling stories glow with authenticity. Avoid creating stories for the sake of jumping on a trend. Instead, stay true to your brand’s identity when telling your story. Lean into refining your brand voice and stay true to it. Don’t feel pressured to use colloquial language or internet slang, unless it makes sense for your brand. Use your brand’s legacy, aspirations and values as your north star.

Patagonia is a great example of a brand leaning into authenticity. Some of their values include quality, integrity, justice and environmentalism.

Collaborate with your audience

It’s not just your team that needs to align on your story. Today, brand identities aren’t created in an incubator. Instead, creators, loyal fans and marketers work together to co-create a brand’s essence. To tell brand stories that resonate with your audience, you need to get their perspective. Social media is where you can find it.

Keep brand storytelling consistent

Maintain consistent storytelling to stay connected with your audience. Your audience should feel like they know what to expect from your brand. If your messaging and brand voice isn’t cohesive or consistent, your brand story won’t be as strong.

Tell a brand story that resonates

On social media, people tell brands exactly what they want. They share their thoughts, feelings and opinions about brands, products, current events and more. Listen to them first, develop your story second.

Why? Because they want to know your brand empathizes with their needs and aligns with their values. According to The Sprout Social Index™, transparency about business practices and values is ranked as the second type of content consumers say they don’t see enough of on social media.

“If you can get a pulse from your audience in the comments section, DMs or via AMA, that qualitative data can help inform creative and content strategies, your editorial calendar and even your larger marketing strategy. It’s an awesome focus group at your disposal 24/7 that can help you refine your brand story on social and beyond.”

– Alex Suazo, VP Digital Marketing & Social at Finn Partners

Let’s dive into the specific aspects of social media that help brands interact with their audience and uncover voice of customer (VoC) data.

Comments

The easiest way to access your customers’ feedback is by monitoring your comments section and mentions. They’ll let you know what they love about their experience with you.

For example, Cava posted a response video on TikTok about one of their most commented menu items: roasted sweet potatoes. In the video, the restaurant chain shares that they brought back the highly requested menu item and showed how they’re prepared. Cava’s seasonally sourced ingredients and in-house preparations are a key part of their brand story and customer experience. Fans were quick to sound off in the comments to share their love for the brand’s sweet potatoes, among other favorites.

On the other hand, when customers experience a roadblock in their journey with you, they’ll let you know by mentioning you or commenting on your posts. Whether they have a customer care concern or disagree with your approach to social media activism, consider negative feedback a learning opportunity. Use it as data to help shape your future brand storytelling.

Polls

When you want to know your audience’s perspective, don’t be afraid to ask. Creating interactive polls on social platforms is a great way to get hot takes on industry-specific debates or product preferences. Polls are a low-lift way to build an engaged community that’s more likely to provide their opinions in the future.

It’s important to note your poll should be appropriate for your followers. Consider what’s in it for them and why they’d want to participate. For example, could they learn something about industry best practices? Do they feel like they have a voice in your company’s stance on an issue?

Monitoring engagement

It’s easy to miss social media engagements, especially when your social team monitors multiple accounts and channels. It’s further complicated when posts only mention your brand by a variation of your name or shout out a product rather than reaching out to you directly. Social media monitoring tools make it easier to catch these instances.

Sprout’s Smart Inbox unifies all social channels into a single stream so your team can efficiently respond to untagged mentions of your brand keywords and hashtags from all channels in one place—even if your brand isn’t tagged. The Smart Inbox also allows you to see incoming messages, comments and mentions, so you never miss a detail that could shape your brand story.

How social listening can help boost brand storytelling

While monitoring tells you what people are saying, listening tells you why they’re saying it. With social listening, you can better understand your audience and improve your brand’s story by accessing the full spectrum of conversations around your industry, brand and competitors.

You get a window into the candid thoughts and feelings of an audience to illuminate trends, uncover patterns and gauge emotional response around any topic.

“Listening helps brands stay relevant. Without listening, you have to dig through a sea of social messages or conduct surveys and focus groups. Listening streamlines that process and ensures brands can keep up with the speed of the social trend cycle.”

— Kristin Johnson, former VP of Content and Communications at Sprout Social

Here are some ways you can use social listening to boost your online reputation and create a new, unique brand story.

Build stronger relationships

If you’re feeling out of touch with your audience, the first step is to discover opportunities to build stronger relationships with your community.

Ask yourself:

• How do our customers feel about us?
• What makes customers want to share about our brand?
• Is our campaign resonating? Why or why not?

In Sprout’s Listening tool, you can review sentiment trends related to your brand. For example, note how positive and negative feelings have evolved over time. Consider how sentiment aligns with your ongoing campaigns, PR efforts or other current events.

Improve your products or services

In many cases, creating a new brand story includes improving products or services. Use customer feedback on social media to refine your product development or service experience.

Ask yourself:

• Why do people like or dislike our brand and products or services?
• How do our products or services align with our customers’ values?
• How do our customers respond to the stories around our products or services?

Sprout’s Listening tool allows you to monitor keywords related to your products. This makes it possible to identify new trends that can help shape your product and service improvements and launches.

Join industry conversations

Innovative brands on social don’t miss a chance to join—and even start—conversations. To make sure you’re in the know, it’s important to be aware of where and why conversations are taking place.

Ask yourself:

• Why are certain hashtags and discussions trending in our industry?
• Why is our audience responding to an event or trend?
• What are people saying about our competitors (and their products or services)?

It’s natural to have a fear of missing out on trending conversations. In Sprout’s Listening tool, you can add themes related to trends and events relevant to your brand’s story to determine how they resonate with your audience. You can also visualize how your brand stacks up against your competitors by comparing share of voice and volume.

Authentic brand storytelling examples that connect with audiences

So, what does it look like to use social media data to tell compelling brand stories? Here are a few examples of brands leading the way.

Calm

The story: Health and happiness in our daily lives starts with meditation, mindfulness and better sleep.

Calm is an app created to help guide users through meditations, soundscapes and mindfulness exercises. With Calm, mental health and wellness feel less complicated. They reinforce why meditation is an important tool and how their app makes it easier.

Calm not only relies on feedback from social media to refine the user experience of their app, but also to keep a pulse on the direction of mental health and wellness trends.

Nuuly

The story: Rented and thrifted clothing is eco-friendly and stylish—while also saving you money.

Nuuly is a retail brand that offers a clothing rental program and thrifted merchandise. They make on-trend, high-quality styles available to everyone. Nuuly customers take pride in using the brand because it’s sustainable, financially sound and exceptional caliber.

Nuuly uses social insights to stay current on en vogue style, and make sure they’re in alignment with their customers’ values and needs. They also use social monitoring to respond to and research their audience. For example, Nuuly linked to their formal dresses page after a customer recommended using their site to find an affordable black tie dress:

Greenpeace UK

The story: We need to take immediate and radical action to fight climate change.

Greenpeace UK is a branch of Greenpeace, a global campaigning network dedicated to protecting the planet. On social media, Greenpeace UK uses visual imagery to convey the truth of the destruction to the planet, while also providing hope and inspiration.

For example, they shared a trailer for Forsaken, a film installation highlighting the life of Immortal Jellyfish and their mass extinction on Earth:

In the thread, Greenpeace UK explains they’re supporting the film because it’s as a reminder of how humans can negatively impact oceans, but note it’s not too late to protect them:

Greenpeace UK also partners with local politicians and environmental activists to serve as ambassadors to help tell their story. For instance a conservationist advocated for their #BigPlasticCount campaign:

This aligns with Greenpeace UK’s approach: every good story needs good visuals and strong brand advocates.

Target

The story: America’s happy place.

Target is a store for everything. The Target brand has been around for over 100 years, but they constantly reinvent themselves to continue providing the best shopping experience for their customers.

Today, they partner with influencers like Tabitha Brown to offer trendy clothing, food, skincare and hair care products, electronics, toys and more. People choose Target when they want a bit of extra joy in their life—whether it’s from recreating online aesthetics at home or being delighted in store.

Target looks to social media to understand emerging trends, how they can infuse more joy into people’s experiences with their brand and what their next collaboration should look like.

Use social media to create an impactful brand story

Brand storytelling is an essential part of your overall marketing strategy. To tell better stories, you have to listen to what people are saying. That starts with social monitoring, but can’t stop there. Social listening is critical to understanding people’s experiences with your brand because the best storytellers are engaged listeners.

Looking to learn more about how you can grow and protect your brand? Download this corporate communication plan template—it guides you through creating a calendar roadmap with quarterly initiatives, crafting a distribution strategy and more.

The post Brand storytelling: Creating a story that resonates appeared first on Sprout Social.

With the right tools, social media management becomes more manageable. You can use these tools to do everything in one place–from scheduling posts to analyzing your performance. It becomes easier to stay on top of tasks with features to collaborate with team members and set alerts.

This post rounds up some of the top social media management platforms in the market to help you decide on the best option for your team. Let’s take a look.

Table of contents:

• What is a social media management tool?
• Best social media management tools overall
• Social media management tools for agencies
• Social media management tools for small teams
• Social media management tools for dedicated platforms
• Social media management tools for publishing
• How to select the best social media management tool for your business

What is a social media management tool?

A social media management tool is a software solution that lets you manage all aspects of your social media in one place. That means you can perform multiple social media tasks without having to switch to a different platform. This includes tasks related to creating, scheduling, publishing, monitoring, analyzing, engaging and collaborating.

Most social media management tools let you manage more than one social media profile across several networks. As such, they play a vital role in executing your social media marketing strategy.

Best social media management tools to use

The best social media management tool for you depends on what you need. Factors like the size of your operation and the platforms you use will influence this decision.

Agencies may need a tool that lets them manage multiple social media profiles for their clients. Meanwhile, small teams may look for something with robust collaboration features. Others may only need a tool to help them manage a specific social media platform. On the other hand, some may want to focus on automating their publishing.

Based on these unique needs, we’ve handpicked some of the best social media management tools to consider.

1. Sprout Social
2. Zoho Social
3. HubSpot
4. Sendible
5. Pallyy
6. SocialPilot
7. Buffer
8. Keyhole
9. Sprinklr
10. eClincher
11. Tailwind
12. X Pro (formerly Tweetdeck)
13. Preview
14. PromoRepublic
15. Hootsuite
16. Coschedule
17. MeetEdgar
18. Later

Best social media management tools overall

1. Sprout Social

Can’t blame us for giving ourselves the top spot, right? Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool to manage all aspects of your social media strategy.

Sprout offers integrations with all the major social networks. This includes Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube. So you can work across your entire presence in a single dashboard.

Plus, you can also manage reviews from sources like Google My Business, Trustpilot and Facebook. It even lets you create shoppable posts integrated with Facebook Shops and Shopify catalogs.

Sprout’s Employee Advocacy tool gives it an added advantage over other social media management platforms. This lets you create a curated feed of content for your employees to share across their social networks. So you can take your employee advocacy efforts up a notch and amplify your brand reach.

Features:

• Social media publishing, scheduling, monitoring, analytics, reporting and more in one easy-to-use dashboard
• ViralPost feature to publish your content when your followers are most likely to engage
• Smart Inbox that compiles all your incoming messages from different social media platforms
• Hashtag tracking to identify the most popular and relevant hashtags to boost visibility
• Custom URL tracking to get a more in-depth insight into how your posts are performing in terms of referral traffic and conversions

2. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a tool that boasts features “built for every social media feed.” The platform allows you to start discussions, share reports, create team roles and encourage feedback. This makes it easy to get everyone on board with your updates, strategies and performance insights.

In addition to scheduling, the platform has its own optimized timing features similar to Sprout. You can customize your content for each network and schedule them to go out at the right time.

The platform’s Inbox keeps track of all your conversations in one place. So you don’t have to switch between multiple platforms to manage your customer interactions.

Features:

• An instant integration with the Zoho CRM and the ability to monitor customer interactions
• Social listening dashboards to track brand reviews, social mentions and branded keywords
• Ability to collaborate with teammates within the platform via chat, audio and video calls

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a leading customer platform with powerful social media management features. Its centralized social inbox lets you keep track of all your social interactions in one place. You can further gain contextual information on these conversations with a CRM integration. That way, you have the insights to enhance and personalize the customer experience.

The platform helps you organize your efforts by tagging marketing assets and content. So you can associate your posts with specific campaigns and measure their effectiveness.

Additionally, it comes with all the essential features you need in a social media management software solution. This includes tools for publishing and scheduling as well as keyword monitoring and social media reporting.

Features:

• Keyword monitoring streams to identify important interactions and prioritize the right conversations
• AI-powered social media post generator to simplify publishing
• Best time to post suggestions to optimize scheduling

Social media management tools for agencies

4. Sendible

Sendible has done a great job of niching down for agencies and large brands. It offers client dashboards and automated client reporting features for agency users. Collaboration tools and user management capabilities make the platform ideal for multiple users.

Additionally, it offers a number of helpful integrations to make social media management as easy as possible for users.

Features:

• An all-in-one dashboard that makes it easy to see your overall social media performance at a glance
• Collaboration tools that allow your team to create content and then send it to the client or team leader for approval
• Presentation-ready reports to showcase social media ROI to clients
• A mobile app that lets you monitor and manage your social media accounts on-the-go

5. Pallyy

Pallyy is a unique social media management tool specifically targeted at agencies. This software helps agencies plan and schedule clients’ social media posts all in one place. The platform features a Kanban-style workflow and a visual planner where you can plan your grids. Additionally, you can easily access media files from the media and folders library.

Features:

• Integration with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Pinterest and TikTok
• Visual planners make it easy to prepare content across platforms and grids, especially when aesthetics is a priority
• Folders to better organize your media files
• Shareable content calendars where clients can leave comments and approve posts

Social media management tools for small teams

6. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a straightforward social media management solution for those just starting out. It provides all the essential publishing and scheduling features that you need in a social media tool. The platform simplifies content creation with an AI Assistant. This helps you generate engaging captions based on the latest trends and audience preferences.

SocialPilot offers in-depth analytics reports to guide better strategies. The content performance and audience insights help you understand what people are engaging with. You can analyze growth patterns to continue creating great content.

Features:

• Integration with several major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube
• Ability to customize and optimize posts for multiple social networks in a single composer
• Bulk scheduling for up to 500 posts to help you save time

7. Buffer

Buffer is another social media management tool that’s ideal for small businesses and startups. It offers a completely free plan for your first three social media channels. This makes it the perfect option for setting up your Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

The platform simplifies content creation with an AI Assistant that generates new ideas. It even lets you store ideas so you can build on them later. A direct integration with Canva, DropBox and OneDrive makes it much easier to import content to edit and share on social.

Features:

• Social media publishing tools that allow you to easily schedule out all the social media content you’ve created for each channel
• A social media engagement dashboard that lets you respond to all mentions or messages online in one place
• Analytics and reporting to give you a bird’s eye view of how your social media efforts are performing
• Landing page builder to create a customized experience

8. Keyhole

Keyhole is unique from most of the tools on this list in that it’s an influencer tracking and marketing software as well. It performs in-depth analytics to help you vet and compare influencers. The profile analytics help you zero in on influencers who manage to drive authentic engagements.

After your campaign goes live, the tool measures the performance of each influencer and their impact on your campaign goals.

Features:

• Automated social media reports that are shareable and presentation-ready within seconds
• Several reporting features, including brand reporting, campaign reporting, hashtag reporting and influencer reporting

9. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a customer experience management platform with features to manage your socials. It supports your essential social publishing needs with an editorial calendar and a digital asset manager. The engagement dashboard lets you view comments, mentions and messages in one place.

A unique Sprinklr feature is the user-generated content (UGC) management capabilities. You can use it to organize content from fans and repost them to amplify brand reach.

Features:

• Sprinklr AI to speed up content generation
• Custom approval workflows to streamline team collaboration
• Customer service and consumer intelligence integrations for a unified customer experience management

10. eClincher

eClincher markets itself as a social media management platform that highlights a commitment to 24/7 customer support. Like most tools on this list, eClincher features a cross-network social publishing tool. It comes with a visual calendar, a dedicated messaging inbox and a publishing queue. Plus, it features brand monitoring across social, news, blogs and more, complete with sentiment analysis.

Features:

• Provides 24/7 customer support for its users so they can “strategize, optimize and measure ROI”
• Team collaboration with drafts, comments, notifications, tagging and assigning messages

Social media management tools for dedicated platforms

11. Tailwind

Tailwind started out as a tool to address a hole in the market for Pinterest scheduling. So it initially focused on automating Pinterest marketing for brands. It has since expanded to cover Instagram and Facebook. But the platform continues to stand out when it comes to managing Pinterest.

The visual calendar helps you plan and organize all your social media posts in one place. You can apply filters to view only your Pins to see how your Page would look. The platform then auto-publishes these Pins to catch your audience when they’re most responsive.

Features:

• Post ideas to make sure you always have Pinterest content in the pipeline
• Automatic personalized designs to create on-brand posts every time
• Hashtag finder to discover popular and hyper-relevant hashtags to boost your engagement

12. X Pro (formerly Tweetdeck)

X Pro (formerly Tweetdeck) is an X-owned management tool to monitor conversations on the platform. It gives you real-time visibility to monitor multiple timelines on a single screen. So you can easily jump in on the right conversations and engage with your audience.

Since its rebranding to X Pro, the tool is now a part of X Premium subscription. As such, you can access plenty of premium features not available to regular users. This includes the ability to share longer content and download videos among many others.

Features:

• Ability to create longer posts to share in-depth information and messages
• A dedicated Highlights tab to showcase your best posts on your profile
• Reply boost so your responses show up more prominently

13. Preview

Preview is a mobile app that lets you visually plan out your Instagram feed. The tool is perfect for creating a feed that’s based on a specific Instagram feed aesthetic. You can upload as many photos and videos into the app so you can preview your feed before you publish.

Features:

• Upload photos, videos and carousels to the Preview app to get an idea of what it would look like live on Instagram
• Schedule your content right within the Preview app so it’ll publish when you’re ready
• Plan out Reels and Stories as well as your regular Instagram feed so you know how everything will fit together

14. PromoRepublic

PromoRepublic is a unique tool on this list as it markets itself as a local marketing platform. Having a localized social media management tool makes it easier to target local audiences. You can create hyper-localized ads targeting audiences on Facebook and Instagram.

Through its local SEO tool, businesses will be able to grow foot traffic and web traffic. You can even manage customer reviews and feedback right within the dashboard.

Features:

• Best for small businesses, franchises and businesses who want to grow awareness in local audiences
• Dynamic fields to automatically localize content across thousands of local pages
• Content labeling to see what social content resonates in specific locations

Social media management tools for publishing

15. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media marketing tool with powerful publishing features. It comes with a visual calendar to plan out your content and easily fill gaps. If you ever run out of things to post, you can use the tool to generate an endless stream of content ideas. The tool even provides suggestions on the best time to post so you can schedule your posts for the highest engagement.

Check out our list of Hootsuite alternatives if you’re looking to take your social media management in a different direction.

Features:

• Publish and schedule social media posts on a variety of platforms
• Manage incoming messages and mentions and respond to them in a single inbox
• Monitor online conversations around your brand and industry to stay on top of trending topics

16. CoSchedule

CoSchedule began as a content marketing company and has since brought social media management and calendars into its fold. It helps you organize your social media publishing efforts with a social calendar to visualize your entire content plan. The Best Time Scheduler ensures that your posts go out when people are most likely to engage.

Features:

• Social Message Optimizer to craft powerful messages for your social posts
• AI Social Assistant to generate ideas and social messages instantly
• Predefined social sharing templates so you don’t have to create a publishing plan from scratch
• ReQueue automatically creates recurring social posts from your best content

17. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a social media management tool that helps teams automatically curate their social media feeds. This is perfect for solopreneurs or businesses with small teams. Startups, where team members wear a lot of hats, will benefit from the features available with MeetEdgar.

Features:

• Repurpose content and give it new life by automatically republishing it at a later date
• Scheduling tools that let you set the optimal times for MeetEdgar to schedule your content
• Real-time content insights to see what performs best so you can optimize your strategy

18. Later

Later is a social media management tool that assists with publishing and content creation. You can organize your social content strategy with a visual planner and a media library. The Best Time to Post recommendations make sure that you’re reaching your audience at the right time on TikTok and Instagram.

Features:

• User-generated content discovery using tags and mentions
• Instagram Hashtag Suggestions tool to generate fresh and relevant hashtags
• Caption Writer tool to automatically craft powerful social media captions

How to select the best social media management tool for your business

When investing in a new tool for your business, you want something that adds value to your marketing tech stack. So it’s important to carefully weigh your options to ensure that you’re making the right choice. Here are some factors to help you narrow down the ideal social media management software for you.

Integration

The first thing to consider is whether it has a social media integration for the platforms you use. It should integrate with all the major networks so you can manage them all in one place.

Scheduling

Publishing is one of the most vital aspects of social media management, so you need a tool to simplify the process. Look for one that comes with features for scheduling social media posts and best time to post suggestions. Bulk scheduling capabilities are a plus if you have to schedule hundreds of posts each month.

Collaboration

Whether you work with a small team or with clients, you need a tool that supports seamless collaboration. Look for one that has a shared publishing calendar along with multi-user support and message approval workflows.

Social listening

A core aspect of social media management is being able to track and engage with relevant conversions. So you need a tool with social listening capabilities to monitor specific keywords and tags in addition to brand mentions.

AI capabilities

While not a necessity, AI marketing capabilities give you an added advantage. You can find social media tools that offer AI-powered features, especially when it comes to content creation. Being able to generate ideas and captions in an instant will help you speed up the process of creating new social posts.

Reporting

The easier it is to highlight your performance and KPIs, the better. Whether you’re reporting to clients or presenting data to stakeholders, in-depth social media reporting is a must-have.

Additionally, reporting can help highlight what’s working and what’s not in terms of your social presence. So make sure the tool can monitor the social metrics that matter most to your business.

Cost

Whether or not you can get by with totally free social media management software really depends on your business’s size and scope. For solo businesses and up-and-coming agencies, free or freemium tools might serve as a stepping stone toward paid ones.

But oftentimes, “you get what you pay for” rings true. That’s why it’s important to assess which features matter most to your business and what your non-negotiables are.

Take care to consider the overall cost of social media marketing when deciding on your budget for a social media tool.

Adaptability

Another major consideration is how well the tool can adapt to changes in your social media planning. Does it have a built-in editor in case you decide to create more visual content? Can you get hashtag ideas in case you want to start adding more hashtags? Make sure it has all the features you might possibly need so it can quickly adapt to your latest social media plan.

Scalability

One crucial factor is the ability to scale along with your needs. Almost in line with the previous factor, scalability helps you ensure that the tool can support your business growth. At the bare minimum, it should offer the option to add more users and social profiles.

Manage social media like a pro

The right tool helps you manage your social media like a pro. It streamlines publishing and allows you to manage all your social media interactions in one place. More importantly, it enables you to collaborate seamlessly with your team and clients.

After going through our list, take some time to weigh your options before you make the final move. And remember, you can get a first-hand look at Sprout’s automation, collaboration and reporting features with a free 30-day trial.

The post Top 18 social media management tools for businesses in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Marketers understand when it comes to strategy, it’s all about accurately measuring your social media analytics and finding areas to increase efforts.

While it’s very easy to group terms like reach and impressions together, they do have their own definitions and can vary per network. To help you accurately measure these metrics, here’s a crash course on reach vs. impressions.

What’s the difference between reach and impressions?

Reach is the total number of people who see your content. Impressions are the total number of times your content is displayed, no matter if it was clicked or not.

Think of reach as the number of unique people who see your content. In a perfect world, every one of your followers would see every piece of content you posted. But, in reality, not all of your followers will see every single post you publish.

Think of impressions as the content delivered to someone’s feed. One person could have multiple impressions for a single piece of content. For example, if one follower saw a post three times, that would count as three impressions. But, since it’s the same follower, reach would equal one.

If a Facebook post appears in the original publisher’s feed and again when a friend shares the post, and you saw both, that counts as two impressions for the same post.

Let’s walk through another example: You have 100 followers and publish one post. If every followers sees it, you would have a reach of 100 users and 100 impressions. The next day you publish two posts to the same followers, and all of them see both posts. Your reach is still 100 users because your follower count didn’t change, but now you have 200 impressions.

There will also be situations where the number of impressions for a piece of content is sometimes larger than your follower count or reach. Notice in the example below how there are 93 likes and five shares. Each person who sees those five shares would be included in the number of impressions. We can’t see the total number of impressions, so let’s assume those shares are higher than the total number of likes and reach.

Reach vs. impressions can be a challenging concept, but knowing the difference is essential when tracking the success of a social media campaign, especially if you’re using other engagement metrics.

If you want to make sure you’re focusing on the right metrics, our social media metrics map can help you understand all the metrics to focus on based on your marketing goal(s) so you can make a greater impact with your data.

The Social Media Metrics Map (Free Resource)

Published on 

Reach vs. impressions per social media network

If you’re looking to better understand how to improve your reach and impressions, it’s important to learn about the different ways each social media network measures them. Many networks include reach and impressions in their native social media analytics, but their definitions can differ slightly. Let’s review.

Facebook reach vs. impressions

Facebook shows reach and impressions broken down by post type and other categories. Facebook reach falls into three different categories:

• Organic: The number of unique people who saw your content for free.
• Paid: The number of unique people who saw your paid content, such as a Facebook Ad.
• Viral: The number of unique people who saw your post or Facebook Page mentioned in a story published by someone else. These stories include actions such as liking, sharing or commenting.

Facebook impressions are also broken down into three categories, which are viewable in Sprout’s Facebook Pages report:

• Organic: The number of times your content was displayed in the Feed or on your Page.
• Paid: The number of times your paid content was displayed.
• Viral: The number of times content associated with your Page was displayed in a story published by another user. These stories include liking, sharing or commenting.

Instagram reach vs. impressions

Instagram refers to reach as “accounts reached,” which means it includes the total number of unique accounts that have seen your content (posts and Stories) at least once. For Reels, accounts reached include the number of unique accounts that have seen the video on screen at least once, whether they played it or not.

Instagram impressions measure the amount of times content was seen overall. Instagram Reel impressions include multiple views from the same account.

If you’re using native analytics or a social media management software like Sprout, you can view demographic information for accounts reached by top cities and countries, age range and gender.

TikTok reach vs impressions

TikTok defines reach as the total number of unique accounts that watched a video. TikTok impressions include every exposure, even if a unique account has already seen the content before. In other words, impressions are simply the sum of all video views. Note that if you’re using TikTok native analytics, reach is considered one of the platform’s estimated metrics, so it’s not an exact number.

LinkedIn social media impressions

LinkedIn doesn’t have a defined metric or definition for reach, but you can see how many accounts viewed your profile over the past month. LinkedIn impressions include the number of times your post, video, article or update appear in a user’s feed. Users don’t have to engage to count as an impression, but since LinkedIn’s algorithm prioritizes content that fuels engagement, posts with more likes, comments, reposts and shares are likely to get more impressions.

YouTube social media impressions

On YouTube, there isn’t a single reach metric. In the YouTube Studio, underneath the “Reach” tab, you can view traffic source types, suggested videos, external sources, playlist and other factors.

YouTube impressions measure how many times at least 50% of your video thumbnail was seen on screen for at least 1 second. You can view impression click-through-rate to determine how often viewers actually watched your videos after seeing the thumbnail.

X (formerly known as Twitter) reach vs. impressions

The native X app doesn’t measure reach, but it does track impressions. The network defines impressions as anytime a user sees your X Post. The number of impressions you see inside the app only counts the number of times your Posts show up in a user’s feed or search results.

When the app doesn’t provide data on reach, there is a workaround. With Sprout Social, you can measure engagement, follower growth, impressions and more.

Reach, impressions and your marketing strategy

With better clarity on reach vs. impressions per platform, it’s easy to gauge behavior from your target audience. The more you know about them, the more you’ll be able to optimize your strategy. Let’s review the connection between reach and impressions to your target audience and marketing strategy.

Know your target audience

For businesses, it’s important to scale your reach. As reach increases, it naturally leads to increased awareness. But even if you’re reaching 10,000 people, it won’t mean a thing if only 1,000 of them have interest in your brand. Design messages and your content strategy with your target audience in mind.

With Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you can keep an eye on the content that’s being shared, liked or replied to. By tracking these engagements, it’ll help you find potential users to target, thus extending your reach.

Monitor and analyze engagement metrics regularly

Impressions measure your ability to get your content in front of your intended audience. When your impressions rise, it’s likely due to your content surfacing more frequently into users’ feeds.

This usually means your posts are optimized for whichever social network you’re using. If you do not see the impressions you hoped for, look at your content and consider if it’s optimized for the platform you’re posting it on.

If you’re trying to increase impressions, focus on publishing shareable content. As your community begins sharing your posts with their networks, your impressions (and reach) will increase.

See if your efforts are working by consistently monitoring and analyzing these metrics. Continually make improvements and experiment with changes by using social media monitoring tools like Sprout to tag messages for specific departments on your social team.

Sprout’s Smart Inbox helps you avoid going back and forth between networks by centralizing your social media in one place so monitoring and analyzing engagement metrics like reach and impressions is easier.

Looking at the bigger picture

Now you know the difference between reach vs. impressions on different platforms, you can use these metrics to better understand how well your brand is generating awareness on social media.

But awareness is just the tip of the iceberg: the next step is to measure and optimize for engagement so you’re creating content that drives business and demonstrates ROI. You can track reach, impressions and engagement for every major network all in one place with Sprout Social: sign up for a free 30-day trial to get started.

The post Reach vs. impressions: What’s the difference in terms? appeared first on Sprout Social.

In this article, we’ll explore audience engagement benefits and strategies. Plus, we’ll show you some shining examples of what audience engagement looks like.

What is audience engagement?

Audience engagement is any interaction between your target audience and your brand. When an audience is fully engaged, they don’t sit back and passively scroll through your social posts. An engaged audience takes action, which can include clicking on a link or sharing content with a friend. This action furthers their connection with your brand.

If your audience doesn’t engage with your brand, it may be a sign that your content does not resonate with them. It’s vital to track audience engagement so you can be sure your content interests the people who matter most to your organization.

Types of audience engagement

There are several different ways audiences can engage with your brand on social media. Some forms of engagement require little effort, while others are much more involved. Here are some examples of common types of audience engagement:

Likes and reactions

Likes and reactions are one of the simplest ways for an audience to engage with your brand on social media—all your target audience has to do is click or tap a button. But when your audience does so, their followers see it in their feeds, which exponentially increases your brand’s visibility. That’s why likes and reactions are important metrics to consider when analyzing your content performance.

Reviews and mentions

Reviewing or mentioning your brand is more involved than simply liking or sharing your social media posts. It shows that your audience is actively engaging in a conversation about your brand. They are passionate about what you do and want to tell people about it.

Comments and replies

Similar to reviews and mentions, comments and replies show that your target audience wants to engage in a conversation about you. They may converse directly with you by replying to your brand’s posts or comment on another post relevant to your brand. Either way, they’ve got something on their mind and they want to share it with others.

Shares and resharing

Sharing and resharing brand content seems like a simple form of audience engagement. However, it’s actually more complicated than that. When your audience shares or reshares your content, they are taking things a step further than just passively enjoying it.

Website interaction

If your target audience clicks through a link to your website from a social post, it shows they are committed to learning more about your brand. They liked what they saw on social enough to go off-platform and hear what you have to say.

Why is audience engagement important for your content strategy?

Audience engagement matters because your brand doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not possible to have a successful digital marketing strategy or social media strategy without it. Here’s a peek at some of the many ways audience engagement can benefit your brand:

Increase brand loyalty

When your audience engages with your brand, especially more than once, they are more likely to stick around for the long term. Your target audience feels that your brand understands them and their needs, which leads to brand loyalty. An engaged audience will also learn about your company’s mission, vision and core values, and see how they align with their own. This further builds their connection to your brand.

Boost visibility

Social media algorithms reward audience engagement on your social posts by displaying them to more people. It tells the social platform that your content is interesting and that other people may also want to see it. By increasing audience engagement, you also increase visibility for your brand to new audiences.

Gain feedback

Tracking audience engagement helps you learn how your target audience feels about your brand. If they don’t engage with your content very much, it’s a sign that your posts aren’t relevant to your followers. You need to go back to the drawing board and see where you went wrong.

If they engage positively by commenting, sharing or liking your post, you must be doing something right. However, if you see negative comments, it’s time to scan through their feedback to determine what is causing the issue. Social listening tools like Sprout help brands surface the big issues, from customer service hold-ups to product defects and more.

Improve user experience

When an audience engages with your brand, they actively interact with you through likes, shares, comments, clicks and more. These actions give you insights to further tailor your content to your audience, and so creating a better user experience for them.

How to engage an audience

Getting your audience to engage with your content takes time and effort, and begins with your social media marketing strategy. With the right tactics and tools, you can be on your way to capturing the hearts and clicks of your target audience. Here is a list of strategies you can use to engage your audience better:

Understand your target audience

The most effective way to engage your audience is to get to know them. Your target audience shares specific characteristics, so a best practice is to look at commonalities within, such as:

• Demographics
• Geography
• Behaviors
• Psychographics
• Buying intent
• Subcultures
• Interests, hobbies and values

This will help you determine what your audience cares about most, what day-to-day challenges they face and how you can best support them.

Knowing your audience will also help you determine which social channels to focus on. If you want to increase engagement, it’s best to move your resources to the channels your audience frequents.

Leverage AI and social listening

Social listening gives you access to the unfiltered opinions of your target audience. Social media management tools like Sprout help you conduct sentiment analysis with artificial intelligence so you can easily review and measure what people are saying about you—and topics related to your brand and industry—across social media.

These insights help marketers and larger teams understand exactly what needs to be improved, such as products, price, store locations, customer service or anything else you discover through social listening. Thus, helping you gain a competitive edge over the rest of the industry.

Define the metrics

How do you know what success looks like? You must determine how you’re going to measure audience engagement to track it. There are several metrics you can track, including:

• Likes
• Comments
• Shares
• Video views
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Followers
• Time on page
• Conversion rate
• Video completion rate

Track the metrics over time to spot trends or anomalies. For example, you may notice when you post about trending topics, your likes and shares go up, and when you plug your product, your comments go down. Tracking metrics enables you to adjust your social media strategy to increase audience engagement.

Sprout’s 2023 Content Benchmarks report is a good resource for understanding how you stack up against industry benchmarks. For example, the average daily inbound engagements per post in 2023 was 14. How do you compare?

Use modern audience engagement strategies

We’ll get to modern audience engagement strategies in a bit, but the main message here is to understand what audiences want today.

Online trends move quickly, and brands have to keep up with the evolving tastes of their target audience. What may be popular one day could quickly drop out of favor the next. Keeping tabs on the types of content your audience wants and engages with most will help your brand stay relevant.

Track performance

Tracking performance using specific metrics, as we defined earlier, will also help you optimize your social media performance.

For example, if you get a lot of comments on your posts but take two days to respond to each one, you may be stopping a possible conversation. Track what happens when you respond to each comment within a day or within a few hours. Does that increase the level of engagement?

In this example, Wendy’s social media team does a great job of responding to audience comments, keeping the conversation going

Try A/B testing

Conduct A/B testing to determine what your audience responds to most. You can test headlines, subheads, post text, images, post formats, post length, time of day, day of post and more. Ensure you only change one variable at a time. That way you will have a clear answer of what specific element caused your audience to engage differently.

Modern audience engagement strategies

How can you get your audience to consistently like, share and comment on your social media posts? Here are some of our favorite strategies for you to try.

Use visual storytelling

Users respond more favorably to posts that include visuals like graphics, videos and photos. However, it’s not enough to include just any video and image from your library. Curate the visuals so they signal the brand’s identity to your target audience without them ever seeing a logo or brand name.

Chanel’s Instagram account provides an excellent example of visual storytelling. The visuals are so consistent in style that any Chanel fan can spot them as being associated with the brand.

Share personalized content

Social media users don’t react to generic content. They only engage with content that speaks to their hobbies, interests, values and other characteristics. Use attention-grabbing content tailored for specific groups of your audience. Personalizing content is one of the most effective audience engagement strategies because it shows your audience you understand their needs.

In this example, Nike appeals to soccer fans by using a specific hashtag and tailoring the copy and image to soccer players.

Be responsive

Social media is not a one-way communication tool, especially if you want to increase audience engagement. By being responsive to user comments, reviews, shares and other forms of engagement, your brand can address potential issues, build relationships with customers and foster loyalty.

For example, Coca-Cola responds quickly to all user posts about their brand, whether positive or negative, so its audience always feels heard.

Engage influencers

Influencer marketing is an audience engagement strategy that can help connect your brand to new audiences who are already highly engaged. Influencers have a dedicated social following of people who trust and value their opinion. If an influencer vouches for your brand, their audience sees this as a form of social proof.

Zoe Sugg is a lifestyle influencer and entrepreneur with 9.2 million followers. She often posts about the products and services she uses in her day-to-day life which are also products that she thinks will appeal to her audience.

Build a community

Create a place where your target audience can gather online and connect with like-minded people. Online communities, like forums and private groups, strengthen your audience’s connection to your brand through the people they meet in the communities. For example, The Arboretum, Sprout’s online community, serves as a gathering place for 10,000 social and marketing professionals to connect for support, ideas, questions and industry updates.

Leverage user-generated content

What better way to get your audience engaged than by using their content in your social media posts? Try reacting to the original post or resharing the original post. Or, ask users to create content based on a specific prompt and share their content on your social channels. User-generated content makes your audience feel like they are a part of the brand and that they have a platform to share their experiences.

For example, Away uses content that customers of the brand have created. This makes Away’s audience feel special while providing social proof for potential customers.

Include interactive elements

Many social channels come with built-in interactive elements, such as quizzes and polls. These are useful for increasing engagement with your target audience and getting their direct feedback. Simply ask your audience a question and give them a couple of responses to choose from. This provides your audience with a voice and tells them you are listening.

24 Seven Talent makes excellent use of LinkedIn polls because they ask questions related to topics their audience cares deeply about.

Try contests

Sometimes, your audience needs an incentive to engage with your brand on social media. A contest is a great way to offer them a prize for their engagement. Social media contest entries can include liking or commenting on a post, tagging a friend or creating a video or photo entry, for example.

Take a look at this post for a giveaway contest from Nuba, which asks followers to enter by completing a number of actions, such as liking the post and tagging their friends. These actions increase visibility for their brand, in addition to engagement.

Audience engagement examples

Check out some of the other ways brands can get their audiences to engage beyond social media.

Webinars

Webinars are an excellent medium for Q&A sessions. Get your audience involved by asking them questions during the session, and open it up for them to ask questions too. You can also solicit questions from your social media followers to answer during your webinar, and spur excitement about the content you’ll cover.

Social media presence

Make your social media presence unique by establishing a distinct voice, tone and brand personality. If your social media personality aligns with your target audience, they will likely want to interact with you online.

Check out how Innocent Drinks uses its quirky personality to get its audience engaged by using humor and tying into timely topics unrelated to its products. This creates an authentic social media presence that stands out from other brands.

Online reviews

Social proof, which includes reviews and testimonials, helps build trust with your target audience. Ask your customers for reviews after they interact with your brand. Then, share those reviews with prospects to build credibility. You’ll need an online review management strategy to ensure you maximize the benefits of any reviews.

WPX Hosting regularly posts customer reviews on X (formerly known as Twitter) to show potential customers how its audience perceives its products and services.

Conferences and events

If your organization hosts live events, increase engagement online by asking attendees to post during the experience with an event hashtag. Be sure to post event updates and ask followers to join in. The hashtag should be short, unique and memorable.

Apple often uses the #applevent hashtag for its different conferences so fans of the brand can follow along live during the event. The hashtag is used in hundreds of thousands of posts.

Surveys

Surveys and polls provide a range of engagement opportunities. Ask your audience about product or service-related preferences, get their feedback on your customer support offerings or ask a question about the mundane parts of their day.

For example, we use polls at Sprout Social to get customer feedback because we value their opinions and want them to share their thoughts with us.

Get your audience engaged

Whether you want to have better conversations with your followers, improve the quality of your leads or enhance overall brand health, increasing your audience engagement will help you get there. And, with higher audience engagement comes stronger brand loyalty.

While you can get audience engagement on many different marketing channels, social media in particular is a good one to start with because users are naturally inclined to engage on this medium. If you’re having trouble understanding what your audience thinks about your brand, sentiment analysis may be the answer.

Mine the opinions of your audience to get a contextual understanding of their engagement to enhance your brand. Learn all about sentiment analysis and how it can benefit your brand.

The post Audience engagement: What it is and tips to improve it appeared first on Sprout Social.

In this guide, we give you a breakdown of what the TikTok algorithm is and how it works. More importantly, we give you some practical tips on how to work with the algorithm. Let’s dive in.

Table of contents:

• What is the TikTok algorithm?
• How does the TikTok algorithm work?
• What the TikTok algorithm doesn’t show
• Tips for working with the TikTok algorithm

What is the TikTok algorithm?

The TikTok algorithm is a system that makes content recommendations tailored to each user. It decides which videos a user might like based on their individual interests and displays them on the user’s For You page.

As a result, the For You page is highly personalized for each user. What you see on your For You page will not be the same as what your friend or colleague sees on their For You page.

For example, someone who watches a lot of beauty and makeup content will naturally see more recommendations for similar videos. Yet, those videos will rarely show up for someone who mostly consumes content related to sports and gaming.

Similar to other social media algorithms, it also means that the types of content you see on this page will change over time as your viewing behavior and preferences change. For instance, as you pick up a new interest in DIY projects, the algorithm will start showing you more DIY-related videos on your For You page. This happens as you engage with more crafting and DIY content.

How does the TikTok algorithm work?

Now you may be wondering how TikTok knows which content to recommend. The TikTok algorithm considers a combination of factors to decide which videos a user might like.

Let’s take a look at the most important TikTok ranking factors that influence which videos show up on your For You page:

Engagement

One of the most important ranking factors for TikTok is engagement. This includes metrics like:

• Video likes and shares
• Comments posted
• Videos completed
• Favorited videos

TikTok uses this information to understand the types of videos you like to watch and share so it can recommend similar videos to you.

It’s also likely to favor videos from creators whose content you’ve regularly engaged with. Finishing a long video or favoriting it also tells TikTok that content really resonated with you.

User Interactions

Beyond engagement, TikTok also considers user interactions like:

• Accounts followed
• Content created

This information allows the platform to get a better understanding of each user’s unique preferences and how they change over time. TikTok then uses this data to serve you content that aligns closely with the content you actively choose to consume and create yourself.

Video information

Video information like captions, hashtags and sounds also helps TikTok understand how to rank the content.

This information shows the algorithm what the content is all about so it can decide when to display it on users’ For You pages.

Device and account indicators

TikTok also looks at the device and account settings of each user to optimize for performance. The main information it looks at are:

• Country settings
• Language preferences
• Device type
• Category selection

However, since users don’t actively express them as preferences, they don’t hold as much weight as the other two factors. That means the algorithm is likely to place greater weight on a strong indicator of interest such as watching a video in its entirety.

What the TikTok algorithm doesn’t show

According to TikTok, the platform aims to keep its users’ For You pages “interesting”, “varied” and “safe.” To that end, the algorithm does not recommend the following:

• Duplicate content
• Content you’ve already seen
• Content considered as spam
• Potentially offensive or unsafe content
• Videos that have just been uploaded
• Videos that are under review

TikTok also mentions their algorithm does not directly consider the following factors when ranking or recommending videos:

• Follower count
• Previous high-performing videos

This means even if you’re a new creator on the platform, your videos are just as likely to rank or go viral as those posted by influencers or veteran TikTokers.

9 tips for working with the TikTok algorithm

Looking at these ranking factors, it’s safe to say that the most important way to work with the algorithm is by driving TikTok engagement.

This may seem like a challenge if your brand is new to the platform and you’re still building your following. Here are a few tips to improve your chances with the TikTok algorithm:

1. Level up your TikTok hashtags

If you thought hashtags were just for Instagram, think again. The TikTok algorithm uses hashtags to understand the content of a video and how to categorize it.

That means if you want TikTok to show your video to the right users, you should use hashtags that are relevant to your video and your brand.

For example, Huda Beauty uses hashtags like #cleaningmakeupbrushes and #satisfyingvideo in the following video. This helps it reach people interested in this type of content and also signals to TikTok what the video is about.

It’s even better if you can make use of trending TikTok hashtags that are already getting a ton of visibility and engagement.

For example, you may be able to take part in a popular hashtag challenge and add your own twist to it. Huda Beauty does this too above with the hashtag #cleaningtiktok.

These trending hashtags could inspire your content creation. They could also boost your content visibility since they’re already popular on the platform.

To browse trending hashtags, search for a relevant keyword and swipe over to the Hashtags tab to see the top hashtags related to it. You can also see the post count for each hashtag.

2. Take advantage of TikTok trends

TikTok is all about the latest viral trends. Using trending audios, hashtags and effects in your videos can give them a boost with the algorithm.

Songs and sounds often explode in popularity on TikTok. When a sound starts trending, make it your own by using it creatively in a video. This taps you into an audience already engaged with that audio.

But audio trends aren’t the only trends to capitalize on. Keep an eye out for trending hashtags and effects too. If a new meme or challenge takes off, find a way to put your unique spin on it. Here’s Amazon using both a trending sound and a meme in one video:

Finally, don’t forget to experiment with trending video formats. For example, if a specific style of video goes viral, try making your own version that aligns with your niche.

Jumping on TikTok trends may seem cliché. But it can introduce your content to communities and accounts you’d usually never reach. Just make sure to put thought into the trends you participate in to stay true to your personal brand.

3. Make the first few seconds count

TikTok prioritizes factors like whether users finished watching your video. So, you need to grab your audience’s attention within the first few seconds and hook them in so they’ll want to watch the rest of the video.

That means skipping the intro and getting straight to the good part within the first 2-3 seconds. With TikTok being a fast-moving platform, there’s no room for slow build-ups that could cause viewers to lose interest. Otherwise, viewers will get impatient and quickly skip to the next video on their feed.

Depending on the content, you may need to use text overlay, voiceovers or sound effects to make the first few seconds count. The goal is to instantly show the value of your video to make viewers stay.

Here’s an example from Chipotle, where a text overlay tells viewers why they should watch the video.

4. Prioritize shorter videos

TikTok recently expanded its maximum video length to 10 minutes. However, longer videos may not necessarily give you an advantage with the TikTok algorithm.

As mentioned above, the video completion rate holds significant weight in the algorithm. Now, what’s the chance that people will watch an entire 15-second video vs. a 10-minute video?

Try to create shorter, punchier videos that will engage viewers from start to finish. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t experiment with long-form videos, especially if they’re better aligned with your brand identity, messaging and goals. Just remember to keep at least some of your videos short.

5. Post at the right time

Just like on other social networks, time is of the essence on TikTok. The algorithm looks at engagements on your video to rank it appropriately. In other words, the more engagement it sees, the more likely your video will show up on the For You pages of relevant users.

This means that you need to drive as much engagement as possible within the first few minutes of posting to improve visibility on the platform.

Posting your TikTok videos when your audience is the most active will help you achieve this goal. The best times to post on TikTok, in general, are Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays between 2 and 5 p.m.

However, every audience is different. It’s best to look at your follower activity and see when your audience is most active.

6. Write keyword-rich captions

While you can keep your captions short or even leave them blank, it’s much better if you can use them to your advantage. Write captions that are relevant to the video so the TikTok algorithm can understand what the content is about.

You can make the most of this space to include keywords that are relevant to the video. This will make it easier for TikTok to understand the content of the video and show it to the right users.

See how Booking.com uses keywords like “home,” “view,” “Cape Town” and “South Africa” in the following TikTok:

That said, avoid stuffing your caption with keywords just for the sake of it. Instead, use the keywords strategically to form a sentence that’s clear and easy to understand while being relevant to the content.

7. Track performance using TikTok analytics

If there’s one thing that’s non-negotiable for marketers, it’s tracking performance on every channel they use. Leveraging TikTok analytics gives you valuable insights to refine your strategy. Here are some key metrics to look out for:

• Video views
• Play time and drop-off rates
• Traffic sources (e.g. For You page, hashtags, sounds)
• Likes, comments and shares
• Song uses
• Profile visits
• Follower growth
• Link clicks
• Video downloads
• Audience retention

Analyzing the performance of individual videos as well as overall changes over time for these metrics can directly surface what content types, formats and distribution tactics resonate best with your target audience.

Compare old and new videos, different video lengths, captions vs. no captions, various sounds used and more. Let the data reveal what works and what doesn’t. Then, apply these learnings to optimize your content and guide your strategy.

Want to go deeper? Sprout Social’s analytics tools can give you a bird’s eye view of your TikTok performance. You can also compare metrics with your other social media profiles.

8. Optimize your content for search

Google has recently started showing more TikTok videos in search results, including featured snippets. This means optimizing your content for both native and web search is more important than ever.

To improve TikTok SEO, craft descriptive, keyword-rich titles and captions that summarize visuals clearly and highlight key themes—don’t be cryptic or use unrelated terms.

This explains what a clip is about to both search engine crawlers and the TikTok algorithm, giving your videos a greater chance of showing up for relevant search queries.

9. Work with TikTok influencers

Collaborating with TikTok creators who have strong followings and high engagement levels can introduce your brand to whole new communities. Even nano or micro-influencers in your niche with only a few thousand engaged followers can be valuable partners.

Here are some ideas for potential collaborations:

• Branded challenges and hashtag campaigns
• Sponsored tutorials, tips and tricks, and how-to videos
• Unboxing new products or reviewing a service

• Account “takeovers”
• Co-created products and collections
• Exclusive discount codes and offers

Remember—TikTok influencer marketing offers major growth opportunities but also risks if you don’t manage it strategically. Vet potential partners carefully by analyzing audience quality, typical engagement rates, follower sentiment and overall brand alignment. Don’t forget to establish clear expectations and messaging upfront.

Win over the TikTok algorithm

Cracking the TikTok algorithm’s code can help you unlock viral success on the platform. Give the algorithm what it wants—engagement, textual cues and quality content—and it will reward you in kind with increased reach.

Optimize around these core ranking factors, put our tips to action, and watch your views and likes take off faster than a hot new dance trend.

Want an easy way to manage TikTok alongside all your other social profiles? Sprout’s TikTok integration can help you analyze performance, schedule posts, manage comments and more from a single dashboard.

The post How the TikTok algorithm works in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Without a deep understanding of their audience, even the most seasoned marketers, at times, find themselves in a cycle of guesswork and reactive strategies. The risk isn’t just a misalignment with customer expectations but also the missed opportunity to cultivate brand loyalty and advocacy.

Social listening plays a vital role in this area. Tapping into social media conversations points to customer insights that go beyond surface-level metrics and unearth the real needs, desires and pain points of your audience. And when you apply this knowledge, you turn customers into fans and fans into vocal advocates.

In this article, we explain how you can use social listening to increase customer advocacy and, in doing so, level up your brand.

What social listening can tell you about your customers (present and future)

Mining through social listening insights pinpoints tangible ways to improve the customer experience and create tailored marketing strategies.

Here’s how.

Social listening decodes the nuanced language of your customers and reveals what delights, frustrates and motivates them. It also captures real-time, unfiltered perspectives on your brand, the wider industry and competitors. This qualitative social data reveals customer sentiments, preferences and experiences.

Applying these insights impacts your business strategy in two ways:

1. It helps you earn more customers

Earning new customers involves understanding and responding to their needs. Sentiment analysis and trend forecasting from social listening unlocks the potential to not only meet these needs but to anticipate them by helping you:

• Understand consumer preferences: Granular insights into customer behavior patterns and psychographics reveal customer preferences. Coffee brand Dutch Bros, for example, employed a clever way to ask customers what their favorite product was. The brand can use the responses to highlight popular products in their promotions or develop new variations to meet emerging tastes.

• Spot market opportunities: Feedback about desired products or services, like location requests, unveils new market opportunities and guides expansion strategies. For example, a customer who participated in the Dutch Bros’ conversation complained about the brand not being present in Michigan. If other customers share the sentiment, it gives the brand ideas on where to potentially expand next.

• Identify trends: Social listening pinpoints changing preferences and emerging trends. Say Dutch Bros notices an uptick in conversations around sustainability where customers are concerned about how their coffee is sourced and its impact on the environment. This insight can steer future product development or marketing strategies.

2. You create loyalty from the start

Once you attract new customers, the next step is to increase retention and loyalty. Social listening is transformative here as it creates a strong foundation for long-term customer relationships. It does so by helping you:

• Cultivate brand advocates: Engaging with users who already show a positive inclination highlights potential players for customer advocacy. If Dutch Bros notices a customer who frequently mentions their coffee in a positive light, the brand can engage these advocates with targeted outreach. They can invite them to share their experiences or offer exclusive previews of new products to increase brand loyalty and reach.
• Engage in proactive product development: Anticipating and addressing future market demands based on social listening insights improves loyalty with existing customers. Dutch Coffee Bros may notice a growing interest in unique flavor profiles and can use this data to innovate their product line and build a strong connection with existing and potential new market segments.

This way, social listening can increase customer advocacy by helping you meet new customer needs and build enduring loyalty from the outset.

What is customer advocacy?

Customer advocacy nurtures satisfied customers into trusted champions who voluntarily promote and support a brand. This is helpful because people trust people more than traditional, self-centered advertising. When a friend raves about a new skincare product or a family member recommends a car mechanic, we listen.

The 2023 Sprout Social Index™ also indicates a customer desire for more authentic, non-promotional content from brands. And because customer and brand advocacy are built on relatable stories, inspiring customers to share their own stories and genuine experiences, they further build brand trust.

For example, Brittany Joiner, a long-time user of Trello, is also a customer advocate who’s turned into a natural influencer for the brand. Her YouTube channel and newsletter provide tips on how to use the tool. And now, Trello frequently collaborates with her to create content for their brand channels too.

This is a powerful recommendation for Trello because it’s a personal endorsement. Customer advocates like Brittany use their social platforms to provide insights, share experiences and highlight the brand’s strengths in a way that feels real and relatable.

Customer advocates also understand the nuances and specific needs that resonate with your customer base. They’re the most authentic influencers you can find—they already know the ins and outs of your products and services and have a genuine relationship with your brand.

This approach creates a level of connection and trust that traditional marketing methods can’t easily replicate.

How social listening turns loyal customers into advocates

Actionable responses to what you hear on the social media grapevine inspire loyal customers to advocate for your brand.

Suppose Microsoft notices a trend in complaints about Outlook’s new font. Social listening can help them learn if it’s an isolated post or requires deeper investigation.

Microsoft can respond and develop comprehensive, interactive digital guides based on these insights to make it easier for all users to navigate the change. This proactive approach does two things: it solves the problem for current (and future) users and demonstrates that Microsoft values user feedback.

Apart from using social listening to increase customer advocacy with product training and helpful documentation, brands can also use social listening for product suggestions and improvements.

For example, productivity and note-taking app Notion’s new Calendar feature faced user access issues due to authorization errors.

Tuning into the social media conversation helped Notion act on customer feedback and work on their product issues. This kind of responsiveness can transform a regular customer into a brand champion.

When customers see their feedback leading to tangible changes, it builds trust and ownership in the brand’s evolution and drives brand advocacy.

5 ways to improve your social listening and foster customer advocacy

Social listening isn’t just about tracking hashtags or counting likes. It’s a strategic tool that changes how you connect with your customers. To find the best insights, you need to implement social listening strategically, though. So here are five ways to improve your social listening to increase customer advocacy.

Set a regular cadence to explore social listening

Regularly tuning into social media conversations ensures you’re always in the loop with what your audience is saying. Do this in two ways:

• First, teams should mark their calendars to set up a regular cadence for consistent social listening sessions. This kind of regular listening allows you to spot trends, understand shifts in customer sentiment and also predict future needs.
• Second, plan to increase the frequency of your social listening during key moments for your brand. For example, if you’re launching a new product, ramp up your social listening and broaden your searches to capture more of the industry conversation beyond just your tagged brand mentions. Doing so will help you catch immediate reactions, see mentions you aren’t tagged in and address any concerns quickly. Looking at the industry more broadly also helps you gauge overall brand awareness and perception.

This proactive approach during high-stakes periods shows you’re not just seeking feedback but are committed to making your customer experience as positive as possible. It’s this kind of attentiveness that ensures social listening increases customer advocacy and uncovers opportunities to convert satisfied customers into passionate advocates.

Jump into industry conversations proactively

Participate in industry conversations on platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter) and Reddit to stay in tune with key demographics. Reddit, in particular, is especially valuable for unfiltered, candid feedback.

Industry intelligence gives you a window into your audience’s core preferences and perceptions. It’s a direct insight into what makes them tick and answers three critical questions, which are:

• How can you keep a pulse on your key demographics to help craft your messages?
• How do you find the influencers in your industry to help you broadcast your messages?
• How can you figure out the best products and content to create and share?

Here’s a real-life social media listening example from our X account. A user asked for alternatives to Buffer and another user weighed in, praising Sprout Social. Our team joined the conversation by thanking the advocate and offering the inquiring user a chance to try Sprout for free for 30 days.

This is proactive social listening in action. It reveals what customers appreciate about our product. It can also help us identify a customer advocate who could potentially be a nano-influencer. For example, this customer already uses our product (and loves it) and has a following on X, too.

Listening enables you to connect with people who have a relationship with your brand and already have an active and engaged audience.

Create reports to surface findings to the company

Creating reports to communicate social’s impact connects conversational data to your overarching business strategy.

The 2023 State of Social Media from Sprout highlights that about 3 in 4 business leaders find it challenging to see how social media impacts the bottom line. Targeted and concise reporting can make this connection crystal clear.

The crux is to link social media outcomes with key business goals such as increasing brand awareness or improving customer satisfaction. Next, use a mix of quantitative and qualitative social media metrics like engagement rate, share of voice or customer sentiment trends to understand social’s impact.

Social listening tools like Sprout consolidate listening data from multiple sources, making it easier to present a comprehensive picture to your leaders.

Suppose the Sentiment Summary on your Listening dashboard highlights an increase in negative sentiment following a product release or brand campaign. You can dial in further to pinpoint what’s causing the decrease, viewing words and phrases that continue to pop up in conversations with the Word Cloud feature.

Analyze recurring themes or keywords (like matcha in the above image) and dig into brand and industry conversations. Then, you can learn what’s causing the recent uptick in negative sentiment. Now, armed with both data and context, create a targeted report for your company leaders.

Thus, when you connect business goals to social data, you demonstrate the tangible value of how social listening impacts your company and customers. This, in turn, translates into building a case for further investment in social to keep these vital brand conversations going and turn more customers into advocates.

Work cross-departmentally to come up with new listening topics

Social listening isn’t just limited to what people say about your brand and product (that’s brand intelligence)—it also includes industry and competitive intelligence, which is gold for other departments.

It provides a treasure trove of info for marketing, customer support, sales, research and development, product packaging, human resources and public relations.

Here’s how you can encourage cross-departmental collaboration:

• Encourage each department to contribute unique data sources—like customer service logs, sales data or market research—to enrich social listening insights.
• Schedule consistent meetings with relevant departments to share insights, brainstorm and identify common themes.
• Establish a process where findings from social listening are regularly fed back into each department.

Then, plug these keywords into Sprout’s Query Builder to get alerts whenever someone mentions these topics on social media.

Setting up targeted alerts with insights from across the business transforms social media from a mere communication channel into a business tool that builds stronger customer relationships.

Conduct competitive benchmarking

Conduct competitive benchmarking to get deep insights into industry best practices, audience resonance and strategic adjustments to differentiate your brand. Begin by gathering conducting competitive intelligence because it answers three key questions:

• Who your biggest competitors on social media are and how much of the message you own
• How your competitors’ social followers feel about them and how you can use that data
• What kinds of campaigns and content strategies do your competitors use and how you can differentiate yourself

Identify top trends, topics and posts in your industry with Sprout’s Listening insights and filter them by competitor, content type, message type and sentiment. As you listen to the sentiments expressed about your competitors, identify if customers are complaining about certain competitor features and position your brand as a solution to these pain points.

But it’s not just about capitalizing on your competitors’ weaknesses. Understanding their strengths gives you a chance to improve the customer experience too.

In a recent webinar hosted in The Arboretum, Sprout’s virtual community for marketing professionals, we discussed how to leverage conversations for connection and conversion. The webinar highlighted a case study where a financial brand lagged behind competitors in overdraft protection. Analysis revealed that 80% of negative feedback was due to a lack of communication about overdraft unavailability during these downtimes.

This insight led to a strategic shift: the brand developed a superior overdraft program with extended grace periods and coverage during downtimes, outperforming competitors’ offerings.

A proactive approach not only differentiated them tactically but also attracted customers from competitors, significantly enhancing their market position. Social listening was vital to identifying specific customer complaints and directly addressing them.

The brand not only resolves immediate issues but also shows a commitment to customer satisfaction. This attentive approach converts frustrated customers into loyal advocates who feel valued and heard and are more likely to share their positive experiences with others.

Amplify customer advocacy through attentive listening

The best way to build a relationship is by showing you listen and you care. Social listening increases customer advocacy by bringing your ears closer to the heartbeat of your customers. Actively participating in conversations, acknowledging concerns and celebrating successes alongside your customers paves the way for genuine connections and turns casual followers into committed brand advocates.

Convert customer conversation into your brand’s superpower. Check out our social listening guide to understand the nuances of customer sentiment and respond in a way that resonates.

The post 5 ways social media listening increases customer advocacy appeared first on Sprout Social.

Earning billions of daily views and video searches, YouTube’s popularity speaks for itself.

And like any other type of social media engagement, competition on YouTube is fierce.

For brands big and small, growing a channel and dedicated audience is no small feat. Especially when performance is tied to the ever-changing YouTube algorithm.

The good news is that there are ways to increase your reach and move your video metrics in the right direction.

Below we explain how YouTube engagement is calculated, plus we provide 10 ways to increase your YouTube engagement rate.

• What is YouTube engagement?
• How to calculate your YouTube engagement rate
• 10 tips to improve your YouTube engagement rate
• Are you taking steps to increase your YouTube engagement rate?

What is YouTube engagement?

YouTube engagement refers to the level of activity associated with your channel and videos. This activity includes views, shares, “Likes,” comments and new subscribers. 

YouTube’s native analytics provide metrics to help channels understand how engaged your audience is. From there, you can draw insights to boost engagement. For example, increasing YouTube engagement starts by identifying trends such as the following:

• Which videos are retaining the most viewers?
• Where do most of a video’s views come from (ex: YouTube search vs. suggested videos)?
• Which videos yield the most subscribers?
• Which videos have the longest video duration?
• Which videos earning the most comments or likes?

Leveraging insights from YouTube analytics can uncover ways to optimize your content and channel’s for further engaging your target audience.  Below is a snapshot of how the platform analyzes unique viewer and engagement for any given video:

You can gather insights around YouTube engagement on both a video and channel-wide basis. You can keep a pulse on your top-performing content on your YouTube Studio dashboard.

Meanwhile, individual videos can be analyzed further via “Reach, “Engagement” and “Audience.”

Both big-picture and granular data points can clue you in on what videos are doing well. Also, which fell flat and the sorts of content your audience actually wants to see.

What factors impact your YouTube engagement rate?

Like any social algorithm, YouTube’s algorithm ranks content based on a variety of factors. One of these factors is the level of engagement of a video. A video with a higher YouTube engagement rate will likely rank higher on YouTube compared to other videos targeting the same demographic or audience with a lower engagement rate.

Some factors that contribute to a YouTube video’s level of engagement are more impactful than others. Here is a strong list for starters:

• Account activity. This includes how often you publish videos, respond to comments and engage with other YouTube accounts. Off-platform activity such as traffic from search engines or social networks can help you here, too.
• Video duration. This includes how long your videos are. Conventional wisdom says that “longer” videos (8-10+ minutes) earn more engagement. That’s because longer watch times result in more time spent on YouTube. There’s obviously exceptions to this, though.
• Video titles, descriptions and formats. These details help YouTube understand what your content actually is. Likewise, these details help ensure that your videos get suggested across other YouTube channels that serve a similar demographic or audience. This would make it more likely to attract a more highly engaged audience to your videos.
• Topics and target audience. Simply put, your YouTube engagement is largely dependent on your audience and industry. A SaaS company or niche channel will likely have a lower ceiling of potential viewership. That said, sticking to consistent themes and topics for a specific target audience will set you up for more engagement than making your channel a dumping ground for clips.

This list isn’t the be-all, end-all of YouTube engagement. How users engage with YouTube content formatting will be ever-evolving as the platform changes over time. That said, these are all factors that channels (mostly) have control over at the time of writing.

How to calculate your YouTube engagement rate

Here’s a simplified formula to figure out your engagement rate:

Total interactions / total impressions x 100 = engagement rate percentage

To calculate your YouTube engagement rate, start with your total video interactions. Interactions include views, shares, “Dislikes,” “Likes,” comments, new subscribers, and lost subscribers. If those are too many metrics to count to be relevant to the goals of your YouTube channel, it’s customary to narrow down your interactions to just “Likes,” comments, and shares. These three metrics are considered to be the most valuable metrics to determine engagement on YouTube.

Second, you’ll want to take your total number of interactions and divide it by your total impressions. Google tells us that “Impressions are counted if the thumbnail is shown for more than 1 second and at least 50% of the thumbnail is visible on the screen.”

You can find impressions in the “Reach” tab in YouTube analytics. Lastly, take the total video interactions divided by the total impressions and multiply that total by 100 to get your engagement rate percentage.

10 tips to improve your YouTube engagement rate

Let’s be super clear: there is no secret to succeeding on YouTube.

That said, there are common qualities between the top-performing channels and videos. While you can’t control the algorithm, you can tailor your content for more reach and views.

Below we dig into actionable ways to improve your YouTube engagement rate. These tips are based on recent trends, YouTube’s own best practices and what we’ve seen firsthand.

1. Prioritize platform and community engagement

Marketers love to debate YouTube’s status as a social network.

But the platforms’ ongoing Community features signal how the platform is getting more “social.”

Like any social app, interactions go hand in hand with reach and engagement. This includes:

• Responding to comments
• Engaging with other channels and users (via comments and “Likes”)
• Asking questions of your audience (in your video descriptions or content itself)

Consider that YouTube puts recent comments front-and-center in your analytics dashboard. The platform explicitly encourages timely responses and interactions. In YouTube Studio, you can actually reply to all of your unacknowledged comments without leaving the page.

If nothing else, posting updates via the Community tab ensures that more people see your videos. These posts can serve as a friendly nudge to your subscribers who’d otherwise miss your latest upload.

2. Promote your YouTube content across multiple channels

Content distribution is all the rage right now.

And rightfully so given the legwork it takes to create a YouTube video.

Reposting and cross-promoting your YouTube presence is a smart move. You might be surprised at which social networks or marketing channels result in more eyes on your content.

For example, consider the following ways to funnel more YouTube engagement to your channel:

• Embed videos on your website (via your homepage, landing pages or blog)
• Include a link to your YouTube channel in your Linktree or social bios
• Cross-posting YouTube links on platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn or Pinterest

YouTube actually keeps track of your off-platform traffic in the “External sites or apps” report in every video. Think of this as a sort of stripped down version of a Google Analytics report.

This report can highlight opportunities to drive YouTube engagement through other channels. Likewise, you can assess whether your YouTube SEO is on point (but more on that later).

3. Create more YouTube Shorts content

The fact that YouTube Shorts is amassing tens of billions of views daily on their own is staggering.

Likewise, it’s all the more reason to experiment with short-form content. Shorts represent YouTube’s response to TikTok and the popularity of “the endless scroll” when it comes to content.

Beyond the potential for engagement, Shorts serve as a way to organize your channel. That is, you can separate your long-form content on your main channel and bite-sized clips.

While this doesn’t guarantee YouTube engagement by default, it does provide more chances to get picked up by the algorithm. Especially YouTube really seems to be favoring Shorts right now.

If you’re new to Shorts, consider the following to kickstart your presence there:

• Recut long-form videos into short-form content
• Cross-post vertical video content such as TikToks or Instagram Reels
• Experiment with smartphone-only video ideas with Shorts

And hey, that last point leads us to our next tip.

4. Experiment with new video ideas

You’ll never know what actually drives engagement on YouTube until you test for yourself.

There’s no shortage of video ideas to fill your content calendar. If you’re in a creative rut or realize that your current video formats aren’t working, try something new. For example:

• “Versus” content (ex: comparing products, methods to do a task)
• How-to content and tutorials
• Review and reaction-style content

All of the above are proven formats that offer a lot of creative freedom. Not to mention they’re like candy to both the YouTube algorithm and Google.

Channels like Pianote publish a wide variety of content that fits into a few specific buckets. For example, they create a combination of lesson videos and gear videos targeting beginner pianists. Needless to say, they’ve found a winning formula primarily through educational content.

You may naturally want to avoid YouTube cliches or anything that borders on clickbait. That said, there’s a reason why many of the most popular channels follow similar formula that includes:

• Videos geared toward a specific audience (that still has appeal to general views)
• “Edutainment” that answers questions or piques viewers’ curiosity
• Longer-form videos that cover topics comprehensively

The takeaway here is to be open-minded to new ideas and test formats for yourself.

5. Create a consistent publishing schedule

Rarely do channels grow when they post at random.

Feeding the YouTube algorithm means sticking to a consistent content calendar. This doesn’t mean sacrificing quality for quantity with your content. YouTube specifically recommends creating Shorts because of their lower time commitment and potential for scale.

For example, you might find a balance posting one “long” video alongside three Shorts weekly. What matters most is sticking to a social media content calendar that’s reasonable long-term.

While there’s a link between YouTube engagement and timing, much data is anecdotal. YouTube Studio actually provides a breakdown of when your specific viewing audience is more active on the app. This can help provide context to the best time to post based on your channel.

6. Hook viewers with creative thumbnails

Food for thought: 90% of the top-performing videos on YouTube have custom thumbnails.

Creating an “optimal” thumbnail depends largely on your content and audience. That said, there are best practices that are likewise recommended by YouTube themselves:

• Make use of colors to catch viewers’ eyes (“dynamic colors” in Google’s words)
• Use clear text that’s easy to read across multiple devices
• Feature actual people in your thumbnails to make an emotional connection with viewers

Think of your thumbnail as part of your video’s hook. Random screengrabs are rarely going to excite viewers, especially people who’ve never seen you before.

7. Be strategic with YouTube ads

This is a straightforward tip that may or may not make sense depending on your goals.

That said, running YouTube ads can be an eye-opener for the sake of getting fast data about your audience. For example, you can test different formats, messaging and keyword phrases to see what hits. This serves as a faster way to gather audience data versus waiting for it organically.

8. Take action to improve your YouTube SEO

Paying attention to your YouTube SEO is a low-hanging way to improve your engagement rate.

The platform’s status as a search engine is well-documented, especially as more and more videos pop up in Google results. The goal of YouTube SEO isn’t to spam viewers. Instead, it’s to make small tweaks to your videos to make them more viewer-friendly and easier to find.

There’s a lot that goes into YouTube SEO, but here are starters to consider:

• Your video titles (think: “How-to” content pops up in the SERPs all the time)
• Including keywords in your video descriptions
• Making use of relevant YouTube hashtags
• Pointing traffic to your video content from external sources

Like everything else related to YouTube engagement, there’s no silver bullet here. Focus on taking small steps to optimize your content and channel to see what works.

9. Use timestamps to hold your viewers’ attention

If you spend much time in YouTube Studio, you’ll notice how much viewer retention is mentioned.

This metric is key to both YouTube and its algorithm. The more time people spend watching your videos, the more you signal your content as recommend-worthy.

Increasing viewer retention doesn’t require making long-form the only part of your video marketing strategy. Small steps like adding timestamps (which in turn create “Chapters”) on your videos can do the trick.

Timestamps can help viewers zero in on the exact information that they’re looking for. Most viewers would prefer to skip lengthy intros and get straight to the “meat” of your videos. That’s how timestamps create a better viewer experience and keep viewers from bouncing early.

10. Use the right YouTube management tools

YouTube’s native tools are a treasure trove of insight about your content.

That said, consider that there are other tools that can also elevate your channel faster.

For example, Sprout’s social media management tools can help boost your YouTube presence. Here are just a handful of ways which tie back to the tips above:

• Easy cross-promote your new YouTube videos across social networks in one platform
• Discover threads and trends between top-performing videos via in-depth analytics
• Align your YouTube content with audience conversations via social listening

Are you taking steps to increase your YouTube engagement rate?

Getting consistent engagement on YouTube doesn’t happen by accident.

Doing so requires a strategy and attention to detail.

Following all of the tips above might seem daunting. The reality, though? These best practices become second nature once you see just how much they impact your engagement rate.

Looking for more insights and tips on taking your video marketing presence to the next level?

If you haven’t already, check out our YouTube strategy template to grow your channel faster!

The post Increase YouTube engagement: 10 ways that actually work appeared first on Sprout Social.