Building a social media engagement strategy: Effective tactics, essential metrics & accessibility tips

In today’s digital world, if you want to win the marketing war, you’ll have to win the social media battle. Social media platforms aren’t just blank-slate marking tools — they’re spaces for building community and connection with your target audience. The right social media engagement strategy can make or break your branding efforts, and an effective strategy starts with understanding how these platforms and algorithms work on a technical level.

With the right combination of intel and resources, brands and businesses can leverage the power of social media to grow their audiences and maximize conversions. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key metrics that drive engagement on social media platforms and explore how boosting engagement can take your marketing efforts to the next level.

What is social media engagement?

With so many different social media platforms shaping our daily lives, it’s important to understand what engagement actually looks like. Social media engagement refers to how people interact with your content. Likes, comments, shares and saves can all be considered engagement metrics, depending upon the functionality of each individual platform.

Here are some of the most common engagement actions seen across various social media platforms:

• Follows/subscriptions
• Likes, loves and other reactions
• Comments and replies
• Shares, reposts and retweets
• Saves/bookmarks
• Mentions and tags
• Link clicks (click-through rate)
• Direct messages (DMs)

Each of these actions signals that your audience is actively engaging with what you’re sharing — hence the term “engagement.” However, with so many social media platforms in play and with new ones being added to the app store every day, it is important for creators, marketers and business owners to take a tailored approach to building an audience across different platforms.

Why one-size-fits-all doesn’t work

Back in the day, a one-size-fits-all approach might have worked for burgeoning content creators. However, the current social media landscape has resulted in an increased need for taking a platform-specific approach to marketing and audience-building. That’s because individual platform boasts its own unique algorithm that prioritizes different factors when deciding which kinds of profiles and content to push to its users.

For example:

• Instagram’s algorithm favors visuals and storytelling. Subsequently, research suggests that non-static content like reels, stories and carousels perform best on this platform.
• X (formerly known as Twitter) is fast-paced and conversation-driven, and trending topics tend to deliver the best engagement metrics.
• LinkedIn is a platform focused on professional thought leadership, so the platform tends to favor accounts and users that are capable of delivering high-value B2B content.
• TikTok was designed with brevity in mind and tends to prioritize short-form video content that leverages popular sounds and trends to drive engagement.

These are just a few of the platforms today’s consumers are accessing on a regular basis. That’s why it’s so crucial that brands and marketers optimize and tailor their social media approach to align with the specific values and priorities of each platform they use to reach audience members.

What are some tactics for boosting engagement?

An effective social media engagement strategy does not rely on creativity alone to cultivate an audience. Rather, a top-tier social media marketing approach combines elements of creativity, consistency and tech-savvy to maximize engagement across the board.

Here are a few proven tactics to help marketers and creators boost engagement across channels:

Use interactive content

Interactive content invites users to take a more active role in their engagement. Interactive content might look like polls and quizzes on Instagram or LinkedIn or livestreams with open chats on platforms like YouTube or TikTok.

Leverage user-generated content (UGC)

User-generated content is essentially what it sounds like: branded content created by existing audience members. UGC is a great tool for building community and enhancing the public’s trust in a brand. Sharing content created by your users builds trust and encourages others to engage. Some examples of UGC might include:

• Published customer testimonials
• Photos or videos of customers trying or reviewing a product/service
• Reposts of user content that mentions your brand
• Branded hashtags that bring more widespread attention to your product or service

Collaborate with influencers and creators

Without question, influencer marketing is the next frontier of digital branding. Partnering with influencers who already have an engaged audience can help you leverage those existing followers for increased conversion rates. In some cases, it is particularly valuable for brands to partner with micro-influencers who have a well-cultivated follower base within a particular niche because these influencers tend to have more devoted and engaged communities to begin with.

Be mindful of peak posting times

Timing can significantly improve (or impede) your social media engagement. Each platform has its own guidelines for effective posting, and there is ample research indicating the ideal times to post on each social media site. Creators should use these platform insights to help develop a posting schedule that will maximize engagement at times when users are most active.

Utilize accessibility best practices

One of the most overlooked approaches for enhancing social media engagement is harnessing the power of accessibility technology. Since multimedia content drives engagement across nearly every platform, it is important to take steps to ensure all potential audience members can engage with that content equitably. In the next section, we will explore some of the accessibility tools that can help creators expand their reach.

Captioning and transcription: Where accessibility meets engagement

While we often think of accessibility as a legal or compliance issue, accessibility best practices have the ability to improve social media engagement for users of all backgrounds and abilities. Employing accessibility tools and features can not only deliver more inclusive experiences to users with disabilities but can encourage all users to engage with content on a deeper level.

For example, research shows that videos that include closed captions enjoy longer watch times and higher rates of engagement across the board when compared to videos without closed captioning. This trend is likely the result of the ever-growing number of consumers who consume content on mobile devices and/or in public spaces where the content must stay muted.

Additionally, offering closed captioning or transcription of audio and video content can make it more readily accessible to a diverse audience including individuals with disabilities, people with specific learning needs/neurodivergent conditions and those who are consuming content in a non-native language. Accessibility solutions can provide audience members with multiple modes of engaging with content and allow information to reach people and populations who otherwise may not have been part of the target audience.

Additional considerations for boosting engagement

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. That’s why actively tracking social media engagement metrics is often the cornerstone to an effective social media strategy. Most platforms have fairly comprehensive data analytics capabilities that creators and marketers can rely on while implementing and refining their approaches.

Social media teams can set clear benchmarks for themselves based on industry standards, but it is crucial that these benchmarks are continuously re-evaluated and adjusted as necessary. Regularly reviewing engagement metrics can help social media teams develop which parts of their approach are working well and which parts may need improvement.

A/B testing can also be a valuable tool for brands and businesses attempting to gain a clearer picture of their social media strengths and weaknesses. Social media creators can test out different CTAs, post formats, accessibility features and more to identify which approaches drive the most engagement. Knowledge is power so the more information you can gather about your audience, the better!

Final thoughts

Social media works best when it tells a story. If you want your audience to put their faith in you or your brand, you should cultivate relationships by curating content that resonates with them. By using interactive content, tailoring your content and embracing accessibility, your brand can cut through the social media noise and make a lasting impression upon an audience.

If you’re interested in learning more about fostering accessibility and engagement in the digital age, reach out today to speak to a member of the Verbit team about how our tailor-made accessibility solutions can integrate seamlessly with your social media strategy to help you cultivate a more inclusive, engaging brand presence.