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5 Unusual Ways to Increase Social Media Engagement

This article is more than 8 years old.

We all know creating quality content is the top strategy for increasing social media engagement. Any article tackling the issue of social media engagement will tell you to regularly post useful content that meets the needs and interests of your audience.

But are there other strategies we could be using to increase engagement? Maybe some outside-the-box, slightly unusual tactics or techniques?

This post will walk you through five strategies you may not have thought of or tried.

1. Tweetcast using Meerkat

Have you heard of the Meerkat app? It just launched a few weeks ago, but is generating a ton of excitement in social media circles. Meerkat allows you to stream video on Twitter , as-it-happens. When you create a "meerkast", your Twitter followers can watch it live, right from within Twitter. Once the broadcast is done, the video is gone - no replays, no downloads.

Using Meerkat can help you increase engagement in a number of ways:

  • Stream product demos or launches
  • Broadcast live from industry events or conferences
  • Share breaking news as-it-happens

While Meerkat has experienced some pretty significant setbacks since its launch (Twitter has now restricted them from using its social graph), the app is continuing to take the Twittosphere by storm.

2. Use Facebook groups to connect your fans with one another

Chris Brogan's private Facebook group. "The Secret Team"

In the old days of Facebook, groups were the medium businesses used to operate on the platform. Once Facebook created Pages, groups were largely forgotten - at least by businesses.

Facebook groups are still very much alive and well among consumers, however, and brands should be excited about using them to increase engagement. Groups function much like online discussion boards or forums, giving each member an equal voice in the conversation. While Page admins can broadcast a message, group admins act more as moderators to conversations started by members (with the added advantage of being able to pin important posts to the top of the group).

The advantage of groups to brands include:

  • Finding out what your target market has to say
  • Participate in conversations as a regular person - not as a nameless, faceless brand
  • Offer benefits or discounts to group members as a way to drive sales
  • Promote or test content or products

3. Surprise your customers

I've been using this with my latest invoicing startup Due, and with great success. Take KLM's Surprise campaign for instance...here's what they did: Through monitoring hashtags and online check-ins, KLM staff located passengers who were waiting for flights with their airline.

Through some sleuthing of their social media accounts, KLM was able to find out where these passengers were going, and what they were planning to do there. Based on this information, they purchased small but personalized gifts, and handed them out at the terminal.

For the cost of around 40 gifts, the KLM Surprise Twitter feed received a whopping 1 million views; not to mention the hundreds of thousands of views their videos have received.

Singer Taylor Swift also recently used this strategy, sending personalized Christmas gifts and handwritten cards to some lucky fans. Westjet airlines also racked up tons of views with their Christmas Miracle video a couple of years back.

4. Try posting less often

You've probably heard that posting more often typically results in increased engagement. However recent research released by Hubspot shows no correlation between the number of weekly posts and the amount of engagement.  In fact, in some cases, more posts equaled less engagement: "...[As] the average number of posts published per week decreases from the 1-10 company size group to the 11-50 group, the average number of interactions per post increases. And when posts per week increase slightly from the 11-50 group to the 51-200 group, interactions per post decrease significantly."

Image courtesy of Hubspot

Does this mean that posting less often is the key to increased engagement? Of course not. But what this research does suggest is that posting frequently isn't - at least on its own - a strong indicator of engagement. As always, your best bet is to test out a variety of frequencies to see what works best with your audience.

5. Use PostPlanner to find and post viral content

You already know that images rule on social media, and that having your stuff go viral can net you tons of engagement. This is particularly true on Facebook: Given the signifiant drop in organic reach over the past three years, Page posts typically only reach a small percentage of fans. Consistently posting viral images can mitigate this situation - as you continue to post content that gets tons of engagement, the reach and visibility of all your content increases.

The question, of course, is how does one find images and posts that are likely to go viral?

Enter PostPlanner. This tool lets you find and use images and updates that have already been proven to go viral on Facebook (you can also use their free Facebook Status Ideas Engine). This means you don't have to guess at which posts might get engagement, but instead choose posts that are relevant to your audience and that have been proven popular in the past.

Bonus Tip: Link, tag, and participate

This perhaps doesn't qualify as "unusual", but its infrequent use by business owners makes it worth adding to this list. Social networking is all about sharing, connecting, and reciprocating. In order to work the way it's supposed to, broadcasting should only be a very small part of what businesses do; instead, we should focus on connecting with our followers, and providing access to useful, relevant content.

This means linking to other sites (not just your own), tagging and @mentioning other businesses and users, and actively participating in other people's conversations. It's a sharing economy, and businesses that operate in the tiny bubble of their own website or social media accounts aren't truly participating.

Here are some strategies you should be implementing:

  • @mention your followers, complimentary businesses, or industry influencers on Twitter
  • Tag fans and other Pages on Facebook
  • Collaborate with other businesses on Pinterest with shared boards
  • Cross-promote with other brands on various networks
  • Share links to valuable content across the web, regardless of who posts it (even if it's a competitor!)

Final Thoughts

There is no magic bullet when it comes to increasing social media engagement. Showing up regularly and being an active participant and connector (not just a broadcaster) are two foundational elements of engagement; posting valuable, surprising, and viral content are the icing on the cake.

For more strategies for increasing your engagement, see my post 7 Free Ways For Boosting Your Social Media Engagement.

What would you add to this list? What unusual strategies do you use for increasing engagement on social media? Share below!