Want To Increase Social Media Engagement? Use A Single Inbox

One clear sign of successful online marketing is a solid engagement rate.

It’s something all businesses strive for—but how can they achieve it?

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One of the best ways to increase social media engagement is to unify all messages and comments received across platforms into a single inbox. This bird's eye view of engagement means you’ll never miss an important comment again. It reduces response time and gets your customers the help they need, faster.

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This single inbox is one part of the engagement puzzle. The other is quality content that resonates with your ideal customer.

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With both working in tandem, your brand will enjoy a strong online presence—one that encourages engagement and two-way conversation between you and your customers. 

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Read on to find out exactly how to increase social media engagement with the help of great content and social media inbox management. 

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Why social media engagement is so important

Social media engagement is so important because it tells you whether your content strategy is working or not. 

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Many brands focus purely on vanity metrics such as followers, but increasing this number means nothing if those people aren’t engaging meaningfully with your content. If they’re not saving, commenting on, and sharing your posts—or tapping through to the link in your bio to discover more about your products and services—it’s time to analyze your content. 

It shows the quality of your content

Have you ever checked your social media analytics platform and been disappointed with the results? If this sounds familiar, your content is probably to blame. 

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Poor quality content doesn’t generate high levels of social media engagement. This type of content is overly business-focused, not customer-focussed. It is poorly designed or formatted. It doesn’t provide valuable information that encourages a save or a share. It is what is known as ‘fluffy’ content. 

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High quality content is quite the opposite. It puts the customer first. It takes into account social media trends like short-form video and insightful carousel posts. It encourages a two-way conversation with the audience by including calls-to-action in captions.

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When a brand’s content isn’t up to scratch,  social media engagement suffers. That’s why it should always be the first thing you analyze when trying to improve engagement.

It is the way your audience communicates with your brand

Social media gives brands the opportunity to connect on a personal level with current and potential customers. Strong engagement is a reflection of how well that two-way dialogue is working (or not). Particularly comments and DMs, which are the gateway to conversations that brands wouldn’t usually get to have with their audience. 

With every comment, message, save, and share, brands learn more about who their customers are and what they want. This data is invaluable. Brands can use it to tweak their marketing strategy, inform other parts of the business, and even create new products and services. 

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But engagement isn’t just great for relationship-building. It’s also a surefire way to increase reach and visibility on social media platforms. For example, one of the Instagram algorithm’s key ranking factors is the relationship between two accounts. 

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If someone frequently engages with a brand’s posts, they’re more likely to see those posts in their feed. The algorithm will also push the brand’s content to the feeds of people (non-followers) who ‘look’ like that engaged user—people in a similar demographic, who like similar content. 

You can provide customer service via engagement

Last but definitely not least, social media is one of the best places to provide customer service. It’s where most people turn when they have a complaint or product issue and their expectations are high. They expect brands to respond quickly and if they don’t receive any answer at all, 81% of people won’t recommend that company to their friends. 

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On the other hand, providing rapid and helpful social media customer service publicly is a great way to increase customer loyalty. 

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Customers spend 20-40% more with companies that respond to customer service requests on social media. Brands that don’t respond to customers on social channels have a 15% higher churn rate than businesses that do.

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Spotify shows brands how it's done with fast and tailored customer service on Twitter. They have a dedicated channel—@SpotifyCares—where they respond to customer queries with links to helpful resources. But even though this is their customer support channel, they don’t forget their brand personality. In this example, Spotify ends the conversation with a link to an appropriate track that shows the customer they actually care. 

How to measure social media engagement

Now you know how important social media engagement is, you might be wondering how you can measure it. 

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Here are some of the key metrics to use to monitor engagement:

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• Likes 
• Comments
• Saves
• Shares / Reposts / Retweets 
• Website Taps / Link Clicks

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Each of these metrics means something different. For example, an educational carousel or video may generate more saves than any other metric because it’s helpful. People save it so that they can come back and reference it later. That post may not generate many other metrics (like comments or shares, for example) but that’s ok. The post is still very engaging. 

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It’s important to understand the purpose of each post when planning your content and what metric(s) you hope to generate. That way, when you come to check your analytics each month, you have something to measure against. You’re not looking at your social media analytics and scratching your head, confused. 

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As well as individual metrics, you might also want to understand your social media engagement rate as a whole. Usually this is something you’d have to figure out manually, but a social media analytics tool like Iconosquare calculates this for you.  

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Iconosquare includes ‘Engagement on reach’ data within its platform.  

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Engagement on reach = sum of [likes, comments + saves] on your post divided by the reach number at the time of the post.

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For example, if you have 100 followers and your post got 30 likes, but 150 people have actually seen it, your traditional engagement rate would be 30%. However, your engagement on reach would be 20%. The latter is more accurate if you want to determine the success of your post beyond vanity metrics.

How to create content that boosts engagement

Before you streamline your social media communications and begin to improve engagement, first you need to know what type of content stands the best chance of success online.

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Because sharing mostly product photos or promotional, brand-focussed content won’t boost social media engagement. What will is content that helps people or resonates with them in some way e.g. makes them laugh or aligns to their values and beliefs. 

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So when you’re planning next month’s content, ask yourself: what value can we provide our ideal customer? How can we teach them, inspire them, and connect to them?

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Here are 4 examples of engaging social media content and the metric (save, share, comment, follow, website tap) they’re most likely to achieve. 

1. Educational carousel or video

Metric: Saves/Follows

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A carousel like this one from ethical fashion app Good On You will drive saves (and potentially follows, too) because it’s packed full of useful information. It’s a preview of a report the brand created—i.e. it includes data that cannot be easily Googled. This is what turns a mundane ‘fluffy’ carousel that people ignore into a post that is saved so many times it makes it to the Explore page.

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Here’s an example of a saveable educational Instagram Reel from kitchen brand Tom Howley Kitchens. Pro tip: ‘How To’ posts and videos make very engaging content. 

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2. Relatable video

Metric: Shares/Comments

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One of the best ways to make engaging content is to think about the experiences and thoughts your ideal customer has on a regular basis. 

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Hubspot is great at getting inside the mind of their ideal customers. Here’s one example—‘POV: Millennials finding out their boss has Good Boss Energy’—and another—‘OOTD: Day 765 of Corporate Work from Home’. Their playfulness and relatability drives thousands of views and hundreds of comments across Hubspot’s content.

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3. Photo or video featuring real people

Metric: Comments

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Content that features real people is an easy way to generate more comments. It humanizes a brand and encourages people on the other side of the screen to step outside of their comfort zone and engage. 

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In this video, Calendly Employer Brand Lead, Katie, takes us with her as she makes a cocktail and prepares for Galendly Happy Hour. Less polished ‘behind-the-scenes’ content like this builds trust between brand and follower, and satisfies people’s curiosity to know what goes on inside a company.

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4. Polarizing graphic

Metric: Comments/Follows

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It can feel a little uncomfortable to make a stand on social media, but this type of content is brilliant at driving social media engagement.

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Take the detergent brand, smol. They created this post calling out Persil for their lack of sustainability and disappointing recycling targets. In doing so, they put a stake in the ground for what they believe in and how they’re different from competitors. 

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People who share the same beliefs as smol will align strongly to this type of content and, if they’re not already, hit that ‘follow’ button. Sure, it might turn some people off, but that’s ok. That’s the point of polarizing content—to attract more of the right kind of people and repel those who would never have purchased anyway. 

How to manage social media engagement with a single inbox

Once you start creating and posting engaging content, you’ll notice a steady increase in not just followers, likes, shares, and saves, but also comments, mentions and direct messages.

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It’s important that you have a way to manage this increase in engagement. Slow response times and missed comments risk damaging your reputation and the relationship you have with potential customers. 

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But how can you keep on top of multiple Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube channels and more without letting any comments or messages slip through the net?

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With a single inbox.

What is a single inbox?

A unified social inbox or ‘single inbox’ allows you to manage all user engagement across multiple platforms through a social media engagement tool like Juphy.

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Juphy is an all-in-one-platform that captures every engagement into a single dashboard and saves brands time switching between different platforms. It provides custom reports to track the performance of the social media team and see how many conversations were made within a specific time period, the average response time and what improvements can be made moving forwards.

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With better social media inbox management, you can deliver faster customer service and show your buyers that you really care.

Define your brand voice

To get the most out of a shared social inbox, make sure you’ve clearly defined your brand voice. 

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This consistency across your communications will build followers, establish trust and increase social media engagement. It will also make it really easy for anyone in your team to respond effectively to customer questions. They will know the phrases to use (and those to avoid) to maintain a distinct brand voice that stands out from the crowd. 

Let social media interactions inform your content

A single social media inbox won’t just improve your team’s productivity and social media customer service. It will also improve your content.

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That’s because having oversight of all customer communication gives brands a clear understanding of what matters most to their audience. Every comment, message, review and mention is valuable data that can be used alongside social media analytics (saves, shares, and website taps, etc.) to inform future content. The kind of content that really resonates with people and exceeds marketing goals. 

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But doing this kind of content analysis manually is extremely time-consuming. 

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Using tools like Juphy, for social media engagement management, and Iconosquare, for social media analytics and content scheduling, you can maximize productivity and increase performance.

Track and monitor brand mentions 

Social monitoring is another benefit of using a social media engagement tool like Juphy. 

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You can set up specific keywords you want to track and get alerted anytime they’re used online. For example, if someone asks a question about one of your products, an instant notification will enable a member of your team to provide the right answer instead of someone else chiming in with damaging or unhelpful information. 

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If any complaints or poor reviews are written about your brand, you can take immediate action. Fast responses and supportive customer service works wonders for brand perception.

Conclusion

If increasing social media engagement is your goal for 2023, accelerate your success with a combination of tools designed to optimize your time, your productivity, and your results.

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With social media analytics and a shared single inbox, you’ll be empowered to create the type of content your audience loves and engage with them in a timely, consistent, and meaningful way. 

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