Brands succeed with customers and customer loyalty. Social media puts you where your customers are and provides you the opportunity to see the conversations surrounding your brand. This is why social media engagement is so key.

The days of consistent content keeping the audience engaged are dwindling. Audiences now want brands to engage and interact as if they are human. This is the key to building and maintaining an audience who supports your brand, product or company.

Here I share my social media engagement strategy tips to build a lasting and loyal audience on each social media channel.

Twitter

While retweets and likes are a great way to engage, we are seeing a shift from this to actual messages with personality. Replies and quoted tweets with humor, emojis and an interest in the follower helps your brand connect and engage with a potential customer or client. Hubspot research shows that 72 percent of people who complain about a product or brand on Twitter expect a reply within an hour. Implementing this type of strategy will increase your chances of converting your ideal customer to a loyal brand follower.

Instagram

Brands have taken a humanizing shift across all channels but we have seen this more in Instagram recently than any other. Commenting on a post that mentions your brand is the first step to loyalty. Comments should be more than one word or an emoji. These should be thoughtful comments that praise the customer for sharing, asking for feedback or a humorous response. We recently interacted with TopoChico on Instagram and were extremely happy to see how engaging and humorous they were in response to an Instagram Story. If someone tags your brand in an Instagram Story you will get a direct message. A simple response with the Instagram like option in messages shows you are engaged and paying attention to the customer.

Facebook

With recent algorithm changes for Facebook engagement could be the thing your strategy needs to see those dipping numbers start to trend upwards. Facebook LIVE still reins as one of the top performing types of content but the more you engage the better. Ask your audience to send their questions in the responses and reply during the LIVE. We are also seeing a trend toward Facebook bots. This helps your brand continually engage with users providing them with support and information. Are you willing to test bots for your brand?

LinkedIn

Don’t forget about LinkedIn! This social media channel deserves just as much attention as the others if not more on the engagement front. If you are personal brand this is key to your content strategy. Comment on connection’s articles, ask them their thoughts and opinions on various topics or like their posts. The more you engage with others the more willing others are to engage with you.

YouTube

And last but not least is YouTube, the channel you may not be on but should be if you care about SEO (which you should). A lot of brands’ first instinct when it comes to YouTube is to turn off comments on their videos. My advice is to embrace the haters. When you turn off comments you are disabling the ability for your loyal brand audience to defend and praise your brand and this is another opportunity to see customer feedback. Comment back and ask for people’s thoughts or thank them for sharing. It may seem simple, but a little engagement can go a long way.