Three ways to improve your social media engagement (2024)

As a small business, having a strong social media presence is crucial. But with so much competition for attention, you need to know how to stand out and engage with people in a meaningful way.

If you want to boost your social media engagement in 2024, there are a few key ways to increase your reach and connect with your audience on a deeper level.

Here, social media expert Katherine George explains how to boost your engagement across the main social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

By focusing on these three essential tactics, you can up your social media game and make a lasting impression on your followers.

How to engage your audience on social media in 2024

Get on board with influencer marketing

I know what you're thinking:

"We used influencers, we didn't really get the results we wanted, we're not really sure why this is important for us!"

But social media influencers are becoming more and more vital. And we're expecting to see more influencer marketing in 2024 for a range of reasons.

What is influencer marketing?

It's a type of social media that promotes and endorses products via mentions from influencers. An influencer is a person who has a dedicated social following and is an expert in their field. They don't have to be celebrities – they can be ordinary people talking about themselves and sharing the ins and outs of their everyday life.

Influencer marketing is really successful, and it's due to the trust that builds between the content creator and their audience. As brands and businesses, what you're doing is leveraging someone else's trust and expertise and getting to reach their audience.

Using influencers is essentially social proof. And social proof is what we all want, and the thing we're looking for in 2024.

Social proof

Marketing is changing. People are fed up of businesses saying how great they are. They want other people to know it and say it. That's known as social proof.

Social proof gives users and potential customers real feedback. It builds trust and spikes engagement.

There's a real psychology behind influencer marketing, because when we share real people doing real things in our feed, the other real people in our audience get really excited.

They share the content, they engage with it, their friends engage with it. And due to the psychology of friendships and why social media works so well, that means they share their content with people who are likely to buy from you at some stage.

User-generated content

The idea is to use influencers to get some user-generated content (UGC). UGC is one of the best ways to increase engagement.

If you feel your audience is very quiet or very shy, you might be wondering how you'll get UGC from them. This is what you do: You bring in your influencers or your brand ambassadors and ask them to share real, genuine content.

How do you do it? Remember that small is powerful, which means seeking out nano-influencers and micro-influencers. At this point, you shouldn't care about the size of someone's following.

As 2024 is the year of genuine authenticity, you should look to work with people who have 1,000 or a few thousand followers. Find them, follow them and approach them. They'll be flattered that you want to work with them.

Bring them on board and ask them to be authentic. Get them to share their real opinions on your product, and create real content that promotes it. Give them full creative control.

When you're picking which influencers you might want to work with, go for your sanity audience. Everyone's getting fed up of seeing vanity influencers. People are looking for real connections. So make sure your influencers reflect your sanity audience – the people who actually buy from you, or the people you hope will buy from you in the future.

Read more:

• A guide to using social media influencers to promote your business

Watch this webinar with Katherine to learn what engagement methods work well on the main social media networks:

Understand and embrace the latest trends

In the social media world, trend forecasting can be tricky because social media changes so often and so quickly. But there are a few trends for 2024 that are worth keeping an eye out for. The best businesses will be trying to make the most of them.

The return of longer-form content

In social media terms, "longer-form" means longer than 30 seconds. This could be tutorials, guides, insight into your business or your product or service.

So although it's fine to still make those five-second or 10-second videos, when planning your video marketing, think longer than 30 seconds.

A change in product placement

Expect to see more videos in which people talk about the benefits of a product rather than the product itself. For example, you might see a video tutorial of someone using a base foundation to do their make-up, but without mentioning the product they're using. Instead, the audience has to ask.

This is engagement baiting. Leaving out vital information in the story, so people have to ask. You could use this for services as well – video yourself doing the service, but without telling people exactly what it is. The audience becomes intrigued, and you're leveraging the psychology behind incomplete content.

The audience wants to find out and isn't going to be able to forget until they know the answer. It's clever product placement, but without the product.

The nostalgia craze will continue

We're seeing the next generation coming up wearing clothes people wore in the 90s. The nostalgia trend is only increasing, so as a business, you need to think how you can take advantage of it.

But have some real fun with it. Don't be afraid to look and see how other people are doing it. It could be a simple nod to the trend, like buying a proper film camera and uploading pictures of your content using that.

Stories will start everywhere except at the beginning

There's nothing more engaging than a story that starts at the end, because you need to find out the rest of it. Again, it's about using those psychological cues of incomplete content and hooking people in.

Remember, an engagement is a video view or someone reading the content. So when you're telling stories as part of your social media marketing, start them anywhere except at the beginning.

Read more:

• Are these social media marketing trends part of your strategy?

Talk directly to your customers

Marketing has always been a one-to-one conversation. Yes, you're talking to hundreds of thousands of people at once, but really it's one to one. So, this is the plan for 2024 – having those personal, direct conversations with your audience.

Talk to them, ask how they are, check in with them. Make your marketing a FaceTime conversation. Literally, have a FaceTime with yourself on video, but like you're talking to a friend. Break down the fourth wall, like you would in acting, for one-to-one engagement.

Encourage real feedback and user-generated content. Every time someone comments on something you do, thank them, like the comment, develop the conversation. These people know everything about your customer journey, they've been through it. And the more you can encourage repeat business, the better it'll be for you.

Golden rules for social media engagement in 2024

• Show up.

• Focus on sanity over vanity. Reach is pointless. There is no point working really hard and pulling your engagement up really high if you don't get any sales.

• 2024 is the year of doing you. So focus on what works for you and your audience and keep doing it. If you're not sure what that is, test, be brave, have some fun, and you will find your groove.

• Be authentic, be a real person.

• Remember why you are using social. You're not on it just to grow massive followings. Unless you're an influencer, you're there to make sales. So make sure you're encouraging that within your content.

Final words of wisdom

It's really important to remember that you can't do all of the social media channels brilliantly. It's a waste of time, money and resources.

Instead, make 2024 the year you'll focus your efforts on where your customers are hanging out. Show up, be authentic and embrace the trends.

And you're going to have a one-to-one personal conversation with them. Because that will really bring your engagement forward. Your audiences are there waiting to talk to you. You just need to open the door to them.

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Relevant resources

• Boost your social media engagement with these clever hacks [WEBINAR]

• Seven steps to better customer engagement

• Lunch and Learn: Weaving stories into branding for customer engagement