How to Generate Engagement on Your Social Media Posts

If you've been posting to social regularly but haven't seen a lot of engagement—not getting a ton of likes and comments—there's a way to change that and actually generate engagement on your social posts.

In this episode, I talk about how to create more engagement on your social posts, including:

• How to change the type of posts your making
• How commenting on other posts gets you more comments
• What metrics to track so you can do more of what's working
• How to switch up the mode of the content you're posting

 Hello, and welcome to the Client Attractor Show, where we talk about concrete tactics and strategies that you can use to attract your dream clients. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, client attraction coach and author of the brand new book Client Attractor. If you've not gotten your copy yet, you can pick that up today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or clientattractorbook.com. 

In today's episode, we are going to be talking about how to generate engagement on your social media posts. What we mean by that is you're posting to social media pretty regularly, but you're not seeing a whole lot of engagement; you're not getting a lot of comments, likes, or reactions, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We're going to talk about how to fix that because, arguably, engagement tends to be almost, if not even more, important than the actual posts themselves. If you're not getting in front of your ideal clients, if they're not responding to you, that's a problem. That's a big problem that we're going to talk about how to address today. 

Now, there are four main things that I recommend looking at, usually in this order, because when you approach them in this order, you'll be able to make the least amount of adjustments necessary in order to turn that ship around to start getting engagement. The first thing that I recommend looking at and considering is changing the type of content that you post. What I mean by this is that when we're posting on social media, it's really easy to fall into the trap of only posting value posts or content that is meant to educate and inform or teach—or inspire, even—rather than content that actually starts a conversation. 

If you find that you're posting a lot of these long-form text social media posts—and they don't even have to be that long; maybe they just have the quick tips, variety—your problem might be that the content you're posting isn't actually content that's going to start a real conversation and back-and-forth with your ideal clients. If you think this might be the case, I really recommend starting to post more engagement-focused posts. For example, asking questions or using polls to somehow elicit a response from your ideal client. This is a really quick and easy fix to go from having almost no engagement to having a ton of engagement. If you're asking the right questions, if those questions are resonating with your ideal clients, then they're going to respond, and out of nowhere, you will start to see a whole lot of engagement. 

The second recommendation I have ties directly back to the title of the episode, which is how to generate engagement on your social media posts. It's not about how to get more engagements, but how to generate it. That’s because it's really important to understand that engagement creates engagement, which means to some extent, sometimes, you have to be the one to generate this engagement. What that means is that you have to go in and engage, and that, in turn, will boost your own engagement. This could look like going into Facebook groups that you're in and starting to comment and react to other people's posts in those groups. It looks like responding to comments that people make on your own posts. It looks like tagging people who you want to see the post. 

One of my content “hacks,” so to speak, is when you're writing a post, to imagine a specific person that you actually know, or a few people that you actually know, and really target it towards those few people. If those people are your ideal clients, it's not just going to resonate with them; it's going to resonate with your other ideal clients as well. When you do that, when you post something that is geared specifically towards your ideal clients, tag people in the comments that you want to see this post. 

After you make the post—you write it, you publish it— go into the comments and tag four or five people in a comment. Say, “Hey, just want to make sure y'all saw this,” or, “Thought y'all would like to see this.” The moral of the story here is really that, if you want engagement on your posts, the best thing you can do is to go engage on other people's posts, to engage on your own posts. All of those things boost the algorithm in your favor, yes, but when you, say, engage on someone else's post in a Facebook group, they're going to click through, see your name, click through to your profile, and see your posts. And that's another set of eyeballs on your content and another opportunity for someone to engage with that content. 

My third big recommendation is to track everything with your social media content. Every time you make a post, track how much engagement it gets, what the post was about, what type of post it was. You can create this in a Google sheet or something so that you can track which posts, topics, and types of posts are getting the most engagement. When you do that, when you start to gather that data, you notice what the trends are so that you can just do more of what's working. It's super simple. Literally, that's all you have to do. And if you have been posting for a while already, go back through your past, say, three or six months worth of posts and note what the post is about. What type of post is it? How much engagement, how many likes, did it get? How many comments did it get? That’ll tell you pretty easily what the trends are, and what's working and what isn't. 

And my fourth and final big recommendation for getting more engagement on your social posts is to experiment with different modes of content. What I mean by this is that most of us have a particular mode of content that we default to. That could be text, audio, video, or images. And most of us default to one of these because that's just what we're most comfortable with. For example, I have always tended to default to text, because I'm a writer at heart. I grew up a writer, I've always been a writer, and I always will be one. It's just the mode that I'm most comfortable with. And a while back, I was noticing that my content wasn't getting as much engagement as I wanted, so I started to experiment with different modes, and I found that my audience responds really well to videos—not long videos, but short, bite-sized videos. 

I found that they also responded really well to podcasts—audio like this, for example, so that's what I started doing more of. In fact, I began using the exact same content that I had posted on Facebook—long, written posts—and I just turned them into videos. I stood in front of a camera, and I delivered basically the exact same content. All I had changed was it was now a video rather than text. And my audience, my niche, responded much more to that than they did to the exact same material in text form. 

So, if you find that you have defaulted to one of these modes of content, just experiment a little bit; try switching it up and seeing how the level of engagement you're getting responds or correlates to the mode of content that you're posting. The main takeaway from this whole episode is, if you're not getting enough engagement on your social posts, then there are four things that you can really look at to start to turn that around. This means changing the type of content you post, posting more content that starts a conversation, rather than more content that just teaches or educates; increasing your own levels of engagement, to increase the levels of engagement that you get, in turn, on your posts. It means paying more attention to your metrics, tracking which posts topics and types of posts get the most engagement, and doing more of what's working. And it means experimenting with different modes, so text versus video versus audio versus images, and seeing what your niche responds to best. 

In conclusion, thank you so much for joining me for today's episode of the Client Attractor Show. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for our next episode. Take care.