So… A good number of people like or follow your social media pages, but day after day, you make posts that just sort of sit there and then fade away into obscurity. Cue the sound of crickets chirping. Your connections just aren’t liking or favoriting your posts, clicking their links, sharing them, or commenting on them.
This can make it all seem pointless. It can make you doubt that there’s really any benefit to social media marketing.
But there’s probably a good explanation for the lack of interest you’re seeing. And when you figure it out, you can fix it. So read over the typical reasons brands don’t get engagement on social media and make an honest appraisal of your strategy. More than one reason may apply. Once you begin to address them, it should gradually turn things around.
Likely Explanations for Low Social Media Engagement
- Your posts are too self-promotional. This is one of the biggest social media marketing mistakes. Sure, occasional self-promotion is expected and accepted, but if your posts are just nonstop ads for your products or services, few connections—if any—will care.
- You’ve built an irrelevant or uninvested audience. If you’ve paid for connections, mass-followed tons of other accounts to get reciprocal follows, or otherwise taken shortcuts to build your social media network, your numbers are probably filled with people who aren’t there because they actually want to be. And they don’t pay attention or engage.
- Your posts don’t speak to your audience’s interests. People connect with your accounts to access valuable information and content that exists where your industry and their personal interests intersect. If you’re not posting things that hit that mark, they won’t click through, like, favorite, share, comment on, or engage in any other way with the posts.
- Your posts aren’t of high quality. If you share poorly written or produced posts and content, unreliable sources, or other stuff that isn’t pleasant to click through to or credible, people aren’t going to engage with it.
- You aren’t using a particular site right. All social media sites are not the same, nor do people behave the same on them or want the same things on them all. For example, Instagram and Pinterest are highly visual sites, where it’s all about the images. LinkedIn is a professional network, and its users are in a business frame of mind. Learn about the best practices and faux pas associated with each site your brand uses.
- Your posts don’t have eye-catching images. Posts with quality images get much more engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and all the other social media sites out there. If something you’re sharing doesn’t load with an image, add one (that’s free for public use or that you’ve obtained permission to use).
- You post too much (or not enough). Everyone has a theory on how often brands should post on any given social media site. What the right number is, nobody can say for sure. But if you post constantly throughout the day, people are likely to start tuning you out, and maybe even hiding your posts. And if you barely ever post—maybe only once every week or two—odds are very few people will ever notice.
- You have no personality. Social media users are there to be social. They don’t want sterile, boring corporate-speak. They want to be intrigued, entertained, amused, maybe even provoked. Your brand personality should carry over into your social media marketing. But even if it’s serious, you should still sound like a real human. People like to engage with other people.
Now, dig a little deeper into this topic by clicking over to our article on how to increase engagement on Facebook. Most of what’s in it applies generally to all the social media sites.
