Written by Ben Strauss

When measuring the success of your digital marketing campaign on social media, do you prefer to track the size of your audience (the number of followers you have) or do you place more value in the engagement you get from your audience (likes, comments, and shares of your posts)?

There’s no wrong answer, unless you choose neither. Engagement and audience are both incredibly important metrics for determining the success of your digital marketing campaigns.

Here are a few ways that you can increase the size and engagement of your audience with your content!  

How to Get More Engagement From Your Audience

  • Conduct polls and surveys on your social media pages. The ability to cast a vote and see the results can make these kinds of posts much more exciting for your users, leading to higher engagement.
  • Create quizzes. This can be a bit time consuming, but the results can be staggeringly impressive. One needs look no further than BuzzFeed to understand how an incredibly simple and silly quiz can bring in huge crowds. Give the people what they want!
  • Host contests. Not only does this allow your users to engage with you (given the promise of free stuff, of course), but it is likely that your post will also be shared widely outside of your main followers, effectively growing your audience as well!

How to Grow Your Audience

  • Tag relevant users in your posts and use appropriate hashtags.
  • Interact with relevant communities. Seek our communities where like-minded people gather and share your message with them.
  • Paid social ads and boosted posts are both great ways to greatly increase the reach of your content, and they’re moving towards becoming the standard. Paid reach completely dwarfs organic reach—it is foolish to ignore this fact.
  • Have you tried out the preferred audience feature on Facebook? You can use it to get the word out to audiences that have specific interests that are relevant to your content.

What are some of your tips for increasing engagement and reaching a broader audience?