Are you struggling to expand your blog’s marketing strategy into the wild world of social media?
While you can get by just fine on social media without ever showing your face or using your voice, a lot of bloggers struggle to make the transition.
Many social media platforms thrive on short-form content, and it can be difficult to condense topics into these shorter formats. That’s if you know what type of content to post at all.
In this post, we share engagement hacks for social media that are made exclusively to help bloggers get noticed by crowded algorithms.
1. Pay attention to key engagement metrics
Every social media platform has analytics you can use to track your performance and learn more about what your audience wants from you.
They may not outright calculate your engagement rate for you, but you can calculate it yourself with the following formulas:
Engagement Rate = (total number of engagements / total number of followers) x 100
and also:
Engagement Rate = (total number of engagements / total impressions or views) x 100
Your analytics will also let you know how long your viewers watch your videos for and when they’re most active. Knowing the latter metric is important for knowing when the best times to post are.
2. Use your blog metrics to understand what your audience wants
As a blogger, you have quite a few advantages on social media in comparison to influencers who are starting with nothing.
For starters, you can use your website to promote your social media profiles.
More importantly, you’re already making content in your niche, and so long as you have traffic, you have metrics you can use to understand what topics your audience is most interested in.
Use these as ideas for what topics to focus on when you get started on social media.
3. Get to know your preferred social media platforms
It’ll be hard for you to succeed on a given platform if you don’t know much about it.
This is why the best thing you can do for your social media marketing strategy is actually getting to know each platform you want to publish to.
You should also learn about the do’s and don’ts of each platform.
For example, the TikTok algorithm loves consistency. If you’re able to deliver the same type of content to your audience again and again, the algorithm will be more likely to promote you.
The Facebook algorithm hates click bait. The platform has automated systems in place to detect click and rate bait. It flags content as such, making it harder for that creator’s content to appear in users’ feeds.
4. Use a graphic design tool to create better visuals
Hiring graphic designers to create visuals is expensive, and many social media users frown upon the use of generative AI.
That’s why it may be better to use a graphic design tool like Visme, Canva and Placeit to create better visuals for videos and even entire image-based social media posts.
Most are affordable and very easy to use. They even have thousands of templates for you to get started with.
5. Be consistent, and post follow-ups
Consistency is the key to any winning social media strategy.
If you decide to publish posts on Tuesdays and Fridays at noon one week, you should publish on Tuesdays and Fridays at noon for every subsequent week.
You can also be consistent by publishing posts in the same style every week or creating a series followers can look forward to.
If you share something with your audience, be sure to post follow-ups to update them along the way.
6. Build an authentic personality for your brand
You may publish genuine content by yourself or with a small team, but at the end of the day, you are a brand.
Unfortunately, social media users aren’t interested in following brands. They want to follow real people.
This is why you should aim to be more authentic on social media by including a relatable personality in every post and creating an identifiable brand.
7. Engage with your niche on social media
As a blogger, you likely avoid supporting your competitors’ content to prevent your website from passing link juice onto them.
This doesn’t work on social media.
You’re much better off using your social media accounts to engage with your niche by liking and posting comments on content related to it and replying to comments left on your own videos.
8. Collaborate with other creators in your niche
If you really want to increase engagement on social media, collaborate with other creators in your niche.
Doing so exposes your profiles to new audiences.
Target creators with similar followings to your own, especially if you aren’t able to get in touch with larger creators.
If you’re struggling to get in touch with anyone, try using TikTok’s stitch and duet features to collaborate with others’ content in unique ways.
9. Avoid using your blog as a call to action
It’s important that you separate your business from your blog in your head.
What I mean is you might see your blog as your business, but in reality, your blog is a marketing tool for your business.
This means social media, like your blog, is another marketing tool for your business. It is not a marketing tool for your blog.
This means your social media content should start and end on social media.
Avoid creating content that only shares small bits of information and concludes with a “learn more on our website” call to action.
If you want to increase engagement on social media, create content that’s made entirely for social media.
10. Create more short-form videos
In our post on statistics for video marketing, we referenced a Wistia study that demonstrated how engagement rates increase the shorter a video is.
Specifically, videos that were under a minute had an average engagement rate of 53.9% while videos that were one to three minutes in length had an average engagement rate of 50.6%.
Engagement rates dropped below 40% for videos that were five to 30 minutes in length, below 30% for videos that were more than 30 minutes in length, and below 20% for videos that were more than 60 minutes in length.
For this reason, it’s best to focus on creating tiktoks, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts and Facebook reels that are five minutes or less.
11. Create valuable content for your niche
There are social media trends to participate in and funny jokes to be made, but when it comes down to it, what your audience is really looking for are solutions.
Provide those solutions with content.
Create short-form videos and carousel posts that offer value to your audience. Create tutorials, guides, reviews and product demonstrations.
Repurpose some of your blog content into social media content.
Find ways to condense your posts into one video, multiple videos or a single carousel post.
12. Keep your audience in the loop with Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories are casual posts that automatically get deleted after 24 hours, unless you add them to a Highlights collection on your profile.
They’re a fantastic vlogging platform you can use to keep your audience up to date with your day-to-day life, at least as it relates to your niche if you don’t want to get too personal.
It’s also one of the best places to promote things on social media, such as posts you published on Instagram or your latest blog posts.
13. Participate in trends
Trends won’t get you noticed by your target audience, but they will introduce your content to new audiences.
When you browse the social media platforms you publish to, you’ll start to notice trends you might want to participate in.
These could be dance trends, trends that encourage you to share a story, or even trends that require you to share an image or video that has a particular theme.
14. Reply to questions with videos
TikTok has a unique feature that allows you to reply to a comment on your videos with another video.
You can use this feature to reply to questions with videos. It’ll appear in the comment section of your original video.
Not only does this encourage your viewers to engage with your videos, it encourages them to engage with more of your content as you expand the topic into more videos.
What’s even better is that the comment you’re replying to will appear in the video as a clickable overlay.
This means if your reply video hits the algorithm rather than your original video, viewers can click the comment to view your original video.
15. Discuss trending topics in your niche
Covering trending topics is a fantastic way to gain traction in your niche.
When a news topic is trending, many consumers’ first instinct these days is to skip Google and head straight to a search bar on a social media platform.
If you can get content about a particular topic out fairly quickly, you can pretty much guarantee that new members from your audience will find your content.
16. Ask for feedback
Instagram, Twitter (X), Facebook and even YouTube have plenty of features that give your viewers new and interesting ways to interact with your content.
This is best done on Instagram.
When you create an Instagram story, you can add what are known as “stickers” to it.
The Questions, Polls and emoji reaction stickers are fantastic for engagement and allow you to collect audience feedback.
17. Share funny moments and mistakes
As a blogger, your first instinct when something funny happens or you make a mistake is probably not to pull out your phone and record it.
But as a social media creator, that should be your first priority, after taking care of anything dangerous, of course.
Moments like these have the potential to go viral in your niche.
Plus, it’s relatable. There’s nothing more personable than sharing something humorous or outrageous that’s happening to you.
18. Share behind-the-scenes content
This one is related to the previous hack.
Social media allows you to be a lot more casual than blog content does. It’s also a lot easier to whip out your phone and record a quick video than it is to research, outline, write and edit an entire blog post.
Behind-the-scenes content is exactly what social media is for.
Share your setup as it relates to your niche, a project you’re working on, content you’re working on and anything else you can think of.
If it relates to your niche, your audience will be interested in it.
Many small businesses are earning new customers by sharing themselves packing orders for current customers.
19. Do the “add yours” trend with your audience
Your audience is filled with active members of your niche.
While you’re working on a project or learning new things, your audience is working on the same things!
Encourage them to engage with your content and niche in general by creating an “Add Yours” trend.
Instagram Stories and TikTok allow you to add a feature called “Add Yours.”
You create a post that has an image or video with a particular theme, then use the Add Yours feature to encourage your audience to add their own.
20. Create an ongoing trivia series
There are two primary types of trivia content you can create on social media: trivia content where the answers are revealed in the same video or trivia content where the answers are revealed in the next video.
You can pretty much guarantee engagements by creating the latter type of trivia video.
This is what @jakesmacronature does with his macro photo series on TikTok.
He posts a macro photo of an everyday object, then asks his audience to guess what they think it is.
His audience fills his comment section with guesses.
He reveals the answer in the next video, but that video ends with another macro photo, creating an ongoing trivia series for his audience to look forward to.
It’s also a quick and easy way to create content, though it can pigeonhole you into creating one type of content if you aren’t careful enough.
Final thoughts
Standing out on social media isn’t easy. It takes time, effort, and a solid strategy.
Social media algorithms are mostly engagement driven and feeds aren’t usually in chronological order. While some users may not like this, it does present an opportunity.
It means that you don’t need a huge following to get your content seen. New accounts with hardly any followers can get their content in front of thousands of people.
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