Social Media Engagement: 9 Ways to Boost Yours + Why it Matters

Without engagement, social media is just media. In this article, you’ll learn nine actionable and authentic ways to boost your content’s engagement.

Picture this: You’re demonstrating your products or services at a kiosk — its benefits, use cases, social proof, all that jazz. You know your offer is A+, but no one seems to notice. They’re just passing you by like you’re invisible. What are you doing wrong? How can you get your audience’s attention?

This is precisely what social media feels like without engagement — like you’re shouting into a void.

After all, engagement makes social media “social” in the first place. You want to reach the right people, spark conversations, and help each other. Which is why a social media engagement strategy can be incredibly helpful for achieving your social media goals.

But with so many social media channels and a never-ending stream of fleeting trends, it’s difficult to understand how to measure, improve, and maintain your social media engagement.

In this article, I’ll share proven techniques to help you understand what social media engagement is and how to improve it.

Theoretically, engagement rate is measured by collating all your audience interactions — including (but not limited to) likes, comments, shares, saves, and replies. Social media engagement constitutes both:

1. How your audience interacts with you (likes, shares, comments, etc.)

2. How you interact with your audience (responding to comments, messages, etc.)

While these numbers certainly indicate a successful social media engagement strategy, it’s crucial to remember that engagement is much more than these metrics alone.

Because social media engagement isn’t just about performance. It’s about building a community. It doesn’t matter if your engagement rate is high if you’re swimming in negative audience behavior (like constructively criticizing comments).

When you think of social media engagement, first think of the human connection and authenticity you’ve built using your social media strategy — how many positive direct messages (DMs) you received, how many customer support queries you resolved, how much you acted on your audience’s constructive criticism, and how much you actually listened to what your followers want.

And as I touched on above — this goes both ways. I always like to use my favorite creator Aishwarya Kandpal as an example: She responds to as many comments and DMs as possible and always creates authentic, true-to-her-values content.

I know I can trust her recommendations in a heartbeat. Her authenticity in engaging with her audience has made me a loyal follower who will stick around and interact with every piece of content she creates.

My favorite example? When she not only responded to almost all comments for an influencer partnership but also went against recommending the same product for specific skin types. Talk about authenticity.

I’m not saying that numbers aren’t important, but they aren’t everything. Meaningful social media engagement encompasses how much your content resonates with your audience, how many meaningful relationships you build, and how much value you provide to your community.

In this article, we’ll primarily focus on how to boost your social media engagement by helping your audience discover and interact with your content (although we’ll also touch on how you should interact with your audience, too).

Here are nine actionable tips for you to boost social media engagement:

Your social media analytics are the place to get the most actionable insights to improve social media engagement.

Set aside time every week to evaluate your social media performance. Here are some helpful questions to ask as you dig in:

Did a social media campaign lead to more DMs than usual?
Did certain content topics get more engagement than others?
Did a few content formats (like text or video content) perform better than the rest?

Your social media analytics offer important clues that could help you understand how you can boost engagement. If you use Buffer, you can get these insights at your fingertips — it will calculate the best time to post, your best-performing content formats, and your ideal posting frequency. Use these insights to improve your engagement without doing the math yourself.

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Pro-tip: Don’t dissect the quantitative metrics alone. Do a sentiment analysis of your comments and DMs to increase social media engagement.

For example, are a majority of your comments and messages about a common issue with your product or services? Or do certain topics spark more insightful conversations and comments? All of these are signals to dig deeper — your audience is telling you what they need from your brand.

Your social media efforts need to be tailored to the social media platform to increase engagement. Doesn’t each network have some overlapping key elements in their engagement rate (such as likes, comments, and shares)? Sure they do. But the algorithm for each social media platform determines how your content will perform on each channel.

For example, the Threads algorithm pushes value-driven content that sparks a conversation. Threads features like tags are designed to help people with similar interests find and interact with each other. Over at Bluesky, too, active participation is critical for boosting visibility and getting more engagement.

But the YouTube algorithm works a little differently: It recommends content based on what users have already watched, searched for, and expressed interest in. It doesn’t focus a lot on ensuring you start or participate in a discussion — you don’t need to actively engage with other people’s content to get engagement on your profile.

Why does the algorithm matter? Because social media posts that align with a platform’s algorithmic preferences get pushed more by the platform. It ranks on top for people that follow you and shows up more often in the ‘for you’ feeds. Thus, you get more engagement than you would if you hadn’t cared about the algorithm.

A successful social media strategy will require you to fulfill unique requirements for each social media platform. Spend time navigating, studying, and absorbing each network’s culture and algorithmic preferences.

3. Lean into trends

Trending content is usually a topic or theme people are interested in. When you tap into trends, you’re creating content that’s relevant and thus sparks interactions. All social media algorithms also love trending content and provide it increased visibility. There are two kinds of trends that should influence your social media presence:

a) Industry trends

These are trends and conversations that are popular in your specific social media niche. For example, “glass skin” is a trend in the skincare industry.

b) Platform trends

Each social media platform has trends (that o