Why People Are Not Engaging With Your Content on Social Media

You have probably been in a situation where you create what you believe is a masterpiece of a post. You post it on your social media page and log off. You hope to return and find that the post has gone viral with thousands of likes, comments, and shares. However, when you return, the numbers are depressing: two likes, no comments, and no shares.

You are left wondering what you did wrong. Is it that the content didn't meet people’s expectations or are there lurkers following silently? You check your competitor’s page and their posts, which are of poorer quality than yours, and they seem to attract thousands of likes, comments, and shares. If this sounds like you, don't worry. We will highlight the top reasons for the low engagement on your social media posts and what you can do about it.

What are the Reasons for the Poor Engagement with Your Posts?

If you are seeing low engagement levels in your posts, this could be a result of several reasons, such as:

Not Targeting the Right Audience

If people see your posts and think they are irrelevant to them, they are not likely to engage with them. Therefore, you need to ask yourself if you are really engaging the right audience. To remain in your audience's minds, you need to have a clear audience persona and ensure you are creating content for the right audience.

You should then group the target audience into distinct buckets consisting of people with shared interests. These can clearly illustrate your specific audiences that may be interested in engaging with your content. Then, you can focus on targeting the audience persona.

Not Creating Valuable Content

People may also fail to engage with your content because they don't consider it valuable. When considering the value offered by content, it can be categorized into educational, helpful, inspirational, entertaining, and engaging content. In simple terms, focus on creating content that sparks an emotional response from your audience. 

Instead of creating content for a general audience, consider the needs of the specific personas. After creating the audience’s persona, make sure you also understand their needs, inspirations, aspirations, and pain points. You can then create content that provides value and insights into these specific areas.

If you are only creating humorous content, this may interest your audience, but it may not help them solve their problems. It may cause them to lose interest as they do not get value for liking or following your pages. Valuable content helps your audience solve their problems and adds value to them. Again, don't just create blog posts as not all your audience is interested in reading.

Instead, combine different content formats such as videos, podcasts, animations, checklists, webinars, infographics, books, and email series. Ensure that you study how your audience’s persona consumes content and interacts with your brand online. You can determine the kind of content format that is likely to resonate with them. You can then include that content format in your publishing strategy.

Content is Not Discoverable

Unless people discover your posts, it can be hard for them to engage with them. One of the ways of making your content discoverable is by promoting it through methods such as:

• Organic SEO. If you are posting on your site or a social media site such as LinkedIn, you must ensure the content is optimized for the search engines.
• Paid ads. You can sponsor your posts on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
• Third party paid tools. Use third-party tools to sponsor your content.
• Email. Use an email list to share content.
• Advocacy marketing. If you have some top fans, you can leverage their social sharing power to share your content on their profiles.

Looking Inauthentic

Social media users often prefer to engage with brands that look authentic. That means if you look fake, you will struggle to get engagement on your content. On top of being yourself, there are some content creation measures you can use to show authenticity in your content creation.

• Stay true. Whether you are creating educational, fun, or quirky content, ensure you remain true to your brand identity. You can already see how well brands such as Burger King, Wendy’s, and Popeye do this on X. They ensure that they remain true to themselves.
• Collaborate with other creators. You can get into brand partnerships with other creators, such as influencers and content creators. These are usually the people acting as your brand advocates and may even have created shareable content for your brand.
• Use real stories. Ensure you share the top stories of your top shoppers, staff, and advocates. These real-life stories will showcase your authentic side and provide your audience with valuable insights into your products, services, and brand.

Use these tips also to create social media content that converts.

Lack of a Good Strategy

According to one study, 63% of B2B marketers lack a concentrated and documented content marketing strategy. This is because a content strategy can help you achieve your content marketing goals, as it clearly illustrates the intention behind the content. Unlike what many think, you don't have to put a complicated marketing strategy in place.

It could be as simple as scheduling your content, the target persona, and the kind of content to post on each date. Tools like Excel and Google Sheets can enhance your content strategy. Alternatively, you can use collaborative tools such as Mural, Sprout and Trello.

Wrong Posting Frequency

Posting time can significantly impact the engagement rate of your posts. To increase the visibility of your social media posts, you want to ensure that you post when your audience is mostly online. Check your social media analytics to determine when customers are online and post during those times.

The higher the visibility of the post, the higher the engagement you are likely to receive. Additionally, you need to be consistent to build the trust and credibility of your audience. When search engines see you consistently posting, they reward your content with a higher ranking.

Focusing More on Promotional Posts

The main reason why you are on social media is that you want to market your brand. However, if you are overdoing it, you are likely to lose the interest of your audience, as people don’t want to be regularly sold to. Therefore, if you are making each of your posts a marketing post, you are likely to lose the interest of your audience. 

Not Focusing on Your Audience’s Values

Today's customers are highly educated, opinionated, and well-informed. They have their ideas and values and look for brands that align with their beliefs and lifestyles. Even though it's essential to maintain your brand’s beliefs, you also want to ensure that your audience aligns with the lifestyles and values of your brand. If you find it to be misaligned, you can pivot accordingly, or you can explore some new audiences.

Instead of focusing on selling a product, customer values focus on delivering experiences that resonate with your audience, offering, and needs. When you are able to create customer value as a business, you can enjoy long-term loyalty and success in your industry. 

Remember that with the many options people have, it can be hard to earn customer loyalty. That's what you should do to deliver exceptional value for your business. Offering value will drive sustainable growth, enabling you to focus on what truly matters. There are several tips you can use for driving customer value. These are:

• Meeting customers needs.You can utilize customer feedback and market research to gain insight into your customers' needs and pain points. You can then focus on creating a product that meets their needs.
• A strong value proposition. A value proposition refers to the promise you make to your customers about the benefits they will receive from your product or services. It outlines how you will meet your customers’ needs in a way your competitors don’t. A good value proposition should discuss the unique benefits of your products in addressing customers' needs.
• Deliver quality products. Ensure that your customers see your products or services as high quality.
• Provide a customized customer experience. Today’s customers are looking for personalized experiences that reflect their needs and preferences. Provide them with personalized interactions using personalized emails, marketing strategies, and more.
• Provide incentives and loyalty programs. Loyalty programs can be a good way to make your customers stick with your brand in the long-term. It can encourage repeat purchases and higher customer retention. Ensure that the loyalty program offers both immediate and long-term value. For instance, you can have tiered rewards for future purchases to keep customers invested in your brand.

Not Considering the Customer’s Feedback

If you do not ask customers for feedback, your business may not understand what it is doing right or wrong. Otherwise, you might know what works well for your customers. When you do that, you can create a product that is no longer in demand. On the other hand, getting customers’ feedback can empower your audience and provide you with insights into your customers’ buying journey.

Statistics indicate that 90% of customers buy from companies that provide a good customer experience (CX). Good customer service also increases the likelihood of customers making repeat purchases by 81%. The data also shows that companies committed to improving their CX are six times more likely to increase their ROI on customer feedback. 

When you send out customer surveys and read through their reviews, you can learn about areas for improvement. This can translate into a better product or service, resulting in higher customer retention and revenue. You can ask for customer feedback in various ways, such as:

Experimenting with Different Kinds of Feedback

Customer feedback can be divided into three different types. These are:

• Giving feedback. Customers can sometimes leave feedback even without being asked, especially in support tickets. This is an example of the input provided.
• Ask for feedback. You can ask for the customer's opinions and thoughts.
• Observed feedback. You can study how customers use your products or services and the kinds of documents they read. For instance, you can check the pages they visit most often and the search queries in the knowledge base to determine what your audience finds interesting. 

Making it Easy to Leave Feedback

A common misconception businesses have is that customers’ feedback should be long and detailed. However, this is not always the case, and a simple feedback, such as an emoji, may be sufficient. Therefore, ask the customers to respond with simple answers, such as a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon. 

When they finish their conversations with a chatbot, add a pop-up survey to ask them to rate their experience with a smiling, frowning, or neutral face. You can also ask them to provide their rating, ranging from one star to five stars.

Ask for Feedback on Live Chat

You have better chances of getting feedback when talking to your customers on live chat. This is why phone calls or live chats offer a valuable opportunity for real-time engagement. Rather than following up with customers via email to ask them to leave feedback, you can ask them immediately during the conversation. Since they are already on the line, they may not mind staying longer for a survey.

Not Acknowledging Customers and Employees

If you aren't acknowledging your employees or customers, it is a strong indication that you don't value them. You also lose out on word-of-mouth marketing. When you feature your customers and employees, you tell them you recognize them as a key part of your community. You can, therefore, attract more fans who engage with your content. Therefore, go ahead and create a post about your employees or thank your customers for their support.

Final Thoughts

There are many reasons why people may not be engaging with your content. However, you should remember that good content is the number one recipe for strong engagement. Therefore, before you implement the strategies above, ensure you create the right content suited to your audience’s needs.