An engaged social media following is an audience who know, like, and trust you.

And that is, at its core, how successful marketers help fuel sales - engaging your audience on social is a great way to build a community of fans for your brand.

And while there's no silver bullet tricks or one-size fits all strategy to facilitate such, there are some of the time-tested, proven social media engagement tactics that continually produce results.

In this post, we'll look at some of the key element of a successful social media marketing strategy, and how you can utilize them in your own process.

1. Curate and Share Others’ Valuable Content with Your Following

Social media content curation is an awesome way for you to share the most valuable content in your industry with your following - even if it's not content you've created.

As Julie Neidlinger elegantly puts it:

"[Your followers] trust you’ll point out the most important stuff. They trust you won’t waste their time. They trust that you’ll know them well enough that you’ll do a better job finding information that an algorithm or computer can’t quite master. Social media content curation is a lifesaver for an audience drowning in information."

There are many different ways to curate relevant content - check out this infographic for a few formulas to help you share a variety of content that will engage your audience:

Social media content curation also presents an awesome opportunity to tag the authors behind the pieces you’re sharing. This recognizes the talent you thought worthy enough to share with your followers, while also giving your audience the chance to discover even more engaging content.

An easy way to start is to set up Feedly with the RSS feeds from your favorite blogs. Then you can easily make it a habit to check Feedly to curate awesome content.

2. Schedule Your Social Messages to Send at the Best Times to Increase Your Reach

For every network, there are certain times of the day when users are most active. By scheduling your social media messages to post at the best times, you’re that much more likely to engage your followers.

So when's the best time to schedule social media posts? The true best time will be relevant to your unique audience, but there are some common points which can guide you on where you should be looking.

Here’s an infographic with the high-level overview of the best times to post on social media to help you increase your engagement:

3. Write Emotional Headlines to Increase Shares and Clickthroughs

If you’re following one of the social media mix formulas from tip #1, you’ll be sharing a lot of your own content on social media. You can increase your social shares and traffic (not to mention SEO value) by writing emotional headlines - and subsequently using those headlines in your social shares.

There are three solid headline formulas that tend to perform well:

1. How To {Do Something} That Will {Help You Experience Desired Result}
2. {#} Ways To {Do Something} To {Produce Desired Result}
3. What Is The Best {Topic} That Will {Do Something Desirable}?

Now, those formulas vary a lot, but the point is that how to, list, and question headlines tend to get the most engagement.

Here are 30 emotional headline formulas that will spark your creativity:

We’ve also researched the formulas behind the 1,000 most-shared headlines of 4,302,684 pieces of content shared through CoSchedule, then we combined that data with the best advice we could find to give you the 100+ best headline templates in the world:

More social shares = more engagement. Try using these headline formulas for your content and measure what happens.

4. Increase Your Posting Frequency to Boost Your Organic Growth

When Post Planner increased their posting frequency by 29%, they grew their Facebook organic reach by 65%.

Sharing more often helps you reach and engage more of the following you’ve worked so hard to build.

So how often should you share to social media? It’s a question we’ve been researching, with a new research report coming soon, but here's a sneak peek at the results we’ve analyzed so far:

5. Share Your Content More Than Once on Social Media

You can generate 31.5x more click-throughs when you share your content on social media more than once.

Let me rephrase that - you can get 3,150% more traffic to your content by scheduling a few more social messages to share your content with your followers.

If your reaction is anything like mine was when I discovered that stat, this is you right now:

You can share the same piece of content on social media more than once to help you fill up your social media posting schedule (especially since you just learned you can post way more frequently than you have been).

A good way to do this is to mix up the variety of the kinds of messages you write to share a single piece of content.

Here’s how to do it:

• Use the three kinds of headlines that work best for engaging content: how to, list, and question.
• Ask questions to pique your followers’ curiosity. Close-ended questions actually work best for click-throughs, so try questions that make your followers answer “yes” or “no” in response to your question. (e.g. Are you using hashtags as you should be?)
• Post something controversial that makes your readers question their behavior, beliefs, or sense of belonging. They’ll want to confirm or disprove what you share, so they’ll have to click through to learn more. (e.g. Nothing is original.)
• Combine a humorous message with a funny meme or GIF. Something that works well is to try a message like “How you’ll feel when you learn how to {experience desired benefit you teach in your content.}” Then pair it with a GIF of someone super excited.

Then can you share your content more than once:

• On publish – Social message sent when blog post goes live
• Same day – Initial social messages trickle out to your accounts over the next 2-3 hours.
• Next day – Messages are shared again on the appropriate social channels.
• Next week – Another series of messages are pre-scheduled and sent the following week.
• Next month – Even more social messages are pre-scheduled for the following month.
• Next _____ – Additional messages can optionally be scheduled for the three-month mark or beyond.

You could plan a social media posting schedule that looks something like this:

Good luck as you get started with these new social media engagement tactics.