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Planable is the best client-facing social media tool we've ever used and we've used a lot.
Brands on TikTok experience an average engagement rate per follower of 5.7%, according to a recent study. Instagram takes the second place with just 0.47%. TikTok is the place to be if you want to boost brand awareness and build a loyal community — if you have the...
Aug 7, 2025
Is your audience engagement not budging even though you’re posting daily? To grow online, you need to expand your focus beyond the visible side of content. Publishing regularly, tracking clicks, and chasing metrics are essential to social media marketing. But audience engagement comes when you listen, learn, and create content that sparks real interaction.
Strong audience engagement can outshine paid tactics if you get it right. It can deepen trust, drive sales, and turn casual followers into brand advocates.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through 5 practical strategies that deepen audience engagement and build real connection, and show you how to make engagement a part of your social media workflow.
Audience engagement refers to the level of interaction between a brand and its target audience across various channels. It can take the form of social media interactions like shares, comments, reactions, or direct messages, website engagement like blog comments or content shares, email communications, or participation in online or in-person events.
What makes audience engagement important is that it signals interest and involvement. Through effective social media community management, genuine interest from audience members can lead to higher-quality interactions and foster brand loyalty and more vibrant social communities. An engaged audience that actively participates shares relatable experiences, leaves insightful comments, and promotes your brand.
However, as social media marketing expert Annie-Mai Hodge points out:
Engagement is great as it gives you instant feedback, builds community and helps your content go further. But just because someone isn’t liking or commenting doesn’t mean your content isn’t doing its job. People lurk, people remember and people convert quietly.
This perspective reminds us that engagement isn’t always visible. Some of your most valuable audience members might be quietly consuming your content without public interaction.
Audience engagement goes beyond metrics like clicks and views, measuring real signals of interest, trust, and brand loyalty. By prioritizing it, you can build stronger, lasting relationships with your target audience.
Here are 5 reasons audience engagement should be a core part of your social media strategy:
Engagement helps you gauge how your brand is perceived. When audience members feel positively about your brand, you gain a competitive edge.
Every comment or question is a clue. Real-time audience feedback can shape everything from your next post to your product roadmap.
The more consistently you show up, the more your audience learns to trust you. Over time, that trust turns into loyalty.
The more people interact with your content, the more it gets seen. Engagement naturally boosts visibility without you having to spend on paid promotion.
Engaged brands show up more often in conversations, trends, and cultural moments. It’s one of the best ways to stay top of mind with your audience.
You don’t have to focus on all these areas at once. Depending on your goals, you might prioritize feedback and through social media sentiment analysis, or double down on reach and presence. What matters is approaching engagement with intention.
Audience engagement grows when your content feels less like a broadcast and more like a conversation. These simple strategies are built to help you spark that kind of connection and keep your audience engaged:
Yes, visual storytelling, call-to-action captions, and using features like polls are all great tactics, but real audience engagement happens when you deeply understand your customer persona and the everyday experiences, struggles, and emotional triggers tied to the problem you’re solving.
Think beyond demographics and product benefits. What does your audience laugh about? What do your potential customers vent about? What do your social media followers share in group chats?
When your content reflects real moments and emotions, it resonates on a cultural level. The future of branding is personal, and that’s what makes someone stop scrolling. Not because your post is flashy, but because it feels personal.
As social media strategist Annie-Mai Hodge explains:
I always aim to make my audience feel seen and heard, whether that’s by responding thoughtfully to comments and DMs, or sharing content that reflects their lived experiences. Memes, in particular, have been incredibly powerful in growing Girl Power Marketing. Not only are my comments flooded with people in my audience stating that they thought ‘they were the only one’ who struggled with that particular pain point (ahem: Meta Business Suite) but I’ve had memes spark client enquiries and brand partnerships.
Monzo nails this. They show up in real-life moments like payday, the arrival of spring, or Mother’s Day, and add a relatable twist that sits at the intersection of money and the moment.
Online reputation management plays a major role in any engagement strategy, and your reputation hinges on how and when you respond.
Engagement looks different across platforms. Twitter, for instance, has evolved into a space where users share unfiltered experiences and expect fast, empathetic responses. If you’re in an organization where responses need an extra layer of review, a response template can be helpful to maintain consistency, speed, and tone.
Here’s how to set one up:
Keeping your audience engaged is part intention, part intuition. The goal is to show up with the right tone at the right time without reinventing the wheel for every single reply.
With Planable’s Engagement features, you can take things one step further and reply to comments directly from your workspace, organize conversations by status (open, reply later, or done), and prioritize based on sentiment. And, if you’re not feeling your most creative or just want a quick starting point, you have the option to Reply with AI.
Never miss a message. Monitor and respond to comments directly with Planable’s engagement hub.
Using the audience engagement strategies above, you can identify what your audience cares about. Next, show them social proof.
Earned media refers to user-generated content (UGC) or any content shared about your brand that wasn’t paid for. When you respond to, repost, or repurpose this kind of content, you create a feedback loop that encourages more interaction and builds trust with new audiences.
You can also amplify reach by working with influencers. When chosen thoughtfully, influencers can give you access to highly relevant and engaged communities. Their endorsement acts as a signal boost to audiences already aligned with your brand’s values or niche.
Calvin Klein’s “In My Calvins” campaign perfectly demonstrates this approach. By encouraging customers to share photos wearing their Calvin Klein pieces with the hashtag #MyCalvins, the brand created a massive wave of authentic user-generated content.
The campaign featured both celebrities and everyday people, making the brand feel accessible while showcasing real customers as brand ambassadors.
Community building means giving your audience a sense of shared identity. It’s no longer limited to starting a Facebook group. Modern community strategy needs to be exciting, dynamic, and ever-evolving.
This is what modern community building looks like:
Be selective and match the space to your audience, not just the moment. Social media community management tools can help you stay organized across all these touchpoints.
In 2018, for example, Gymshark launched the #Gymshark66 challenge, a campaign built around progress, not perfection. Participants were asked to set a goal and share their journey. The result was a wave of real, relatable content that turned everyday customers into community heroes.
Social media moves fast. One day it’s Met Gala memes, the next it’s a viral trend like “I’m not ashamed to admit” breaking the internet. Using trending audio, jumping on viral formats, and sharing takes on events can shape your brand’s relevance online and grab your audience’s attention.
This kind of topical content rides a wave of traction. TikTok, for example, reported that videos using the #BackToSchool hashtag doubled year over year, with 42% of parents purchasing education-related products as a result.
Trending social media posts can foster a sense of community, increase visibility, and drive sales. Take Starbucks, for example, when they quickly jumped on the trending topic of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, attributing one drink to each “era” for Swifties to enjoy:
The Eras as Starbucks drinks:
pic.twitter.com/TayVsfcAkY— Starbucks (@Starbucks)
March 17, 2023
Every metric tells a different story about how your audience sees, values, and interacts with your brand. From how long they linger on a post to whether they click, comment, or share, these signals help you understand what’s resonating and where there’s room to improve:
If keeping track of all these metrics feels overwhelming, it doesn’t have to. Collaboration tools like Planable can simplify the process and bring everything into one clear, centralized dashboard.
With Planable’s Analytics features, you get in-depth insights into your content performance and audience demographics and detailed post-by-post stats. It’s your toolkit for actively engaging audiences and tracking every metric that matters.
Track key metrics like followers, impressions, and engagement with real-time analytics in Planable.
Engagement doesn’t look the same everywhere, and if you manage multiple social media accounts, you’ve probably felt that whiplash. The rules shift constantly, and the metrics that matter vary by context.
Here’s what engagement looks like, platform by platform:
Social media marketing expert Annie-Mai Hodge discovered that simple interactive changes can yield dramatic results:
On Instagram, I started putting a tappable emoji sticker in my first Instagram Story of the day, and my views went from an average of 300 to 3,000. That’s a 900% increase, from just making a small change to my strategy that encourages my audience to interact in a low-effort, and low-risk way.
Juggling platforms, tracking performance, comparing analytics, and compiling reports can quickly become a time-consuming and never-ending cycle.
Planable supports 9 social media platforms, so you can optimize content and engagement formats per channel, and simplifies processes end-to-end by centralizing all your important data in one place.
Visualize and manage campaigns effortlessly across all platforms with Planable’s content calendar.
From pop-ups to polls, brands are finding smart, creative ways to build real connections. Here are some standout examples of how engagement can come to life in different formats:
Live events can be a goldmine for audience engagement. Brands use event hashtags, behind-the-scenes Instagram stories, and real-time posts to bring the experience to a wider audience.
PUMA’s #GoWild campaign launched The High Point pop-up with athlete panels and interactive zones. They brought it online through real-time LinkedIn updates, behind-the-scenes content, and the #GoWild hashtag to drive global attention.
When webinars are built around a clear theme and paired with real-time engagement, they can turn into genuinely interactive experiences.
Planable’s Lightning Talks series uses short, 5-minute themed sessions on community management, so the format feels approachable and focused.
Social posts around the event spark pre- and post-event conversations, making it easy for the audience to tune in and share takeaways.
Your brand voice should feel familiar and distinct. Slim Jim does this with a chaotic, meme-heavy style that mirrors Gen Z humor.
From hot takes on trends to nonstop banter with followers, their feed feels more like a fan page than a brand account.
… (your entirecontent goes here) …
Getting feedback doesn’t have to be complicated. Polls, AMAs, and reaction sliders give your audience an easy way to weigh in and give you valuable insights in return. It’s simple, interactive, and shows people their opinions matter.
In the example below, Starbucks kept it playful with a poll, the “Battle of the Hot-Cross Buns”, inviting followers to vote and turn seasonal treats into fun, low-effort engagement.
There’s something special about taking the online connection offline. IRL meetups, pop-ups, or casual events give your followers a chance to feel like they are part of a community.
Self Space nails this with initiatives like their Pop-Up Therapy chairs and Walk Clubs. They take conversations out of traditional rooms and into public spaces, offering moments of reflection and support.
Planable calendar view highlighting campaign progress, content planning, and real-time engagement analytics.
Real audience engagement starts long before you hit ‘Publish’. It takes alignment, strategy, and a content process that helps your team stay consistent, no matter how many platforms or collaborators you’re working with.
Planable brings all of that into one place, so you can move fast without losing clarity or control.
Use Planable to:
And if you want to write better content, faster, Planable’s AI marketing tools help you craft punchier captions, rewrite posts, and optimize messaging to increase audience engagement.
As Grégory Piet, Head of Solutions at Audiense, emphasizes:
For the many brands we support, we use AI not as a shortcut, but as a strategic enhancer. Every recommendation starts with calibrated prompts tailored to the brand’s tone, values, and objectives. The goal is to keep the human experience at the core—AI is here to amplify, not replace. When used this way, the AI-human duo becomes today’s version of a ‘superhuman’: faster, smarter, and still deeply connected to what makes a brand authentic.
The most engaged brands are far from perfect. But they are present. They show up consistently, stay close to what their audience cares about, and build momentum through everyday interactions. That kind of engagement takes more than good instincts. It takes systems, collaboration, and clarity.
Planable brings everything together in one workspace, so your team can spend less time juggling and more time engaging. When you’re ready to simplify how your team collaborates and drives better conversations, Planable has you covered. Try it for free and see the difference for yourself.
Brand strategist and content nerd working at the intersection of education, impact, and internet culture. Obsessed with voice, storytelling, and building content systems that connect with the right audience at the right time.
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