11 Tips on How to Increase Impressions and Engagement

As we discussed in other articles, it’s important for content creators to have a large and engaged audience if they want to monetize their content.

In this article, we’ll be talking about how to increase impressions and engagements on your platform.

These ideas will be helpful in building your audience and monetizing your content, so read on!

What’s the difference between impressions and engagement? 

Impressions are the total number of times your content has been viewed. The flaw of this metric is that it includes repeat visits in the count.

Since this metric is ambiguous, marketers and content creators opt to measure unique impressions (the number of people who saw the content) – a more specific metric to measure how a content has performed.

However, impressions don’t tell the full story on how well a content is performing. This is because there could be a lot of reasons why a person could’ve looked on a piece of content, including seeing it by accident.

That’s where the engagement metric come in.

Engagements are the number of interactions you got from your audience. It shows how many people liked, commented, shared, saved, and did other things with your content. This translates to how many people intently consumed your content.

Engagements also allow you to see how people feel towards your content. Here you’ll know if they liked it or they disagreed with it. You’ll also know if they shared it to their friends or kept it for future reference.

Knowing these things would allow you to further optimize your content for growth.

Even though engagements are more telling, paying attention to both are equally important in your journey as a content creator because potential partners would be looking at both to evaluate your value.

11 strategies to increase impressions and engagements

Although luck sometimes play a role in increasing your impressions and engagements, a good system in place would help you when lady luck doesn’t look your way. Here are 11 strategies you can implement on your channel starting today.

1. Check your analytics.

Assuming that you’ve been creating content for a while, you should already know where to find the analytics on your platform.

It’s important to know your analytics because they’re like your car’s dashboard and GPS all in one. It tells you everything that’s wrong and it also shows what you need to do to get to where you want to go. All you need to do is understand what it tells you.

Since our goal right now is increasing our impressions and engagements, the first two question we need to as ourselves is “where?” and “who?”

Where are our impressions and engagements coming from? And who are they?

 

• Traffic sources:

  This metric would tell you where your viewers are coming from. Are they native to the platform? Are they coming from social media? Are they from searches? Were they from Ads?

Knowing this would tell you which platforms you should invest more time on and which platforms to leave behind.

 

• Demographics:

  This metric breaks down the profile of your viewers. Most platforms would give you the age, gender, and location of your audience. Some platforms would go as far as letting you know their interests.

This information would tell you which audience segments resonate the most with your content. Hence, the best segment to target to increase impressions and engagement.

2. Choose an audience to focus on.

After checking your analytics, you should now have a clear idea on who your target audience should be. Clue: They’re the people who consume your content the most.

Once you’ve determined which segment generates the most impressions and engagement, focus on getting more people like those to become part of your audience.

Start by researching them further and get to know what their interests are and what they enjoy. This would help you create content that would attract them to your platform.

Some of the best tools you can use to research your target audience are:

• Facebook Audience Insights
• Google Analytics
• Consumer Barometer
• Quora
• Reddit
• Consumer Reports by various researchers

You can also check if the platform you’re using has their own insight tools.

3. Refine your image.

Now that you know who your target audience is and what they like, it’s time to refine your image to make you more interesting to them.

The image we’re talking about here is not your literal photo or thumbnails. It’s your online persona that your audience experience when they view your content.

Are you funny? Serious? Authoritative?

The best way to determine what voice you need to have is by looking at your past content. Review your top performing content and see what theme and personality it had. Compare this to your low performing content and see if there’s a big difference between the two.

Once you know what image to project, refine it and make sure to own it.

Discovered that your audience enjoys your humor? Make more jokes and share more memes.

Found out you have a more authoritative and respectable image? Be less childish and talk about more mature topics.

Whatever it is, make sure it’s what your target audience finds interesting.

4. Optimize your content.

In continuation with refining your image, the kinds of content you post should follow too.

For example: when Burger King decided that they’ll have a fun and naughty persona, they started grilling McDonald’s on social media. Even when you look at how they write captions for their posts, you’ll see a hint of naughtiness into it.

So don’t be afraid to be playful with your content. Often times, being bold and controversial can make you go viral and increase your impressions and engagements.

Just remember to stay consistent with the image you’re projecting.

5. Be more entertaining.

The reason why people consume content is because they want to be entertained. Even when they’re trying to learn something, they’re looking for the most entertaining way to do it.

So when you create content, make sure you’re evoking emotions from your audience. It doesn’t matter if it’s positive emotions or negative, as long as it’s not boring, you’re good to go.

The last thing you want is to be dull and plain, because boring content do not increase impressions and engagement.

6. Engage with your audience.

Most people are shy that even when they like your content, they’ll hesitate to say something.

That’s why most times, it’s better to start the conversation with them. Try to ask for their opinion at the end of your content. And if it’s not too much for you, reward your audience for engaging with you.

Also, make sure that when they start engaging with you, you’ll reply back and keep the conversation going.

The last thing you want to be is the person who ghosts them, because we all know how bad that feels.

By engaging and befriending your current audience, you’re also encouraging more people to engage with you and share your content. Ultimately helping you increase impressions and engagement.

7. Repurpose your content.

People have short attention spans nowadays. We find it extremely hard to pay attention to long contents. That’s why if you’re still here reading, props to you!

This is the reason why most content creators, even mainstream ones create bite-sized contents.

Instead of just posting their full content, they’ll post highlights of the game, punchlines of sitcoms, and intense moments of TV shows.

That’s because short, digestible contents like these would capture the interest of new audiences to explore the longer content available on your platform.

So if you want to increase your impressions, make sure you’re putting out shorter versions of your main content.

8. Expand your network.

If you want to increase your impressions further, you need to promote your content more. Now you can do this by advertising, but that costs money.

So if you’re tight on budget, join different communities related to your core topics. These groups have people who are interested in the topics of your content. So they’re most likely to consume yours too.

You can start by joining Facebook groups, Reddit Subreddits, and Forums related to your core topics. You can also find chatgroups on Telegram and other messaging platforms where you can share your content and engage with your target audience.

9. Paid advertisements

If you’re already making money from your content, it wouldn’t hurt to promote your channel via paid advertisement. This would allow you to show your content to people who might be interested in it.

Another upside is that you won’t need to spend as much time doing all the legwork of engaging, posting, and looking for communities.

Just make sure you promote your best performing content and you target people who are interested in it (check your analytics).

Promoting your best content can exponentially increase your impressions and engagement.

10. Guest posting

There are probably a lot of successful content creators in your field already. And that’s okay. You can use them to your advantage by piggy-backing on their audience.

Get in touch with people in your space who already have a large following and ask them if you can do a collaboration project with them.

Perhaps post your original content on their platform while you post theirs on yours, or partner up to create new content.

Make sure you’re bringing value to the table when you reach out to these people, because they’ll ignore you if you don’t. Also, be prepared to pay them, if they have a really big audience.

11. Hop on the bandwagon.

Make sure you’re hopping on the hottest trends. This would increase your relevance to people – hence increasing engagements.

Just make sure that when you hop on a bandwagon, you’re still connecting it to your own core topics and your voice. Otherwise it’ll feel forced, tacky, and boring.

If you pull this off, you might even go viral and increase your impressions and engagement tenfold.

Now that you have these 11 strategies, we hope you’ll put these into action. And when these works out for you, don’t forget to share these with other aspiring content creators.

BONUS TIP:

ASK. Don’t be shy about asking your audience to engage and share your content. Collaborate with others and more often than not, they’ll be willing to if they found value in it. If you’re just getting started in collaborating, don’t forget to check out our guide to collaborating for streamers with peer gamers, streamers and content creators in our training module.