Creating a profile and posting a
few times per week is no longer enough
By Jacklyn Lavoie
Social media is a great way for independent insurance agents and brokers to connect with people and generate new business leads. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that 73% of young U.S. insurance agents use LinkedIn and nearly 70% use Facebook, according to Statista data.
If you haven’t established a social media presence for your agency yet, then there’s no time to waste. If you’re already active on social media, then it’s important to stay abreast of these platforms’ constant evolutions.
Creating a profile and posting something about your business a few times per week is no longer enough. Here’s how you can leverage social media effectively to create real engagement and build a loyal following in 2024.
Why social media engagement’s important
When marketers talk about social media engagement, they mean the number of views, likes, comments, shares, saves, or other interactions your posts have been able to amass on your chosen platforms, whether that’s Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), or LinkedIn.
One way of calculating your engagement rate is by taking the number of interactions a given post received divided by your total number of followers multiplied by 100 (though some marketers divide by their overall reach rather than follower count). The tricky thing about this metric is that the more followers you have, the harder it is to maintain an engagement rate between 1% and 5%, which is the amount most marketers aim to achieve, according to a Hootsuite article.
These quantitative measures can help you gauge whether your content is resonating with your audience. Reading the comments that your posts receive and rating their tone—positive, neutral, or negative—can also deliver a more qualitative view of what your audience is thinking.
Social media engagement is vital, as it demonstrates that your messages are reaching the right people. The more people who respond to your posts positively, the more likely they are to form a positive opinion about you, and those warm feelings can translate into a preference to work with you in the future.
That’s why social media marketers are always trying to boost engagement as much as possible. By successfully inspiring high engagement, they can grow your organization’s following. This is particularly important for agents and brokers, whose businesses revolve around establishing and maintaining close relationships with people.
There’s little point in spending tons of time and effort generating content that no one likes or wants to see, which is why marketers prioritize engagement on social media. Keeping this goal in mind informs what kind of content is produced. To the extent that the campaign is successful, it strengthens the organization’s public-facing voice and enhances its standing in the eyes of search engines.
The challenges of and competing for engagement
If you already have a social media presence, you’ve probably already mastered the fundamentals, such as posting consistently, hopping on trending topics, and utilizing eye-catching visuals and videos. If so, good for you!
While these tactics remain important, social media users have grown increasingly picky over the past decade. Keep in mind that social media algorithms are designed to steer users automatically toward the content that holds their attention best. While these algorithms change all the time, they always have the same goal: to glue people to the platform/app for as long as possible.
Meanwhile, when most people log on to social media, they are looking to be entertained, and content from agents and brokers can come across as salesy or self-interested instead. As a result, many users may scroll right past content they feel doesn’t align with their interests, wants, or needs.
To get your content about insurance prioritized in people’s feeds, it has to compete. While this may sound like a tall order, it doesn’t have to be, but it does mean that your social media posts should be fun and relatable. One way to do this is to tie insurance to something popular in pop culture
Strategies
Tapping into pop culture and injecting humor entertains your audience and can even prompt them to share your posts on their own social media accounts, expanding the number of people who see your messages even more.
For example, one of our high-performing posts took an image from the movie Mean Girls, in which the three “mean girl” characters cluster around the heroine, doing her hair and makeup. We put text over the shot, labeling the heroine as our client and the other three characters as services we offer. The mean girl who is brushing our clients’ hair became “crisis management,” the one holding the mascara wand became “reputation management,” and the one holding a blotter became “media training.”
In another campaign that we released for Halloween, we took stills from iconic Halloween and horror movies and labeled them with funny comparisons. For instance, one showed a witch from the movie Hocus Pocus bending over a steaming black kettle. The text we overlaid said, “Our publicists creating the perfect pitch for their clients.”
Judging from the positive response these posts received, they struck a chord with our audience, making them eager to share the laughs with their friends. Many people reposted the images, which boosted their overall visibility and reach.
Perhaps the most important strategy for boosting engagement in today’s social media environment is authenticity, which entails stepping away from the scripts and allowing your audience to see you in your more human moments. It means shrugging off the mantle of authority or taking down the professional mask, even if just for a little while, to help people understand the real you.
Yes, this approach can feel like you are making yourself vulnerable. It can mean embracing imperfections, but it also makes you more relatable and likable.
The “We work at [company name], so obviously we [stereotypical quirk]” video trend illustrates how this works. Businesses create reels highlighting quirky things about their workplace cultures.
For instance, our reel showed people playing ping pong, cuddling our office dogs, and working at our standing desks. By showing these slices of everyday life, we were able to communicate the ethos of our company in a lighthearted manner.
Agents and brokers know how important
relationships with clients are, and social
media engagement is all about forging and
strengthening those relationships.
Similarly, showcasing third-party-generated content is a great way to boost trust with your audience. Today’s social media users trust other social media users most, according to a study by user-generated content agency EnTribe. This doesn’t necessarily mean influencers, either—today’s social media users have become increasingly skeptical of them. Instead, sincere, honest reviews and endorsements from your loyal partners and associates are some of the most trusted forms of content you can circulate.
Finally, to raise your engagement rate as much as possible, view social media engagement as a two-way street. Just because you put a post up and people have started commenting doesn’t mean you’ve done a great job and can stop. Instead, you’ve done a great job, and it’s time to keep the conversation going by clicking on reactions to every comment and responding.
This will impress the platform with the traction your post is getting, which means it will promote your post over others’ going forward and leave commenters with the favorable impression that you care about them. Responding to them personally is a great way to solidify the relationship.
It’s about relationships
Agents and brokers know how important relationships with clients are, and social media engagement is all about forging and strengthening those relationships. That’s why it’s important not only to establish and maintain a social media presence, but also to adjust to the times and meet users where they are.
In 2024, that means posting content that inspires, moves, and entertains people, as well as revealing who you really are.
The author
Jacklyn Lavoie works with Otter PR as a marketing specialist with a concentration in social media. She initially refined her organic social media skills by spearheading marketing initiatives for her own online retail store. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Stetson University in May 2022 with a Bachelor of Business Administration and a minor in Marketing. During her time there, she balanced academic excellence with a distinguished career as a D1 student-athlete and was elected team captain her senior year.
