Social Media is beginning to take its rightful throne in the world of marketing as for many businesses it’s the key catalyst for brand growth. Social media engagement is a sign that you are making an impact in the market.
It is not just about looking popular: it is about making meaningful connections with current and future customers, which will serve to boost your brand (and ROI) both on and offline.
Hiring a social media management company can help you harness the power of social media. For example, to increase awareness of your social channels or to develop new relationships with the people your customers care about.
As a business, it is quality, not just quantity, that you should be striving for.
Know your audience
First thing is to make sure you have the right audience. Knowing your audience is central to any marketing strategy especially for social media engagement.
With the great diversity of marketing styles and strategies out there, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the fundamentals inherent to every strategy. Realistically, only a handful of principles are necessary for success in literally every marketing strategy out there. One of the more important is this: You must know your audience, inside and out.
If you don’t know your audience, you won’t even know what strategies or media to choose, let alone what messages to give them or how to treat them once they become full-fledged customers.
Here are the 7 actionable or practical ways you can better understand your audience.
- Do your research in advance
- Look at your competitors
- Create a customer persona
- Get to know your clients personally
- Monitor reader comets and engagements
- Witness external social habits
- Conduct a survey
Look at the content that you are sharing.
Is the content going to generate social media engagement? Questions are much more likely to generate engagement than statements. If somebody asks you a question, you are more likely to answer it than if somebody makes a statement to you. If somebody just walks up to you randomly on the street and says, “It’s a sunny day,”. You are probably not going to say anything. But if they say, “What time is it?”, you are going to look down at your watch and you’re going to say, “It’s ten to five”.
We have a natural inclination to answer people’s questions. I would look at the content that they are sharing and make sure that that content is true engagement-worthy. Are they asking something that is going to generate engagement?
[bctt tweet=” Social Media is beginning to take its rightful throne in the world of marketing as for many businesses it’s the key catalyst for brand growth. Social media engagement is a sign that you are making an impact in the market.” username=”ThatCompanycom”]Be Consistent and Tell a Story
Consistently posting at the time your audience is most active and posting popular types of content can help your future posts perform better since you know what your audience likes.
From a brand, perspective consistency makes storytelling truly effective. Every brand should have a consistent overarching narrative that allows situation-specific stories to fit into it. It is also vital that the team is well versed in what the brand story is, what goes into it and how to use appropriate language that will communicate the message to its audience. Therefore, you must keep an eye on how well your story is serving your brand.
Social media content should be curated to support campaigns highlighting certain customer pain points and topics of interest. Another important piece of this is that your social media engagement efforts should align with the rest of your marketing efforts so that the messaging your audience is seeing is consistent wherever they go.
Analyze your engagement
It is hard to measure your growth if you don’t know where you are starting from.
If your business wants to improve its social media engagement, you must first look at where your engagement currently stands.
Engagement rate is a metric that measures the amount of interaction social content earns relative to reach or other audience figures. Engagement rates are the currency of the social media marketing industry.
Vanity metrics like followers, likes, and impressions count for something. But engagement metrics like shares and comments give your social media performance perspective.
Make sure to keep tracking regularly so that you catch jumps or dips in engagement that can give you valuable clues about what is working (or, just as importantly, what is not).
Using a social media scheduling tool can help your company stay consistent with this approach. You can also hire the best white label digital marketing agency to execute your social media strategy.
Select your engagement strategy
Improving your social media engagement strategy takes time and effort as every audience is unique. The end goal is to increase the quality of your followers, not just the quantity.
Increasing your engagement rates will not only help to convert your followers into customers, but it will improve your social media reach.
A customer engagement is a plan to increase customer satisfaction by having more positive interactions with them. It can be through any channel, from in-person to online, to over the phone.
Great strategies take customer engagement from reactive to proactive. They should include both how your team interacts with customers when they reach out on their own and ways your company can take the initiative and actively engage with your base.
Social Media contests and giveaways
There are so many rules and guidelines and so much planning and preparation involved. A contest could be the best tactic you have ever introduced to grow your reach, drive site traffic, and generate leads, but you want to ensure you’re doing it right.
Social media contests are a proven way to get the word out, get people interested in what you offer, collaborate with an influencer.
More brands are making the shift towards enhanced customer service and two-way communication. Makes sense, contests and giveaways will remain as relevant as ever, but their main goal will no longer center around increasing the number of likes and followers alone.
Instead, brands are actively starting to use contests as another way to provide something of value to their audience. Allowing them to not only get on the radar of potential consumers but stay on the radar as well.
Use a Call to Action
A key element in increasing social media engagement is always including a call to action at the end of your posts. A call to action is a way for you to entice your social media audience to focus their attention on the next action you want them to take. Encouraging your followers to like, comment, or share can help increase engagement on a post. Without any reminder, a follower may see a post with no call to action and simply scroll past it.
Calls-to-action drives your followers to act and give your social media content a purpose, but they can also do much more.
By motivating your audience to act, social CTAs can transform casual fans into active followers. When you use the right calls-to-action, you can boost your conversion rates and increase your return on investment (ROI). That means social CTAs can be essential for helping your brand reach its social media goals efficiently.
Including a creative, funny, or thought-provoking caption can entice your followers to comment their thoughts on a post and therefore boost the post. Liking every post on your feed and commenting on posts is not routine for everyone. A gentle reminder can help convert more of your followers into followers that consistently engage with your content.