Businesses treat social media engagement in different ways. One is to come whenever needed, make some noise and go back. And continue doing so whenever required. The second method is, marketers, come to make noise, engage with the audience and customers. These type of marketers are always there for the clients. They address all their requirements and make them feel wanted in the engagement party.
The second type of marketers always has a better marketing edge as compared to the first one. It very easy to blast out your content on social media, but if you use it as a platform to engage with your customers, to increase leads, brand awareness or customer support. Social media engagement is the key to track your leads.
So, marketers let’s get started.
What is social media engagement?
Social media engagement is about someone interacting with your social media account.
It comes in the form of metrics such as:
- Likes
- Shares
- Follows
- Comments
- Re-tweets
- Click-throughs
Your audience interacting with you on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook is Social media engagement.
When you have audience interacting with you on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. It becomes crucial for you to measure the effectiveness of your social media campaign and accomplishing goals for generating leads and sales.
The main purpose of social media is to be social. It may be obvious, but many businesses get it all wrong. The one-way social media dialogue, where you just blast the content doesn’t really work.
Your followers surely don’t like to talk to faceless organizations. They want to engage to real people on social media. Engaging with your one-on-one audience shows there is a real person behind the account. This can make a difference in they have behind the brand.
You need to plan out your social media engagement. You might think that you need to plan for something as simple as responding to a comment on the internet?
Well, yes! You have to plan for each and everything you do on social media. A healthy plan for your social media engagement strategy helps you ensure every engagement you have on social media. It is not just useful to the person you are engaging with but also holistically to your entire business.
Social media engagements plans look different for every business. And Facebook engagement is separate for Star Bugs and Nike. Here, are a few essential pointers you need to remember.
You should have a clear insight into what your followers gain while interacting with you and your brand on social media.
If educating people is what your Brand is expert at, then your engagement strategy should be focusing on sharing resources, answering questions or giving advice.
You should be clear about how you outline social media to impact your business positively.
Here are some of the social media goals.
- Get feedbacks about products or campaigns
- Finding and nurturing leads
- Providing information that will help customers move from one point in the buying journey to the next.
- Change Brand perception
1. Know your audience
You will know if your tweet will be engaging or no before you even start typing the tweet. Because if you know your audience, it is just a matter of sharing the right content that will create a buzz among them.
You should be in your audience’s head, before you decide on things like social copy, posting frequency and things you are going to share.
Your audience will tell you what they want to see on social media. So do not assume what your customers want. And when viewers don’t engage businesses are wondering what exactly went wrong?
To know your customers mind, you need to spend time immersing yourself in your customer’s needs, desires and pain points. Listen to your customers, their struggles regarding a single topic. By doing so, you are opening a whole new horizon of tactics for social media marketing.
2. Create and share valuable content
One brand that does this well is Tech Insider. Their science and technology news has done full justice to the audience. As the audience expects to give all the information technology, science culture and innovation.
This is the kind of content that addresses the audiences need to learn more about the future.
3. Stay Trendy
The simplest way to keep your audience engaged is marketing about topical and trending topics around the world.
You need to jump into the current topics to instantly connect with your audience. The trending is likely to be top of their minds.
A trending hashtag, sports event or a pop culture news could work wonders for your site. How Marketers Can Increase Social Media Engagement?
4. Interact with your audience
Remember engaging with your audience is always better than just providing them with one-sided information.
- You can split the interactions into two categories:
- Reactive interactions
- Proactive interactions
Reactive interactions
Responsive interactions is an act of answering direct messages, comments or incoming mentions at you brands on social media. The reactive guidelines should cover when and how your business interacts with the signals it receives directly on social media.
These are some of the strategies your brand needs to follow in reactive engagement tactics.
Whether or not to reply to every single message or comment at your brand or business on social media platforms.
• How you pass on messages for another department to handle ( Example- Customer support or sales.)
• An overview of the tools and workflow to manage incoming messages.
Proactive engagement
Proactive engagement is when you are initiating the first move to your audiences.
People are mentioning about your brand on social media but may not be addressing you directly. These are your potential engagements. You can search for indirect mentions of your brand name somewhere in the messages with misspellings and relevant conversations based on keywords and phrases.
Create the buzz around a specific campaign or product.
When you are talking about Proactive engagement tactics of your brand. Consider the following.
Here are five social media engagement tools
Is it getting difficult for you to manage all your social media engagement? Here are some of the tools that will help you sort out the social media engagement.
For Photo Editing:
• Canva– It is a photo editing tool that makes it easy for you to edit pictures as per the exact specifications and size, depending on each network you are using.
For GIFs
• Giphy– Just type in any keyword and you will immediately find an entertaining match of amazing GIFs for some entertainment and engagement.
How to measure social media engagement?
To get good idea about social media engagements, you will need lots of data. To see if your social media campaigns worked or no, you need to analyze the data.
Hence, your social media analytics for your brand.
The most used social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, all have their own analytical system. You can go to their analytics and measure the engagements.
Facebook Analytics has a very robust and extensive dashboard with many ways to track your audience engagement.
You need to have a business profile on Instagram, for you to access Instagram Insights. This Dashboard provides you with all the essential social media engagement you need for the campaign.
Your ultimate goal is to design engagement efforts to build new and better relationships with customers. But how do you measure these? Just like the other aspects of social media you need to find out ways to measure the engagements. It is vital that you set some achievable goals and justify the time you spend on it.
Put your Social media and marketing efforts by using the above strategies. You can also hire a content marketer to curate a strategy as per your requirement and your brand.