How to Improve Your Business’ Social Media Engagement
You should be treating social media engagement like a dinner party, welcoming people and encouraging conversation between the host and the guests.
For modern brands with an online presence, strong social media engagement is a sign that you're making an impact in the market.
It's not just about looking popular: it's about making meaningful connections with current and future customers, which will serve to boost your brand ( and ROI ) both on and offline.
Read on for the ultimate guide to building, managing, and measuring social media engagement and all its business benefits.
Source: blog.hootsuite.com
Importance of Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement helps you strengthen your customer relationships. When customers engage with your posts or send you a message on social media you're presented with an opportunity to get to know your customers and build a relationship with them. Answer their questions, respond playfully when appropriate, and go above and beyond to offer excellent customer service.
Social media engagement also allows you to build customer loyalty. By helping your customers when they're in need, building a relationship with them, and offering a one-of-a-kind customer experience, you'll be able to increase your customer loyalty. Customers will trust your brand because you've answered their questions. They'll fall in love with your brand because you've joked around with them, expressed your gratitude, and resolved their issues.
You'll also increase your sales through social media engagement. By being active on social media and responding to customer posts, customers will feel confident making a purchase through your store. Even if there are negative comments on your page, if you respond positively and resolve the issue, you'll still grow your sales. You can also grow your sales by recommending certain products when asked. Avoid making every response to a customer about your products though. The sales will come naturally.
Source: oberlo.com
Analyze your current engagement
To know how to improve your engagement, you must first analyze it. As mentioned earlier, engagement analytics are available natively for all major platforms. If you use a management platform like Sprout Social, you'll be able to see data summarized up for you.
In the above two examples, the number of engagements are added up for you for Instagram and the post engagement rate is averaged out per Facebook post. How do you analyze this? If you see post engagement dropping week over week, then your posts need to be adjusted to better suit your audience (assuming nothing else has changed in the world or in your paid promotions). If a post has a significant engagement rate over all the others, it's important to make note of what made it stand out. This helps you identify what realm of content to focus on if you want to improve your engagement.
Source: sproutsocial.com
Have a consistent, authentic voice
Putting yourself out there on social media can be scary. Will people like what you have to say? Are you putting your brand in its best light?
Having an authentic voice on social media is important but not as easy as it sounds. It's essential because it humanizes your brand and encourages people to respond and talk about you positively.
It's difficult because things like “voice” and “tone” are quite subjective. Here's how Kevan Lee described the challenge in a previous blog post:“We don't want brands talking at us as if we are dollar signs. We want authentic communication. Finding a voice for your social media marketing can be difficult because the concept is somewhat unlike other optimization strategies online. Voice is not a statistic you can track or a design element you can tweak. Voice goes deeper than that.”As an example of how to develop your social media voice,here's a four-part formula suggested by Stephanie Schwab, writing for Social Media Explorer. She breaks voice down into tone, character, language, and purpose.
But what does that look like in practice?
Source: buffer.com
Respond to Followers
A conversation requires input from both sides, and social media interactions are no different! By replying to incoming mentions, comments, and direct messages, you can show your followers that your brand cares about them—and that you're interested in continuing the conversation. This will likely be rewarded with more mentions, comments, and direct messages. When responding to followers, make sure you address both positive and negative feedback—all preferably within 24 hours. And don't be afraid to redirect the conversation to DMs for a more responsive and personalized interaction.
Source: hurrdatmarketing.com
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Optimize your profile on each channel
Once you've chosen which channels you are going to focus on, take time to explore the default pages and informational fields for each. Make sure your company logo, business name, address, contact information, and store URL are correct and consistent on each channel, and add a short sentence or paragraph describing your business. This will help customers see that the page is for a legitimate business, which will make them more likely to engage.
Also consider the messaging and response capabilities for each channel. Can you connect the messaging feature to your site's live chat feature so that customer service can handle questions all in one place? Can you pre-save replies to common questions or set up an automated response menu? These can help customers reaching out to you through social media find the information they need more quickly.
Source: volusion.com
Use targeting to maximize organic potential
This tactic will vary from platform to platform, but tweaking the settings of your posts to target specific members of your audience can give you a boost in organic potential. For Facebook, you can use organic post targeting to tweak who will see it.
There are eight options on Facebook you can use:
Gender
Relationship
Status
Education level
Age
Location
Language
Interests
Post end date
The same type of options are available on Twitter. For example, with their use hashtags, which allow you to categorize your posts. Take any opportunity you can to better target your audience so the right people see your posts.
Source: mention.com
Post consistently
Post consistently across all your platforms to help your engagement stay strong. It's not enough to get a bout of inspiration, upload a bunch of memes onto Twitter and then not post for a month. You need to have a consistent schedule.
Being consistent helps you stay at the top of your followers' minds. It also helps the Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter algorithms find and favour your content, showing your posts to more people (and potential followers).
If you have trouble keeping up with posts, try using a scheduling tool . Options like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Later allow you to schedule posts for multiple social media platforms at the same time, making the process a breeze.
Automation tools take a lot of the hassle out of posting on social media. That way you can set aside time to schedule a bunch of posts at the start (or end) of the week, or even month, and free up time to actually engage with users on a day-to-day basis.
Source: paperform.co
CONCLUSION
All in all, social media campaigns, have a lot of potential and if done well, can skyrocket your business efforts.
If you're not yet implementing any of these tactics, make sure you start including them in your marketing strategy to increase social media engagement.
If you're already driving some engagement using a few of these tips, try implementing the other digital marketing tips highlighted in this post.
Remember, social media is a long-term goal. Make sure to plan ahead and know what you want to gain out of it first.
Do you have any questions about executing some of these tactics? Feel free to ask them in the comments below.
And don't forget – you can always reach out to us to help you improve your social media strategy.
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