What does a successful dinner party look like?
Does it look like a gathering of a lot of people sitting silently, making no talk to each other?
Or does it look like them having a ball of a time, talking, dancing and taking second servings.
Of Course the latter and that’s how you should think about social media engagement.
Having a big audience on your social media platforms is no big deal unless that audience is engaging with your content. Let’s try to understand social media engagement and how you can do it right.
What is Social Media Engagement?
Social media engagement is the brand’s interaction with their audience. It measures how your audience responds and reacts to your brand and its content on social platforms. It can be measured in the form of:
- Likes
- Retweets
- Shares
- Mentions
- Favourites
- Replies and DMs
Is it really so important?
For brands, it is a good question to ask whether social media engagement is really so important. The short answer is yes. Social platforms only push content that gets more interactions and the fact is that your audience is also looking for you to interact with them.
People and businesses exchange 8 billion facebook messages every month simply because social platforms are the number one choice for customer care. According to a Twitter survey, 71% customers expect brands to respond within an hour of tweeting while brands who are responsive on social media are more favourable to customers than those that don’t respond.
For a business, it’s the quality that should matter and not the quantity and the same applies to their social media audience as well.
Social media engagement gives brands a direct line with their audience. It is a way to make connections and relationships. It gives access to important insights that can help improve customer experience and take their feedback to build better products.
Now you know the importance of social media engagement, let’s learn to do it right
How to Get Social Media Engagement Right
Start Engaging With Your Audience
Posting pretty pictures on social media may get you a following but it won’t do much for your social media engagement. To get that right, you have to interact with your audience and that means starting a conversation, replying to comments, and responding to feedback or mentions.
Just like you go to a party to make connections and have a good time, think of your social presence in the same way as well. You won’t just go, make a speech and come back right? You will talk to people and introduce yourself, make new connections, respond to their queries and put your best foot forward. Your audience on social platforms is waiting for the same.
Your audience is waiting for you to interact with them. They may already be talking about you and if you find it difficult to track all brand mentions, a social monitoring tool like Notifier can help you out. By setting up searchers you can easily be notified and not miss any mentions, whether you were tagged or not.
Be Consistent and Authentic
It can be scary for brands to put themselves out there but there is no way around it. Audiences love it when brands they like are authentic in their communication. Authenticity helps humanize a brand and encourages a positive response.
Having said that it can be a challenge to be authentic and consistent online. However, once marketers are able to identify and develop their brand voice it can become easy to engage with audience online.
You can also think of adding GIFs and emojis to your online conversations. These have become an integral part of online conversations and help add personality. Brands use humor to form connections and show the human side.
Know the Platform Algorithm
Different social media platforms have different algorithms and to boost your social media engagement and get it right, you must be aware of the algorithm changes on the platforms you are using.
For instance, LinkedIn factors the engagement within the first 60 minutes of posting into the reach while Instagram doesn’t favour time.
You should dig into your audience insights as well to find out the best time to post. It can significantly affect your engagement. No brand would want its post to not gain any traction. Posting at the “right” times can make a difference to your social media engagement as well.
Know Your Audience
Another important factor to consider to get your social media engagement right is to know your audience. When you don’t know someone how can you possibly engage with them? This is why it is important for brands to have audience insights into their likes, dislikes, demographics and pain points.
When you know who you are talking to, you can effectively craft messages that appeal to them. Knowing your audience will also help you decide the kind of content to post, when to post, the social platforms to use and the brand voice.
Join a Conversation
Is it getting difficult to find topics to post about every day? Well, you can join in on a conversation that is already happening to build momentum. Viral memes, holidays and current events are all good excuses to make a post or join an exisitng conversation in a way that ties to your brand.
Keep it Flowing
Making conversation online is an art and brands can divide their engagement strategy into proactive and reactive engagement. Reactive engagement means responding to comments you are tagged in and direct mentions. Proactive engagement means sparking a conversation yourself with your audience.
This can include starting a question series, seeking feedback or simply creating a conversation around interests and hobbies that relate to your brand. There are plenty of oppurtunities online to engage your audience and find possible customers.
If you have the right searchers set up for your brand and industry in Notifier, you will never miss any mentions. A lot of them are lost in incorrect spellings and not being tagged. Using Notifier can help you identify all these opportunities to spark a conversation with your audience and increase social media engagement to find leads and grow sales.