Marketing communication has dramatically changed. People no longer approach marketing with the tired ‘business as usual’ mind set. The prevalence of social media must have shape-shifted everything to a point that we no longer use the same marketing tools our businesses thrived on a few years ago.
So as a marketer looking to stay updated, and never miss out on anything important, there’s always an urgent need to master the new social media engagement strategies as they come. You have to master the new tools, the trends on social media marketing, customer relation services, and effective human communication tactics and techniques to score it big in the current super-competitive world of marketing.
Besides understanding how internet tools operate, it’s also important that you find out how internet people use them on the regular. It’s only by doing so that you’ll be able to leverage them for a widespread customer reach. If anything, these are the people who matter the whole world to both you and your growing business.
This simplified guide tries to shed some light on all there’s to know about social media engagement. From the fundamentals of social media engagements to advanced hacks only experienced marketers who’ve invested heavily in understanding the dynamics and undercurrent of social media marketing are privy of, this guide strives to strengthen the connection you have with potential customers.
And that’s NOT where it all stops…
Also provided is a solid guide on how to use social media to convert the bulk of the potential customers you attract into actual customers. Even more interesting is the fact that the guide covers a series of SME tactics that you could use to convert the customers you’re attracting into active and avid evangelists of your products and business.
Understanding the Basics of Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement is an essential segment of an effective social media marketing campaign. It simply focuses on helping you connect with your social network on a personal level. Benefits abound. But core is that it’s the only way you’re guaranteed greater success in reaching even more customers and getting them to take action with little strain on your part.
So to put it quite simply, social media engagement is the process by which your social media interactions are made to create a strong connection with your online prospects.
The process itself involves the use of selected social media tools, each of which works to establish a relationship with your online connects with an aim of ideally resulting in some kind of reaction, connection, interaction or action.
Understanding Social Media Engagement through Social Analytics
The process involved in gathering, reporting and analysing your online data is so tedious and time consuming. This makes it difficult to handle everything on your own. But with social analytics, the process is simplified to a point that you can just glance over the platform and be able to tell where your social media campaign is headed.
Here’s a list of all the things you can do via social analytics:
- Measure the success rate of the social media messages you post and share. With the information you get, you can easily tell which among the post should be re-shared or what direction to lean most with regards to the kind of messages you post.
- Come up with real figures on your ROI. Through the platform, you can easily find out about your ROI. How much is your business making per every campaign run? And with this kind of information, you’ll have an easy time proving your value to both your clients and yourself.
Simple, you want to find out whether or NOT your hard work is paying off? Then make analytics your lifelong friend.
- Understand your social media engagement. It’s through analytics that you can trace the pattern within your social media interactions. With the information provided, you can spot the trend within your social media content and in extension, the underlying social network.
This allows you to understand what your audience likes for you to adjust and act quickly enough.
- Find out what’s working and what’s NOT working. You don’t need to run everything on a humble. Not when there exists analytics to help you see and compare your social media performances across different social networks from a single place.
Essential Social Media Engagement Tactics to Employ
With social media engagement, it’s easy to be left behind. You might be convinced that you have everything on the lock, but judging by the rate at which new ideas pop up and the constant changes made regarding social media algorithms, there’s a whole lot you might be missing if you’re NOT observant of the new trends.
Planning is of the essence when it comes to this. Besides saving you loads of time, it saves you unnecessary stress.
That being said, here are 10 tested ways to plan, create and schedule the content you post on social media for better engagement:
Start Creating Video Content and sharing it around
Facebook users watch an accumulated 100 million hours of videos per day. Also found is that 82% of all twitter users watch videos on the network.
So by sharing video content with your social media fans, you’ll be developing a much better way to engage with them on a way you can easily relate.
Having said that, here are some sound tips on how to create and share your video content on social media:
- Stuck on videos ideas? Well, why NOT consider preparing a how-to guide, entertainment clip, behind the scenes of how your product or services are made, your business culture, your recruiting process, a shout out clip, an event promotion clip, a documented interview and a series of customer testimonials to name a few.
- Watch out for video length. For Facebook, the ideal engagement time for a video is 1 minute 30 second, whereas twitter allows you to upload a maximum video length of 2 minutes and some 20 seconds. Another approach is to record a single video on, say, YouTube, after which you can share them across the platforms. It’s important that you also consider uploading the videos on YouTube for additional exposure.
- One way to keep your followers interested and excited about the videos you produce is to consider storytelling.
- If you can’t afford a camera, don’t worry – your smartphone can still get the job done. Start by using your smartphone to produce the videos, then progressively invest in a really nice camera, microphone, and some lights and stand.
- If your in-house expertise doesn’t allow you to produce quality videos, then consider working with an agency specialising in video production. Works well if you’re looking to take a more professional approach with the kind of videos you produce.
- You’re NOT limited as to the number of software you can use to edit your videos. For more professional edits, take your time to learn and understand adobe CS5. But in the meantime, consider using iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, and ScreenFlow among others, to create the videos.
- You’re also allowed to add some caption on the videos you produce to make your videos easy to understand.
- Use the social media captions to come up with a witty message that gets your followers jazzed up about watching your video. You can use the captions to break down the video and get your follower even more excited about watching it.
Curate and Share What Other Authoritative Voices Are Posting
While it’s always good to be original, there’s no harm in sharing a piece of content that doesn’t necessary belong to you.
Your followers don’t trust you for posting original content. They instead trust you for posting what’s important and relevant to their life.
What they’re interested in is value. So regardless of whether you came up with the post you made or pulled it off someone’s blog or page, so long as they find it useful and valuable enough to their life, then they’ll keep trusting you for information.
Your audience wants you to know them well enough so you can figure out the type of content they’re most interested in. So think of content curation as a lifesaver. That time when you have nothing valuable to post. Instead of feeding your followers subpar content, check out what the other forces within the industry you’re in have and find a way to repost, rewrite or share the post on your page.
There are so many tricks for curating online content. One approach to take is to consider checking out infographic for the formulas you could use to share all kinds of content with your followers in the hopes of keeping them engaged and interested in more of your content.
One thing with content curation is that it offers you a perfect opportunity to tag the authors behind the content you’re sharing. It’s also goes on to show that you’re able to recognise real talent in the industry you’re in and that you deem their content valuable enough and worthy of being shared around. That’s besides ensuring a steady supply of valuable content to your social media followers.
Know When to Schedule Your Social Media Posts for a More Widespread Reach
It’s simple logic – schedule to post your content when your social media followers are most active. That way you’re guaranteed a more widespread reach and better engagement.
The question to ask yourself is – when is the right time to make social media publications? When are your followers most active? Is it during the day?
Use Facebook analytics to track your social media data and find out when is the right time for you to schedule your social media posts.
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For Facebook
Facebook users are thought to be at their happiest moment on Fridays. This makes it the perfect day to post upbeat content. It’s also been found that posting your messages at 3 pm gets you most clicks while posting them at 1 pm gets you the most shares.
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LinkedIn
The best time to schedule your LinkedIn message is midweek from 5 to 6. That’s when people are in their more professional and working mood.
Also found is that a good number of business people read through their LinkedIn account during morning hours – just like newspapers. All in all, the best time to schedule your LinkedIn posts is before and after work if you’re looking for a better engagement and a more widespread reach.
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Instagram
Instagram posts tend to do so much better when updated between 8 to 9 am and so much worse when updated between 3 and 4 pm. Another study also goes on to show that videos posted between 9 and 10 pm tend to receive 34% more engagement.
In summary, it’s important that you schedule to post your Instagram messages during off work, while strictly refraining from posting them during working hours.
Try Coming Up with Really Emotional Headlines to Attract Shares and Clickthroughs
You don’t want to be the only one sharing your content online. To increase the number of social shares and win more clickthroughs, focus on letting your creativity fly.
Start by writing really witty and emotional headlines. Then let the same creativity trickle down to the rest of the content section.
The whole point is to work on increasing your social shares while increasing the amount of traffic you’re able to drive through social media.
Here are three headline formulas for you to use:
- How to (get something done) for (you to experience this desired results)
- What’s the best (any recommendation) that will (get the most desirable results)
- Way to (Get something done for (this desirable results)
There are so many variations of the above formulas. So if you find yourself confused on how to implement them, then try formulating your headlines around how-to, question headlines, and listicles.
The point is to try and attract more shares and clickthroughs through your headlines. Keep in mind that the shares you attract translates to more engagement, which happens to be the whole point of this simplified step-by-step guide.
Post Frequently
Posting frequently has been found to stretch out your reach while increasing your engagement rate.
Start by looking at how often you share your posts on social media. Now try increasing the rate of sharing the posts as you weigh in on the results you’re getting little by little until you’re finally able to come up with an ideal rate of recurrence of sharing the posts.
If you have limited time on your hand for sharing the posts, try using a scheduling tool such as coschedule or ReQueue to schedule your posts ahead of time and save yourself the trouble of posting individual messages on your own.
Share Your Social Media Content More than Once
There’s no harm in resharing your content on social media. If anything this has been found to generate 31.5 time more clickthroughs as opposed to sharing it only once.
In other words, you’re likely to increase the traffic you’re attracting through the posts you make by a whopping 3, 150 % by simply scheduling the posts you make.
You’d be surprised by the sheer number of your social media followers that soften up to your content you post upon viewing it a number of times.
This is particularly important if you’re working on scheduling your posts. Simple: just mix up the content you have, repeating some of the messages after a few run of new content, and let each one of them auto-post themselves at regular intervals.
When to Share Your Content:
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Upon publishing a new blog
Every time you share a new post on your blog or website, make a point to share it on social media for your followers to see.
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Same day, later on
Your posts have a short-lived span of 2 to 3 hours to create the intended impact. After which, they’ll trickle out and lose their effectiveness.
So, to make sure this never happens, try sharing again at least twice that same day.
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The Following Day
Once a day elapses, consider sharing the post again the following day on all the appropriate networks.
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A week after
A week after you scheduled your post, you can create a day and reschedule the posts again.
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A Month after
A month after you ran your posts, you can make a point to run the posts again. It’s also important that you make sure that all the posts are run on all the social media networks you’re signed up.
The rest is all on you. Whether you wish to share the content a year later or after a few months in, then it’s worth being reminded that the call is entirely on you.
Use Hashtags
Hashtags, especially when used on Twitter have been found to double your engagement rate. For sites such as Pinterest, hashtags help to categorise your content. Whereas for sites such as Instagram and Facebook, hashtags make it easy for your content to be found.
Go Big on Images, GIFs and Memes
Posts with images attract 18% more clickthroughs, whereas tweets with GIFs have been found to attract 167% more clickthrough compared to regular tweets.
Memes are generally favoured for their humour. If worked right, they make your content even more shareable.
All in all, just integrating visuals in the social media messages you share around should increase your engagement rate by tenfold.
For inspiration, here’s what you can do:
Visit GIPHY, Popkey, and a subreddit on Top GIFs. Curate the GIFs you find there. You also have the option to create your own GIFs with GIPHY.
Reddit is another good spot for finding trending memes. Otherwise visit memes.com where you can create your own memes.
It’s a Wrap
This tips are all you need to enhance your social media engagement and lock in more sales. But before we wrap up everything, it’s important to be reminded that MediaOne is there to help you work on increasing your social media engagement. Just in case you’re stuck or having a hard time getting it done all by yourself, email them or give them a call today and they’ll be glad to help you out.
