How To Boost Engagement Across Social Media
May 3, 2018
As you know, social media has long been a hot topic among marketing professionals and businesses for years. From connecting with friends and family to viewing pages related to their favorite brands, users across various social media platforms are a growing target audience for businesses both large and small.
If you actively manage a Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or other social media account, you know how hard it can be to effectively engage a distracted audience with posts, tweets, or shares across your page. From growing impressions to carefully monitoring clicks and other valuable traffic metrics, staying ahead of the game and boosting engagement is always a top priority for professionals.
To help, we put together our team, their experience, and a few best practices to highlight a few of the most effective strategies you can use to boost the performance of your campaign and stand out from the crowd.
Spark A Conversation
Engaging with your target audience across different mediums should be focused around a central goal. For professionals in the marketing/communications realm, that goal is usually to start a conversation, share value, and hopefully capture value in return. Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are geared towards the first goals of starting a conversation and sharing value.
Many professionals who turn to social media as a way to spread the word about their company simply share informational posts about their company, products, or services. While posts like this might sound like a good way to generate interest and sales, they’re usually easy to ignore and often don’t create an open dialogue with customers.
Creating posts that open a line of communication with an audience and peak their interests is a much more effective way to build brand awareness and can lead these audience members to conversions in the future. Creating unique posts that focus around users submitting their opinions or feedback is key.
Putting together surveys or poles across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram might be a great way to get customers excited about sharing their feedback or visiting your site. The B2C example below from Walmart could easily be used for any product you sell. For instance, the product that receives the most likes or shares will be next months featured on-sale product. The information and dialogue you receive from the post, positive or negative, can help you tailor your approach and begin refining your marketing strategy.
If you want to test your audience’s knowledge, putting together a small trivia game like the one from our client Diesel Pro below is a great way to get customers sharing their ideas. Bonus: Having a small prize like a t-shirt or gift card for the first correct answer is always a great incentive.
Engaging Media
Whether Facebook is your preferred platform, or you favor LinkedIn or Instagram, adding engaging media to your social media posts offers numerous benefits for both your business and audience. In today’s online arena, everything from infographics and unique images to full videos are being used by businesses just like yours to captivate audiences and drive them to complete specific actions.
Gone are the days of publishing plain text posts and hoping your loyal followers like or share them with friends. On today’s social platforms, users are showing significantly higher engagement metrics on posts that feature videos or valuable infographics. Sitting down with a graphic designer and putting together an interesting infographic depicting statistics from your industry is a common theme.
If you’re in the HVAC industry, putting together a graphic that shows the energy savings of investing in a new HVAC unit over a five-year period might be interesting to homeowners. From an engagement standpoint, infographics alone are being share three times more than any other type of post across social media.
Videos are another common tool businesses use to capture the attention of their target market and deliver valuable information related to the who, what, where, why, and how of their products or services to their audience. Because of the fact that so much valuable information can be conveyed through rich media like videos, experts predict that by 2019 about 80% of online traffic will generated from videos alone.
Unique images, infographics, and videos aren’t just a cool way to grab the attention of a target audience. These valuable tools can be used to open a line of communication and allow both businesses and consumers to understand each other’s unique needs and exchange value in the future.
Balance Work & Play
Social media wasn’t given the first name of “Social” by mere happenstance. Social media was designed to bring people together to share ideas, connect with colleagues and family, and enhance relationships for users. As both a business and a user, keeping this original purpose in mind can help not only boost engagement metrics for your accounts but also create a candid feel for your brand.
Posting “Deals of the Week” or new product announcements is always a great way to get the word out about what’s going on with your business, but taking a break and showing the human side of your business has its benefits too.
Giving customers a glimpse into your company culture not only shows potential customers there are real people behind your brand, it also creates a unique opportunity to peak their interest and get their attention. Going live with a video and showcasing a few fun activities from your company party or event is an easy way to grab user’s attention and pull them in to learn more.
By continually showing the lighter side of your company and giving customers a glimpse into who you truly are and what you do can help build trust over a period of time. For example, have you ever researched a company and found absolutely nothing about their team or company history on their websites or social media pages?
Have you ever visited an incredibly formal website written in industry heavy jargon and wondered if it’s truly a local company or if it’s actually based overseas? Showing who you are as a team and what you do helps alleviate these uncertainties and helps create a comprehensive brand image your customers can resonate with as they begin to communicate and build a relationship.
For companies large and small, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are one of the easiest ways to communicate with their customers and build their brands. Whether you own a small local restaurant or are the marketing director at a large manufacturer, creating a positive experience for your users across your different accounts is a pivotal key to boosting long-term engagement.
Looking to take your social media to the next level? Not sure how? Think VIG!