The much promoted concept of social media engagement is all about showing some love to your audience, to your followers and to your community.
When we talk about engagement, we're referring to the specific activities that take place on your social media pages; the fan interactions you have, your brand sharing, the level of involvement and influence your brand has over its audience.
This is a fantastic opportunity to reach out to your brand community, and its always on the to-do-list when building social media strategies and plans, but many companies lack the patience to follow social media engagement through.
Companies that are successful at social media engagement, are social media dedicated, proactive, listening, and yes ... they frequently engage their audience. Social media engagement is definitely not a passive experience nor a nine-to-five chore.
The fact is, the deeper your brand is connected to your audience, the stronger your brand ties with your customers and prospects will be. Brand associations, brand endorsements and brand promotion are bound to happen if you're honest and consistently engaging with your fans and followers. You also have to take the good with the bad, and often it's how you handle the bad that is so important.
All this is great - right?
But how can you be sure that you have achieved the appropriate level of engagement for your brand? One way to measure the level of engagement your have is to look at your data. This can be a measurement of how much love do you get on social media? Data is always key.
Insights into social media activities can provide us with at least a linear approach on your brand’s engagement performance – whether there's an increase, or decrease in numbers, is a minimum measurement requirement for every company, large and small. This can be as simple as measuring likes, followers, shares, comments, forwards, retweets, favourites etc.
Many businesses are doing an excellent job sharing content that attracts and engages new followers and clients. But often these brands neglect the engagement required to retain existing followers.
Among other things, this involves thanking your social media followers and doing it in a way to prove you’re an engaging brand. In addition to actually tweeting “Thanks for sharing” or “Thanks for following,” there are several ways to really impress your followers while saying thanks.
Following people back is a great way to show your appreciation. An even more impactful way would be to share their content with your own followers. While many social media users have come to expect the occasional message or follow-back, very few expect to be called out by name. Sharing a piece of relevant content from a new follower, be it a Facebook post, Instagram photo or YouTube video, can be a significant moment for that individual.
But if social media engagement is the most effective way of developing positive interactions and affinity between a brand and its customers, then what's the best way of measuring this.
Taking this up a notch, the basic measurements mentioned previously, are important and they are better than nothing, as they represent a good start to tracking as an essential digital marketing discipline,
But those numbers are not enough to measure feelings, impact, attention and influence. In our opinion the best way for a brand to establish a higher level of social media engagement monitoring is to develop a continual monitoring process, using technology, that allows you to closely monitor and react to trends, feedback and comments very quickly, if not instantly.
By using a social media monitoring tool such as HootSuite or HubSpot, you'll be able to:
As a digital marketing agency this is what we do for our clients. We want to increase social media engagement, by continuously monitoring brand feelings and sentiment. But we're also using social media to to attract more visitors to client websites by creating content based on the conversations we track online. Our client goal is to help delight customers and convert more leads by adding context and support to your social conversations.
To this end we have to work closely with our clients and we'd need to remain constantly informed about news and trends that matter to our client, so we can push a brand at the exact moment (Google is calling these Micro-Moments) so we can seize an opportunity and target social media for appropriate engagement.
For us, social media engagement is all about augmenting your brand’s human attributes and becoming part of your audience community. With love. And care.
About Terry Marketing
Terry Marketing (www.terrymarketing.com) is an Inbound Marketing Agency providing Inbound Marketing, Website, Social Media and HubSpot marketing automation services to small and medium sized businesses. We're focused on generating traffic, leads and sales and we're experts in the Inbound Marketing, lead generation process and how to increase website traffic, leads and website conversion rates. Terry Marketing is a Gold level Hubspot Partner, a certified HootSuite Ambassador agency, and a certified Google Agency Partner.