Effective social media engagement means a happily ever after customer relations. How can you entice your target audience to hold on to your SMM engagement ring?
23 No-Fail Tactics for a Sticky Social Media Engagement Ring
- Get visual with it!
Infographics by NichoDesign - Create engagement stimulating content that screams share me! In other words, your content must be relevant, educational and entertaining to your target audience. People share what they love. Make them fall in love with your content and enjoy massive engagement rewards.
- Start your social media posts with a bang! The first sentence must be very compelling to grab readers attention. (Lead your posts with an interesting question whenever possible.)
- EXPLICILTLY ask for peoples interaction. For optimal results, make your call-to-action visually attractive. For example, you may include large buttons on your YouTube video asking people to share your video and subscribe to your channel.
- ALWAYS include a persons first name when responding to their posts or comments. (People love their names as they make them feel important and appreciated. Make sure to apply this tip ALL the time even when faced with a limited writing space on some platforms such as Twitter. In this case, you may divide your response into two consecutive tweets, making sure to use peoples names in the first sentence. )
- Encourage ongoing users engagement by holding regular Q&A sessions on your Facebook page, LinkedIn group or Twitter.
- Offer thorough and prompt responses to your fans questions and comments.
- Answer private questions publicly. (For example, if you receive a question form a prospect via email, write a blog post about it and notify the sender. On the one hand, you will showcase your expertise and industry leadership. On the other hand, your fans will see that youre so keen on answering their questions and will keep coming back for more. )
- Keep the conversation going by ending your comments/answers with interesting questions.
- Hold brand-relevant contests on social media. For example, a client of mine was selling a social media scheduling tool. When we brainstormed contests ideas, I proposed to hold a question-based contest that says: If you can cut few hours off SMM every week and achieve the same results, he would you enjoy your spare time? The contest highlighted the time-saving value of his brand and the most creative answer was rewarded a 3-month free trial of his product.( I often see businesses holding all kinds of costly contests that have zero relevance to their service value! Why not design a contest that serves your branding objectives? Just a food for thought)
- Reward engagement by crediting the Top commenter/fan of the week. Even better, you may offer free consultation or free product samples to your most engaged fan(s).
- Share other peoples content and let them know you did. They will gladly share your content in return. Make sure to cherry pick quality content that's relevant to your target audience. Heres a great way to make a public notification via Twitter:@USerName Thank you, <FirstName>. Your article was featured in our top 20 social media posts of the month <PostLink>
- Encourage peoples engagement by offering a freebie in return. For example, some businesses ask people to like their Facebook page in return for a while paper or an ebook.
- Diversify your digital content to satisfy all tastes. While some people prefer visual content such as videos and images, others prefer reading. Keep content diversity in mind when crafting your content marketing strategy.
- Republish popular content that generated high engagement over and over again especially if it addresses evergreen topics rather than easy-come-easy-go trends!
- Use a social media scheduling tool (such as Hootsuite) in order to maximize social presence during peak hours and, in turn, enhance social engagement.
- Reuse your popular content. For example, if a blog post generated high buzz, turn it into a video, SlideShare presentation or an Infographic. I firmly believe that Infographics are social sharing magnets. If you agree, go for it and create your own infographics, making sure they standout in terms of design and content.
- Use emoticons strategically. According to HubSpot, a smiley face emoticon in your post can increase likes by 57%, shares by 33% and comments by 33%!
- Use stats and interesting facts in your posts to boost engagement. You may also copy a teaser paragraph segment form your blog post in order to encourage readers to click through your link.
- Create an image template including your company logo and/or a link to your website and share interesting content (such as quotes or shocking facts) using this template on regular basis. This way, when your fans share the image, your brand will be visible to a wider audience.
- Use social media analytics tools to measure your posts popularity in terms of likes, shares, comments, retweets and so forth. This invaluable information will help you pinpoint the exact content that generates high engagement and vice versa, enabling you to tweak your content marketing strategy.
- Most social media platforms support tags. Leverage tags to maximize your visibility and reachability.
- Understand the context of each social media platform in order to deliver the right content to the right audience. It goes without saying that fishing where the fish are will significantly boost your social engagement. Gary Vaynerchuk beautifully summed up this super-important tip in his must-see interview with the ever-radiant Marie Forleo. Enjoy!
Where Do You Go From Here?
Which of the tips presented with here resonated with you the most? Which ones are you going to apply NOW? Can you name other social media engagement tactics that you tried in the past?
Your valuable contribution is much appreciated. To our success!
