We live in the times when digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest are at their peak. These social media platforms have become more than just a place to connect with friends and to share the moments. Over the last few years, these have evolved into the most powerful and rewarding marketplace for businesses.
Every post, story, comment, and every connected user is a potential customer, and every engagement matters. Today, businesses are investing heavily (money as well as effort) to improve their social media engagements.
According to social media experts and marketing professionals, social media engagements are more than just number quantity. It is also about the quality and effectiveness of the engagement that generates leads.
Here are some important ideas from newstricky that would empower your social media marketing strategies this year.
Know Your Audience And Their Usage Trends
A crucial aspect of effective engagement is visibility and being seen. You might spend days creating the perfect content and come up with something that interests your clientele. But, if it doesn’t reach your audience, what use is all that effort. So, it is essential to understand the usage and activity of your followers.
Things like when and how do they interact with your content, what are their interests and how does your engagement affect them, and what are their activity trends and how often do they interact with you and your competition. All these insights would help you formulate effective strategies and engagement plans.
Their Words Are More Valuable Than Yours
Any potential customer would see your content as a sales pitch if it is coming from you. On the contrary, the same coming from a fellow user or customer is more likely to get attention. So, encourage user-generated content on your profile and leverage your audience to tag, comment, and share their experiences with your products.
This would only trigger a chain reaction and improve your reach as well as credibility. Motivate your audience to share their thoughts and moments with your services/ products. Create and promote hashtags that uniquely identify your business and boost your presence.
Interact With Your Audience And Keep In Touch
One of the great ways to showcase that you value your customers is to listen and share. Present them with opportunities to interact with your business and to engage themselves. If you are targeting Instagram, you could use ‘question and quiz stickers’ to get your audience to share their views and experiences.
If you are launching a new product or hosting an event, use the ‘location and countdown’ stickers to invite your audience to be a part of it. If it suits your marketing strategy, set up live sessions with your users. Create awareness and excitement – give them a reason to come back to you.
Be Active And Post Frequently
Being active does not mean posting new content every few hours or to keep hosting activities. Engagements are about staying in touch and letting your customers know that they matter. Social media interactions are two-way, so give people the center stage.
If someone posts a comment or shares about your products, address them and respond to those. This could help improve your interactions with your audience and also showcase that you care about them. Moreover, post frequently and engage with the audience. The freshness of your content would help you stay a part of their feeds and keep your people in touch.
Don’t Be Monotonous, Try Something New
There is so much content on social media platforms and people spend a fair share of their time scrolling through their feeds. If your content is too mainstream or is getting monotonous over time, people might lose interest and move on.
And that’s not something you want for your business. So, keep things fresh and try new forms of content to get their attention. Use videos, graphics, interactive stickers, and hosting events to keep your audience engaged for longer.
Track Your Performance And Engagements
For any business, numbers are the most important thing to look for. Whether those numbers are about revenue, profits, sales, or your engagements. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram provide built-in analytics tools that can give you insights into your posts.
Information like how many people interacted with your posts, when and how long did they stay, what led them to your posts, etc., are provided. These tools can help you understand a lot about your usage and how your activities influence your engagements. You can also get data about the audience demographics, interests, and activity trends.
Diversify Your Social Media Strategy
Engaging across various social media platforms gives you access to a wide audience and increases your chances of engaging potential leads. Furthermore, cross-promoting your content across different channels would help bring your audience together.
By cross-promoting, we mean that mentioning or sharing links to something you shared on Instagram on a video that you upload on Youtube. Or, you can also mention a success story someone shared on Twitter on your Facebook timeline.
Social media promotions and engagements have become important in the current marketing landscape. Contrary to the traditional marketing strategies, social media marketing is a booming segment and it offers greater success for business and engagements.
That’s why it’s important to pay attention to your marketing strategies and find ways to execute them more strategically. After all, the quality of engagements and relationship-building matters more than just growing the number of engagements.