How to improve social media engagement
Cutting through the noise on social media and gaining a share of your customers’ attention can be a difficult task. The effectiveness of your social media channels, and the extent to which you are getting a return on investment for the time and energy invested, relies on the extent to which customers are engaging with your brand. How can you improve social media engagement? Here are some tips to get you started.
Identify what you have to say
Selecting which specific issues or topics you are going to speak about is crucial. Many businesses make the mistake of casting the net too broadly and commenting on issues that are not interesting for their potential customers.
The goal should be to create a community around an area of interest. Identify the areas your business specialises in, share this content regularly and remain consistent and on message. By establishing your niche you are positioning your brand as leading and credible experts, and people are much more likely to consider your content as credible and valuable.
Start and join conversations
Social media is built upon the power of conversation. Social media channels are not designed for the one-way push of information; rather they present an opportunity to create a two-way dialogue with customers.
The way to do this is through asking questions, answering other users’ questions and responding to mentions and comments. Being an active participant in online conversations will not only help build your online profile, but will strengthen the relationships between you and your online community.
Understand your audience
Understanding who you want to speak to and where they are is critical. By breaking down your target audiences’ demographics, interests and behaviours you can better understand their online activity.
Understand who uses which social media platforms so you know where your potential customers are and where to invest your time. By engaging the right people via the right channels you can improve engagement with the people that matter; your potential customers.
Post at the right time
By posting your content at the right time you can increase the chances for improved engagement.
The best time to post on social media is when the majority of people will be either at a computer or using internet enabled mobile devices. Research reveals this is Monday to Friday between 7:00am to 9:00am when people are travelling to work, during lunchtime between 12:00pm to 1:00pm, or early evenings between 5:00pm and 7:00pm when people are travelling home. Friday afternoons are always quiet across most platforms and engagement picks up again around Sunday evening.
Share great content
The content you share on social media needs to be timely, good quality and should drive people to share it with their online networks.
The most important thing to remember is your content needs to be interesting and valuable for your followers. Social media is not an appropriate arena for a hard sales message, rather your aim is to generate and contribute to conversation.
Not all content needs to be created by you from scratch. Repurpose old content, upload guest posts or articles or use content generated by your customers and clients. Hold regular brainstorms with team members to help generate content ideas.
Improving engagement on your social media channels won’t happen overnight. However, by taking these simple steps, investing your time well and tracking your progress along the way, over time you can make significant inroads into better engaging your customers with your brand.
Sydney Social Media Agency, CP Communications provides specialist social media strategies as well as traditional and online PR strategies that get amazing results. Contact us today. For more great tips visit our website www.cpcommunications.com.au or download our free Social Media eBook http://bitly.com/12GEPor