Social Media Engagement – While social media has proven to be a remarkable tool for projecting voices, it’s important not to forget one of its most powerful features: connecting with and engaging your audience. So how can you go about this?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Reasons to use social media to connect.
Benefits of social media engagement.
Ways to engage through social media.
Connect with Root & Roam.
You’ve got the content down: Facebook fans thoughtfully respond to your well–written captions, while Instagram followers excitedly comment under your high-res, eye-catching photos. The audience is there, the engagement steadily rising—what’s next? Rounding out your social media engagement strategy through connection!
Reasons to use social media to connect.
- Build brand loyalty. When a customer encounters your product and a competitor’s product down the aisle, your product will be the one they consistently put in their basket.
- Encourage further user engagement. This means more direct messages, comments, reviews, current audiences directing other users to your page, etc. And discover more ways to engage through social media!
- Discover new audiences. As your current audience thrives and grows, you’ll encounter new viewers and have the chance to direct them to your page.
Benefits of social media engagement.
By adopting new ways to increase social media engagement with customers, you’re humanizing a brand, both building its trustworthiness and influencing the feeling it evokes. This is one of the greatest benefits of social media engagement, since this feeling ultimately carries some brands (rather than others) to the forefront of a customer’s mind.
As the relationships between audiences and businesses grow, social media engagement ensues, strengthening your brand image even further and creating more opportunities for connecting with potential customers.
These conversations are vital to bolstering connections and broadening your audience; they work to personify your brand, allowing it to stand out better and become more relevant in users’ lives. As discussed earlier, with each positive one-on-one interaction, the memorability of your page grows! Plus, it allows others to feel seen and included, rather than talked at. Taking this conversational approach with your social media engagement strategy is about engaging with audiences, answering questions while asking them some of your own, and allowing them to feel heard by your business in an entirely new way.
Ways to engage through social media.
The first thing is to get acquainted with your audience. Learn about them! Who are they? What are their interests? What do they respond to?
Then, develop content based on this information, and balance it with what resonates with you. Let social media be a way to build trust and relationships with your community. (Check out this article on Hootsuite, which covers this in-depth.)
When looking to increase social media engagement, be sure to
- enthusiastically respond to direct messages;
- thoughtfully answer comments;
- post user-generated content (UGC); and
- engage with other users’ content.
The key to these practices is to be genuine. A social media user can tell when efforts to engage are merely made with the intent of promoting pages rather than contributing to the community. Inauthentic attempts at connecting with customers can backfire!
Instead, try to meaningfully comment on things interesting and relevant to your brand or social media page. This can help build positive associations with your page and encourage users to start conversations with you, presenting more opportunities to reap the benefits of social media engagement!
For this reason, the daunting influx of comments and direct messages occupying your notifications shouldn’t be seen as a chore, but as multiple ways to positively engage your audience through social media.
Take time to answer questions, address concerns, or have a leisurely and enjoyable conversation! While you may hold several of these conversations throughout the day, this is likely an infrequent occurrence for your follower/customer, making it more exciting and memorable. It’s what social media is for—connecting and engaging!
Reposting UGC serves a similar purpose as holding conversations with social media users. It helps users feel included and convey a sense of community—which ultimately encourages more engagements, connections, brand loyalty, and in turn, far more chances to make a sale!
Connect with Root & Roam.
All in all, prioritizing customer/audience connections can play a significant role in propelling your social pages forward, allowing you to define your brand through one-on-one engagements positively. And, in case you need a refresher on building your brand, check out our last blog post! If you’re looking for more in-depth help finding ways to engage through social media, the experts at Root & Roam are always here to help. Call us at 325-455-3130 to learn more!