Rebelling

September 22, 2015

The Importance of Social Media Engagement in Modern Business

Social media is a key factor in developing a successful marketing strategy. Statistics reveal that a huge number of people around the world are using Twitter (271 million), LinkedIn (300 million) Google+ (359 million) and Facebook (1.2 billion), proving that a large part of your potential customer base presents itself on social media. Social media plays a big role in marketing by helping you to boost your business, create brand awareness, and drive business revenue. Apart from these factors, social media should be considered the first and foremost channel for providing customer support.

Following are few steps that could be followed to enhance your social media engagement:

Evaluate your content:

Creating appealing content to the audience is most essential for better marketing. You content should have the power and influence to engage the audience and make them share or retweet the content other than Facebook likes that has limited reach.

Brian Dean’s Google 200 Ranking Factors is a brilliant example of creating content that is the best in its category.

Visual content is more engaging in this age of visual web. Research says that 85% interaction rate on Facebook and 35% increased retweets on Twitter are observed with wonderful visual content.

You must have hated your friends for sending you Candy crush or Farmville requests on Facebook. But that fact is, most of the interactive and engaging content online includes games, tools, quizzes, contests or apps. It is surely expensive to create such content, but it is not difficult to come up with such ideas that offer wonderful user experience and engagement.

Time to post your content:

Apart from creating valuable and attractive content, it is necessary to know when and where to post your content to maximize your audience engagement. Your social media posts gets maximum engagement at certain times of the day. It is necessary to test and track the times that work best for your content to be posted online. Using a scheduler like Hootsuite, BufferApp, etc. to schedule content can be helpful.

According to the Social Intelligence Report, most of the likes and shares occurs in social media on Fridays. To easily increase your social media engagement, repost content that has already gone viral, in your social media pages.

Monitor social media:

Use a social media management tool to manage all of your social media communications in one single place and maintain better communication with customers to build long lasting relationships. Make sure you monitor all variations of your brand name online and respond to customers as early as possible.

Not every person mentions brand name online or tag your company in their post to bring it to your attention, but keeping track of them and responding to their posts may create a solid community of engaged customers which a successful step.

Build a circle of engaging customers:

Create expectations for your audience by promising that you will respond to their posts within a limited time period. This increases the rate of communication with your company and builds trust and reliability.

Provide solutions for customer problems through your content to help them solve it. The “How to” content is more necessary and helpful for fixing their problems with your brand and will usually get higher level of customer engagement.

Be an early adopter and use new social media channels for increasing social media engagement. Monitoring social media channels and responding to customers at the right time, even for negative comments is more necessary for better brand building through social media.

Two foundational elements of social media engagement are showing up regularly and being an active participant or connector. Apart from these posting valuable, surprising and viral content online are additional benefits.