In a world where individuals are accustomed to having the information we need at our fingertips, social media has become an essential marketing distribution channel.
One reason social media is so effective is that it makes it fun and easy to consume and share information. Individuals can share ideas, pose questions, and have meaningful conversations with peers from all over the world without even having to leave their desks. And thanks to the rise in mobile usage that has occurred during this past decade, individuals now have access to social media pretty much everywhere they go.
Because social media is the place to be, however, it can be very easy to get lost in the crowd. To avoid having your target audience breeze through your posts, you need the perfect social media engagement recipe to make your followers stop scrolling, check out what you have to say, and take action.
While it will take some work to fine-tune your social media engagement strategy, the process is easier than you think if you have the right tactics in place. Today, we’re sharing 5 engagement tips to help you boost your social media game and earn more clicks, shares, and conversions.
1. Lean Into the Power of Employee Advocacy
Creating an effective social media engagement strategy is not a one-person job. If you want to get in front of your target audience and improve engagement, it helps to have as many people as possible sharing your content.
Getting your followers to engage with your content is the ultimate goal, but that can only do so much if you only have a few followers to start with. That’s why encouraging employee advocacy is a great way to build your social media presence. Having your employees engage with and share your organization’s recent posts on their own social channels can help you secure better placement on social feeds so you can reach more prospective customers and grow your audience.
Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module makes it extremely easy to mobilize your employees to share your content. The tool allows you to use boards to organize your post by topic, making it easy for your employees to find and share posts that are relevant to them and their followers.
While you can’t force your colleagues to be active on social media, you can definitely encourage participation by giving them some sort of incentive. For example, you can create a leaderboard and give prizes to the employee advocates who share the most posts or generate the most engagement on social media per month.
2. Be Consistent and Tell a Story
We often hear about posts that have “gone viral.” For many social media creators and influencers, those 15 minutes of fame are the ultimate goal. Unfortunately, businesses can’t expect one noteworthy post to lead to long-term social media marketing success. If you really want to drive ROI from your social media marketing efforts, you should tell compelling stories that keep your followers engaged and coming back for more. If your followers know what to expect from you, they’ll be more likely to notice and interact with your content when it pops up on their feed. And, if they really love what you’re doing, they might even take the extra step to visit your profiles on their own.
But what do I mean when I say that you should tell a story? What I’m getting at is that your social media content should be curated to support campaigns highlighting certain customer pain points and topics of interest. Another important piece of this is that your social media engagement efforts should align with the rest of your marketing efforts so that the messaging your audience is seeing is consistent wherever they go. So, for example, if you develop an email campaign aimed at top-of-the-funnel contacts in the manufacturing industry, you should create content that opens the door for this segment to continue to engage with you on social.
Adding another marketing activity to your day is probably the last thing you want to do. However, investing in an automation tool that allows you to schedule posts ahead of time, will allow you to easily deliver timely content that aligns with the rest of your marketing efforts.
The Essential Social Media Resource Guide
3. Take Advantage of Current Events and Trends
Timeliness is key when it comes to obtaining strong social media engagement. Creating or curating content that is “trending” can also improve your chances of appearing at the top of social media feeds — making sure your audience sees your posts in the first place. So, latching on to current events and trends is an excellent way to get your content featured and capture the attention of your target customers.
That doesn’t mean that you need your eyes on social media at all times to take advantage of every potential opportunity. Instead, you can set up Google Alerts for terms related to your target audience and industry. You can also monitor relevant hashtags to see what your audience and competitors are posting. Then use their content as inspiration that informs your overall social media strategy.
4. Fuel Demand Gen By Leveraging Social Media as a Content Distribution Channel
A good portion of your social posts should direct your audience to a webpage or asset that will motivate them to keep progressing through the customer journey.
Using your social media channels as a content distribution platform is a great way to direct your audience to resources that provide the information they need to move to the next stage in the sales funnel. For the best results, we recommend that you use a mix of gated and ungated content.
Ungated content, such as blog posts, is a great way to get potential customers on your website so they can start browsing and learning more about your products or services. Conversely, gated content — such as eBooks that your contacts can access by filling out a form — allows you to collect important contact information that you can use to inform your marketing strategy and create more compelling customer journeys.
5. Use Data and Analytics to Optimize Your Efforts
While social media provides you room to get more creative with your marketing efforts, you still want your work to generate results. If you’re not already keeping an eye on your data and analytics and optimizing your social media engagement efforts accordingly, you should definitely start.
A few KPIs to measure social media engagement include:
- Impressions: Knowing the number of people who see your posts allows you to understand if your content is getting prominently featured on social feeds.
- Follows and Unfollows: You want to secure an audience that is eager to view your content and hear what you have to say. Tracking how many followers you gain week-over-week can provide you with an idea of whether your efforts are attracting new potential customers.
- Clicks: As I mentioned above, you should create opportunities on social media for your audience to engage with you through other marketing channels. If your social media posts are not motivating your audience to download an eBook, sign up for an email newsletter, or perform other actions that advance them along the sales funnel, you need to re-think your efforts.
- Shares: A share shows that a follower not only found your post interesting enough to stop scrolling but also to share it with their audience. On top of that, having followers share your posts helps you get more eyes on your content and improves your chance of showing up on social feeds. Keeping track of which posts are getting the most shares can help you see how to continue to enhance your social strategy for maximum engagement.
- Attributable Conversions: Social media should play a key role in your demand generation and customer acquisition efforts. Being able to trace conversions back to your social media efforts is a good way to gauge if your strategy is working.
- Attributable Revenue: Speaking of conversions, the ultimate goal for any company is to gain new customers and increase ROI. You should also keep track of revenue generated by specific campaigns and posts, and use your findings to optimize your efforts to help you meet your revenue goals.
Having access to these metrics will show you where you stand and where you can improve so you can continue to grow your audience and reap the rewards of this powerful medium.
Tie Your Social Media Engagement to Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Investing in a robust marketing automation platform will help you align your social media strategy with top-notch execution and reporting. Act-On equips you with the tools you need to automate your marketing efforts to Act-On equips you with the tools you need to automate your social media efforts, streamline processes, and measure results. Even better, the time you’ll save on tedious manual processes will allow you to focus your energy on innovating your social engagement strategy.
If you’d like to take a peek into Act-On’s Advanced Social Media module and learn how we can help you implement your entire digital marketing strategy, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They can show you what makes our platform so unique and walk you through a variety of use cases related to your needs and interests.