Are you ready to engage more powerfully with social media in the New Year? Businesses can take many shapes and sizes; from a small eCommerce website to an international finance company or a national NGO. However, there are some lessons we can all adopt when planning a digital marketing strategy, especially when it comes to the use of social media for community engagement. Social media is a constantly changing platform. Used well it can increase customer satisfaction, elevate your organic SEO rankings and be an essential part of your public face as a business, a personal brand, or an organisation. In the 2014 online space, the key concepts to watch will be engagement and community. Here are our three top tips on mastering the art of social media engagement and community:
- Listen and respond
Social media is part of the public face of a brand. And it’s success is often driven by user engagement. Although your aim may be to increase your social media followers, it’s important to take some time out and listen to what your community members are saying. You are better off with 100 loyal, engaged followers than 1000 who don’t really care about what you have to offer. One key engagement tip from Aliza Sherman and Danielle Smith in their book Social Media Engagement for Dummies is using survey and poll apps on your Facebook Page to get quick opinions from your fans. You can then post the results to keep your followers updated (repurposing the content and acknowledging the participation of your community). Aliza and Danielle also recommend giving people a reason to continually interact with you and how to create a space where people feel comfortable.
- Be community-minded
No brand is an island. We believe that good social media engagement comes from realising that every Like, comment and ReTweet is actually from a human being, not a ‘fan’ or ‘follower’. In recognising that your audience are real people, visiting your site, reading your posts, it makes sense to be more human in your approach and to nurture that community through thoughtful posts. When building your social media engagement it is important to create a community mindset, in fact, that’s how social media is designed to function. What does your audience love, what do they respond to? Can you give them more of that? Test. Test. And, test again. Be thoughtful in your posts. For example, we find that when we mix in motivation and inspiration with posts about our products and services we get a warmer reception. Here is one of our most popular recent posts which got 86 Likes, comments and shares on Facebook:
You can expand your reach and engagement by reaching out to partners, starting a blog with guest authors, and inviting participation on your social media and website. The Australian Businesswomen’s Network is built entirely around the concept of a community. And our social media engagement is always used to reflect this. At times this means doing something very small, like tagging a member in a post, or very large, like promoting our Hall of Fame to acknowledge the success of some of this country’s prominent businesswomen and to share their tips with our members across all of our social media networks. If you approach your social media with a community mindset, new paths for communicating with your clients, customers or followers will inevitably eventuate.
- Position yourself as a thought leader
While the term ‘thought leader’ gets bandied around a lot, it’s the idea of being the ‘go-to person’ in your industry that I want to stress. By actively engaging with your community in a way that shows your authority and experience in an area that you want to be known for, you can become that go-to person in your industry. And, you can be that authority REGARDLESS of your business size. It’s interesting note that this post from the SocialMediaToday by Stephanie Frasco predicts blogging will be the number one way to generate new business. Publishing relevant blog posts is an essential way to engage a community through social media. However, it is important to be publishing clear and thoughtful content. As noted by Aliza Sherman and Danielle Smith in Social Media Engagement for Dummies: “People click links or share content when they feel the content is valuable.” Start using your social media and blogging to position your brand (and yourself) as a thought leader. This might mean making predictions in what will happen within your industry, sharing advice from people you admire or doing your research before responding to an online question. While there’s a lot more to social media engagement than we’ve covered off in this post, by taking action on these three points you’ll can start to answer the question of ‘Is anybody out there?’ when it comes to your social posts.
Aliza Sherman and Danielle Smith are the authors of Social Media Engagement for Dummies. Learn their social media engagement secrets in an exclusive webinar on January 23.
