Many businesses today make the mistake of underestimating the value and impact of social media on their business, one of most common mistakes is their not building engagement. In reality, when properly executed with engagement being the main driving force, social media can become a powerful catalyst to increase leads, brand awareness and build credibility with your audience.
A common misconception with social media is to use it solely as a place to output content. Businesses often use it as a platform to broadcast their content in an almost monologue fashion, without regards to what their audience perceives. It’s easy to forget that social media has human components, and therefore requires human-like interactions to cultivate engagement. Examples of this would be to encourage discussions with your audience and get active feedback from them.
In this article, we’ll be going over what it takes to increase the social media engagement for your business.
Define your goal
Just like any other strategy, you need to first identify your goals. These goals will of course vary depending on the nature of your business and what best suits your brand. But one thing for certain is that as a business owner you should be able to discern what your business has to offer to your audience through your social media channels. Whether that be customer support, brand awareness, or product knowledge.
Think about what you want to deliver and achieve by engaging with your audience. Good examples for goals include getting feedback or criticism about your products or services, customer support, providing information that can guide your audience during the buying journey, and so on.
Know your audience
Before building engagement on your social media, another important element that you should consider is knowing your audience. In fact, this should already be in your mind before you even post content on social media. Knowing what your audience wants and when they are likely to engage with your content is crucial to increasing your engagement performance.
The solution is to spend some time placing yourself in your audience’s shoes, and immersing in their needs, desires and expectations of your business. Place yourselves in their position; are they facing any problems currently? If so, how can you use social media to find the solution?
With those insights, you’ll be able to get in their heads before deciding what content to make, or what posts to share; effectively increasing your possibilities and strategies to engage with your audience.
Create and share valuable content
This goes in tandem with the previous point of knowing your audience. Once you’re able to get inside the minds of your audience, crafting engaging content is the next step. With the insight you’ve gained about your audience, you’ll be able to create and curate content that will appeal to your audience – and most importantly building engagement with your audience and community.
Once again, something that helps when creating content is by placing yourself in the audiences’ shoes. Think about their needs, and present them with content that can address those needs. You can also think of topics that would spark curiosity or emotion to your audience.
Stay topical
By topical, we mean staying on top of upcoming trends on the internet. You can use Google Trends to help you know what’s happening at the moment. It is a simple, yet potent way to engage with your audience, who themselves a lot of time on the internet. When executed properly, you can instantly connect with your audience since those trends will most likely be on their radar anyway.
Additionally, being topical shows that your business can keep up to date with the latest on the internet and maintain its relevancy in this digital age. This does mean that you have to be vigilant and keep a keen eye on developing internet trends and events. It can be difficult and time consuming, which is why many businesses opt to partner up with an agency they trust to handle their social media management altogether, so they can focus on growing internally.
To summarize, building engagement on social media is not an easy task, it needs time and you have to know your audience really well.
