Every business wants to be on social media. It’s the fun part of the job, right? But once you’ve set up your pages, whether it’s on Facebook or on Instagram, or maybe Snapchat – what’s next? How do you actually enter a dialogue with your customers on social media? Do you initiate or do you stay passive? And if you do interact with them, what do you say? Here are five things we think you should incorporate in your social media strategy to maximize engagement with your audience.
1. Initiate conversations and participate in them
What’s the last thing you posted about? Was the content engaging enough? Always ask yourself whether your content is likely to trigger a reaction or not. Create posts that will push your audience to action – ask them a question, ask for their opinion, or ask them to help you figure something out. Once you’ve successfully launched a conversation or begin to receive responses from your customers, don’t leave it at that. Respond, interact and push the engagement further. You can use instagram today to ask your audience questions or initiate polls. You can even have them ask you questions now. These are all great examples of triggering a conversation and participating in it. But you can take it one step further.
2. Personalize the engagement
You want your customers to feel engaged and listened to. You can share their content, to show that you care about involving them in your brand’s story. Use your social media tools to find out who is talking about your brand, and respond to their engagement. Whether their post is positive or negative, you should consider responding to it. Through our work for Junior-Athletes, we strive to interact and respond to every communication coming from a customer. Whether it is a private message or a comment on a picture, if it mentions us, we respond. Think about it this way: someone sends you a text message, but you don’t respond. How do you want the discussion to move forward?
3. Dedicate one of your social media channels to customer support
Since 2016, social media has become a major channel for customer support. Have you ever taken an issue on Twitter to get a quick response from the social media support team? Or have you ever conversed with a brand on Messenger because you had questions? Customers seek instant gratification and rapidity of response by taking their questions to social media. By turning one of your channels into a dedicated support platform, you will drive traffic and naturally, engagement. It’s important to only select one platform for support so you may be able to handle the amount of requests.
4. Be funny
Little case study for this one. This content creation start up emailed me a few months ago to promote their writing services for our blog. Like 99% of people, I was too busy to respond to advertising cold emails, so I disregarded. Then they emailed me again the next week, and the following – but still didn’t get any response from me. Until they threw in their last card:
I laughed and they got a response.
5. Be visual
Sounds familiar? We’ve discussed this here, when we touched on how to create engaging content. Remember, Adobe conducted a study back in 2014 and highlighted that posts with images can produce up to 650% more engagement. Pictures simply attract more attention and make people linger longer. Every platform has its own way of crafting a story. Browse free stock photos and play with frames and filters to find the perfect combination – the one that will help your brand shine and be colorful/creative enough to retain your audience’s attention.
Bottom line
Customer engagement is a recipe. You need to initiate an interesting conversation and participate in it. You need to speak your audience’s language and retain their attention with visuals and humor where applicable. It’s no different from having a regular conversation with a friend.
Don’t stop exploring! 🙂
For more super cool content, check us out on Facebook and Instagram. Any project in mind you’d like to discuss with us? We’re always available at hello@sprklestudios.com – let’s create something together!