Social Media Engagement is a Must, 3 Reasons to Engage Your Social Audience With Your Brand.
Social Media Engagement is a must for any social media strategy, many of us fail to take the opportunity of it when we implement our strategies, that is a fact, however, when you decide to make the Engagement is a core part of your strategy, you need to step back and look at it, then step further and try to make more proactive attitude, listening and engaging with your customers on the social.
Social Media Engagement practice shouldn’t be passive, in fact, it should be active. Rather waiting your audience to reach you out and inquire your product or services, you should take the initiative and talk to them, in a chance to create a conversation, in a sense of text, media or other mediums.
5 important social media engagement techniques you understand and decide to make it real! First you should listen to your audience and understand what is trending and what issues or discussions they are having, secondly, you should respond to this discussions and issues or at least be part of it! Then you move to share some positive comments or posts, probably also some best practices by others form you audience, moving forward, fourthly, you should start to shape your strategy by creative original contents and branded materials from your point of view evolving around your product or services, ultimately, you need to start leading a community and building an audience where they interact with you, wait for you and engage with you whenever possible.
According to Social Media Fuze, an expert Social Media website, Social Media Engagement definition goes as below;
“Engagement simply means getting your fans to do something in response to your post.
- Like
- Comment
- Click to open picture
- Click on Link
- Share”
Arguably, I would like to emphasize about my latest experience in engagement social media marketing, where it could be a one more element of the definition.
Since Social Media consist of “media” e.g.: Photos, Videos, etc.. I thought that every strategy to engage people on this platforms requires trigger. The background of the strategy is to transform people from Print Media into a Social Media audience who are interacting and creating initial conversation with us in order to promote our products.
We partnered with a local newspaper (7DAYS UAE) and we sponsored the most boring page, the puzzle page where people land there to kill time, do some puzzle solving, and then throw the entire newspaper waiting for the second day edition. Our trigger was that once you solve the puzzle which requires logic, math calculation sometimes, you would be able to win an iPhone on weekly basis. So the trigger was the iPhone. The mechanism was that you need to solve the puzzle, then take a photo of it and share it over social media via specific hashtag, where you will be enrolled in the competition with a chance to win the iPhone! We used #7DAYSCLASSWIZ to promote our calculators.
It turns that loads of people have start to be part of it, people start to circulate the news, there is a competition with 7DAYS! After 4 weeks, we have hit 8.2 million impressions (using a monitor tool KeyHole) that was spactaculare as we have grown our page’s audience from 30,000 to 45,000 in just 1 month, the good thing that this increase was generic and not paid via media buying techniques.
When we start to sum up what we’ve done, we’ve got to the point! There was (at least for us) 3 main reason why a strategy that is driven by engagement is good;
- We were able to grow generically, people where interested to join our page, and look through it, our fan-base increase helped us to leverage our presence on the social.
- We start to be able to talk to people more individually. Since people start to participate in a very creative way, those who do creative inputs are usually sponsored by us! We take the work they have done and we publish it to others! We allowed people to demonstrate their creativity to others!
- Product awareness were getting higher day after day, more people start to call and inquire about the products, more people start to visit the showrooms and more people start to write about it!
P.S: This Engagement strategy was highlighted by the International Media News Association as a good practice on the social! You can read the article By Pressing Here
-Aboud
