Social Media Engagement Archives - Page 3 of 6

March 8, 2016
Social Engagement

Stagnant on Social Media? Re-engage Your Audience!

There was a time where anything you did on social media would make an impact. However, billions of people are logging in and using these platforms everyday. Complex algorithms mean that most of what we post won’t hit many feeds. As a busy professional, perhaps you’ve just ran out of time to really get creative on social or you’ve gotten into a rut of posting the same content over and over? It could just be that you are experiencing a bout of social media fatigue instead. There are many reasons you’re social media has gone stagnant but that doesn’t mean you have to accept that fate! Here are some ways to switch up what you are doing on your social sites to #ReviveYourMarketing and re-engage your followers.

You Have to Give to Get

Yes, your goal on social media probably has to do with signing more clients or getting more sales. That’s all right. It’s important to remember that social media is not your website. The 80/20 rule of posting only 20% of your own content exists for an important reason. People do not want to develop connections with businesses – they want relationships with other people. This means creating content that has no ROI other than engaging your audience. It also means becoming an expert or influencer in your niche or industry. To do this requires an investment of time and energy. However, that is how to gain true social media ROI.

Remember to Engage

If you are caught up in a loop of just creating and scheduling content, you are missing out on the most important aspect of social media. Social media is intended to be social! This requires you to regularly read, comment, ask questions and share other people’s content. It means using social media not just as a business owner but also as a follower. Participate in conversations and groups. Engagement is the key to active social media. Therefore you need to become an active participant.

Clean Up Your Social

It’s easy to get caught up in the pattern of just following any individual or company we might have an interest in. However, the more people you follow – the more clogged your feeds become. That’s a lot of content to go through on a regular basis, much of which isn’t worth the precious little time you have to browse. A better option is to get clear on which accounts are worth watching. Who inspires you? Which ones do you really take the time to stop and read? Which social platforms are still fun for you? Once you have your list – unfollow and ignore the rest. You don’t have time to follow accounts that aren’t encouraging you to be better on social media.

Let It Go

There is a ton of advice out there. It can be way too easy to get hung up on doing things the “right way” even if they aren’t working. It’s essential to monitor, analyze and evaluate what is and is working and be willing to toss techniques that don’t produce results. It’s perfectly okay to get creative and try new things to see whether or not they work. Leaving a social platform that doesn’t do it for you – is also just fine. Give yourself permission to evolve and change and try something new.

You’ve Lost Your Magic

All of us get caught up in the loop of productivity and projects. If your social has become just another thing you need to get done, then it’s not just your audience that has lost interest in engaging online. Time to take a moment and remember why you started in social media to begin with. Social is important but it’s not a requirement. If you simply hate it, walk away or hire someone else to manage it for you. The best social media accounts are ran by brands that love what they are doing and love sharing it with the world. These accounts become inspired by interacting with their followers and keeping their feeds full of great content.

Do you need some additional help or support? Want to hire someone else to handle your social media so you don’t have to? Our social media team loves this type of work and wants to help you #BeAwesome!

January 18, 2016
Social Media Strategy

New Year, New Habits – The Value of Learning Social Media from a Social Media Manager

Is this the year that you’ve decided to truly invest in social media and make it an integral part of your company’s marketing plan? There were over 179 Million social media users in 2015. That is a huge audience and should not be overlooked when creating a marketing strategy. Incorporating social media make not sound like a difficult task, however there are a lot of variables to consider when dealing with social platforms. Here are some thought-provoking reasons to seek out a social media manager before building your social media strategy.

Social Media Marketing

When doing your own marketing, content is any bit of material created with the purpose to establish or grow online presence. This includes articles, blog posts, videos, websites, publications, podcasts and curated social media posts. A social media manager’s role is to take the most relevant and interesting content and post it at just the right moment so that the targeted audience will see it and engage with it. This means understanding the various social media platforms – including their strengths and weaknesses – and what content works best for each. It also requires understanding peak times and the best time to post, related to individual platforms. A social media manager stays on top of platform trends and knows the processes behind scheduling just the right type of content at the right time.

Social Media Engagement

Posting consistent social media content is important. However, motivating the audience to engage and then capitalizing on that engagement is the real benchmark of success. Some platforms require more attention than others. Also, there are a variety of tools available to help streamline and promote certain types of engagement. A social media manager is experienced with creating online environments that motivate organic participation. They also understand that engagementis essential and missed opportunities to engage are bad form. In fact, having social media content and not making engagement a priority is a waste of strategy and resources.

Social Media Advertising

With so many people using social media, it is an easy thing to get lost in the shuffle. Newsfeed algorithms automatically filter out quite a bit of content. Sometimes the push to be found requires a boost of social advertising. Most of the social platforms have established their own advertising options. A social media manager is familiar with the details of each of the social advertising possibilities and can show users what ads and campaigns will be more successful. They will also have the expertise to analyze and track the results in order to adapt the best possible strategy moving forward.

There is so much more to social media marketing than drafting some tweets and posts and hoping for the best. Training with a social media manager will ensure that an effective social media strategy is implemented – saving time, money and resources.

Don’t go into social media blind! Give us a call and arrange a time to discuss how we can train you to #BeAwesome with your social media marketing.

~ Social Media is changing the way people do business. Don’t get left behind ~

Be sure to Follow us and Let’s Engage!

Hollie Clere, of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedIn,Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Google+ , YouTube,Pinterest, Instagram and the tools to manage them.

Click here for her Social Media Workshops, Classes and Seminars.

January 11, 2016
Social Media Marketing

New Year, New Habits – Building an Editorial Calendar

Are you new and just getting started with social media? Have you been using social platforms but feel like your engagement is suffering because you don’t have a solid strategy in place? Social media, like any other aspect of marketing, is more effective when a plan is established and followed. Success can be found by winging it but it’s not as likely, and not nearly as sustainable.

Building an editorial calendar is the essential first step when it comes to strategizing your social media efforts. A calendar is a tool that allows business owners to create and curate consistent content in a time efficient way. It breaks down content into platforms, number of posts per day/week, and scheduling for peak times.

Pick Your Platforms

Spend some time examining the diversity of the social media platforms to determine which sites will have the best impact for your business. Each of the platforms has different strengths and weaknesses and one-size fits all plans will fail in impact and efficiency.

Then it’s time to figure out how often to post and that is also unique to the platform. Facebook posts should be no more than 3 – 10 each week, while Twitter needs at least 5 posts every day. On top of that, an examination of peak times of the day is necessary as well to ensure that posts are hitting at the most effective time.

Posting Times

If you have already been posting to social, the next step is to evaluate what you’ve been posting based on its rate of engagement. Certain posts will attract more attention than others. Start by scheduling and incorporating those types of content into your calendar and build from there. Most of the social platforms offer some sort of analytics tool if it is not immediately obvious what is working and what is falling flat.

If social media is a new tool at your disposal, start thinking about what posts resonate with you the most when you are using various social media platforms. Check out some competition to see what type of engagement success they are having. Make some notes and use that as a starting point in developing your first editorial calendar.

Curating Content

Once you know where to post, when to post, and what types of content to post – it’s time to start curating content. The first priority should be original content. There should be some original content being created every week. The rest of it should be curated, which means finding content online that can be shared with your audience. When curating, it’s important to stay true to your targeted audience and your brand. Stay focused and on topic. Share information that would be interesting or beneficial to your readers.

To make this more streamlined, start compiling a list of resources. This would be websites, hashtags and other social media tools. There are many social tools available that will automatically offer suggestions based on recent content or a set of keywords.

January is the perfect time of year to begin implementing some #NewHabits, including developing an editorial calendar that can be used to make social media more impactful. If creation of the calendar is out of your wheelhouse or too time consuming, contact our Social Media Team for assistance. We’d love to help you #BeAwesome this year and really ROCK your social content!

~ Social Media is changing the way people do business. Don’t get left behind ~

December 28, 2015
Social Engagement

#GiftYourBusiness – The Gift of Engagement

The last entry in our #GiftYourBusiness series focuses on giving your business the gift of engagement. While social media engagement does not necessarily transcend into sales or profit, an engaged audience is much more likely to pay attention to what you are saying. They are more likely to share what you offer with others. It builds the Like, Know, Trust that is so imperative in social media and is really the standard to measure whether or not social media is having a positive impact on your business. We all know that engagement is the goal for our posts – regardless of platform. Here are some concepts to consider when it comes to increasing engagement online.

Branding

Each company needs an established brand presence, especially when it comes to their interactions online. Branding helps the audienceunderstand you, your business, and what you have to offer. Conflicting or undeveloped messages leave the audience confused and disengaged. If your branding has been neglected, the first step is to learn more about what branding is, what your brand should be, and how to best exude your brand on the web.

Those with an established brand concept should turn their attention to building brand advocates. A brand advocate knows nearly as much about your brand as you do and they are passionate about sharing it with others. A brand advocate is like having a #1 fan who does marketing for you simply because they desire to share your message with their world. Word of mouth, referrals, and free online promotion are the valuable side benefits of developing brand advocates.

About Me Page

What many businesses have discovered while paying attention to their Google Analytics, is that an overwhelming number of their website hits are due to their About Me page. This is the page potential followers and customers go to find out more about a brand, an individual, or a company. Way before they get to the point of deciding whether or not what you offer fits what they need, they want to find out more about YOU!

The scary reality about this is that most About Me pages are done as an afterthought. They are boring, un-inspiring and often don’t convey the proper message to people in order to get them interested.

Think about a novel. How important are those first two sentences? How many people open up a book to check out the hook before deciding whether or not to read it? Your About Mepage is your opening, and if it lacks the right hook – you are hemorrhaging attention.

Building a Tribe

While having brand advocates is fantastic, having a community built around them and other followers of your brand is THE way to create engagementthat lasts. Not only does it last longer, often it can work even in your absence. Seth Godin, The Marketing Guru, wrote a whole book on finding and building your own tribe.

“A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interested and a way to communicate.”

Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us

First, you have to find your tribe. This means understanding your target audience. It also means doing those ideal avatarexercises to discover who your ideal tribe member is.

Then you have to discover a way to not only communicate with them – you already do that with your newsletter, website, and social media channels – but a way they can interact with one another. This could mean a Facebook group, regular blab streaming, LinkedIn group, online forum, or some other avenue of communication. It might mean doing some investigation to understand where your avatars hang out online and then develop a communication channel to match where they already hang out.

Your Community as a Resource

Now that you have proper branding, your website is working for you, there are brand advocates and a tribe – it is important to realize what a wealth of information that is for your business. To keep engagement thriving and to continue developing products that maintain your tribe’s level of interest, regularly tuning in to what they want is essential. Assuming that what you are offering is what they want is the wrong way to go. Develop regular surveys, opportunities for commenting, and other ways to pick their brains. Don’t drop the ball here – track and analysis this information. You may find that it leads your business to places you would not have considered on your own. That, in turn, will keep your audience interested and engaged.

We all do it – we get so involved with the projects and the tasks that we lose the strategy. You know you need engagementbut have you considered how to increase it and really make it work for you? Developing an environment where followers can more easily become advocates and tribe members is such a valuable investment of time and energy. Paying for ads and other marketing opportunities will attract more attention, but it doesn’t keep it. Only the right type of engagement possibilities will ensure that people stick around and then become supporters of your message.

Have a wonderful New Year and #BeAwesome today and every other day!

~ Social Media is changing the way people do business. Don’t get left behind ~

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Tag: Social Media Engagement

Stagnant on Social Media? Re-engage Your Audience!

New Year, New Habits – The Value of Learning Social Media from a Social Media Manager

New Year, New Habits – Building an Editorial Calendar

#GiftYourBusiness – The Gift of Engagement

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