Edwin Schlosberg once said: The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. Social media community engagement? What does it mean to your business?
Dialog with customers for sure. What about reading your content and remembering? Appreciating your help? We believe it is all of these things.
Related post: Find your Content Marketing Creative Ideas
In the ever-changing landscape of social networking, you might be wondering if you are getting the most out of your business’s social media community engagement?
Here we define social media community engagement as the process of gaining customer website traffic, attention, and interaction with customers through social media sites.
Do you remember the last time you created an online relationship with a potential customer? We would love to hear the story. Please share it in the comments section below.
This task starts with what customers want and need. Most people want to: feel needed, be valued, be appreciated, be fulfilled, share emotions, laugh and be happy, succeed and be inspired.
Make them feel something that feels unique to what other brands are blasting at them. To do this, you must know who your community is. You must know how to catch and hold their attention.
So let’s examine our recommended game plan to build a positive social media community engagement:
Win the first impression battle
What are you doing to make their first 30 seconds on your platform useful and worth their attention? If you can’t answer this question, you need to start here. First impressions are everything.
Be human
Humanize your brand. Realize that your brand is everything about you from what you tweet to how you respond to comments on Facebook.
Don’t hide your employees. Let them shine and be a living, breathing representation of your brand.
Related post: Improve Telling Stories by Employing These Remarkable Examples
Be patient yet persistent
You aren’t going to capture your community overnight or on the first day you launch any social media site. Building and launching an integrated online community takes time. Give yourself and your team the time to do it right.
Have patience and persistence. Slow down and do it right and at the end of the game, you’ll be the winner, guaranteed.
Social media community engagement … connect emotionally
Make them feel. If you want to grab my attention on G+, make me laugh. Make me cry. Make me feel something, anything. When I have a super busy day, and I am replying to posts, I have no choice due to the amount of them and time constraints but to choose where and when I am going to respond.
It is an easy choice for me. I respond to the people who grab my attention. The people who are nice, who make me feel good. The people who are genuine. The people who make me laugh, playing the emotional card.
Focus on relationships
The life of social media is people. People like you and me. People who laugh, cry, get mad, go crazy, get married, divorced, have kids, lose family members, win jobs, lose jobs, get promotions, win new clients, get new opportunities, have fun, play hard and work hard.
Offer value to the people in your community with a goal of building real relationships. Offer value and knowledge.
Inspire them
Inspire your communities to connect with you with a foundational goal of achieving their objectives. Inspire … Connect …Achieve. To do this, you must know their objectives and goals. You must know them. When you know your audience, then you can know how you can help them be better.
How can you help them learn? How can you help them go faster? Work smarter? Be smarter? Share more valuable information with their colleagues, clients, partners, and friends? Figure these answers out and use them to help.
Teach them
What knowledge can you share with them that will make them smarter? How can your knowledge drive real efficiency in their life or business? Share your best stuff, not just the same old, same old you wrote two years ago that is overused and oversold, by everyone everywhere.
Make it easy
People want to connect. They don’t want to be spammed at every opportunity. Give them an opportunity to engage with you, your brand, and your team. Be available. Open up your comment stream on your blog. Listen and be relevant and responsive.
Listen
The most important thing you can do to create a positive engagement is to listen carefully. Listen with a goal to understand. Bottom line, listen more than you talk. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn about your audience when you shut up and listen.
The bottom line
Facebook has a monthly audience of nearly a billion visitors. That’s a B as in billion. Other top sites, like Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, attract hundreds of millions. By now, nobody doubts the power of social platforms, although few marketers have been able to exploit them as fully as they desire.
As Harvard’s Mikołaj Piskorski makes clear in his new book, A Social Strategy, businesses have a long way to go before they truly begin to unlock the potential of the social web.
Most marketers, in fact, use social media much as they would ordinary media—to broadcast messages. We are still not working as hard as we can on engagement and building relationships.
And the real potential lies in building relationships and utilizing social platforms to create solutions for customers’ social problems.
While consumers are understandably skittish about corporations interjecting themselves their personal conversations, they appreciate the opportunity to meet and build relationships with others. And that, it turns out, this is an enormous opportunity.
That’s why it’s important to make the distinction between a digital strategy that involves social platforms and a true social strategy. For a social strategy to succeed, simply joining the conversation is not enough. You must lead it.
Being social with a great positive engagement isn’t a new way of marketing; it’s a way of doing business. Follow these simple tips and you will be leading the way.
Do you have an experience on your team’s positive engagement to share with this community?
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Improve Telling Stories by Employing These Remarkable Examples
Find your Content Marketing Creative Ideas
Creative Ideas Can Add to Publix Social Media Marketing
Social Media Campaigns to Stimulate Learning
Network Connection … 23 Actionable Tips for Relationships
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.