20 March 2013

Social Media

4 Steps To Boost Your Social Engagement

With every business wanting to try their hand at social media in order to get their company name out there, build brand awareness and promote their products, ultimately, their goal is to increase social engagement with potential customers as a bid to bring in leads and generate sales.

However, before going in all guns blazing, it’s important that you have some kind of strategy outlining your approach to social media and engaging with the public. Whilst anyone can post a Facebook status or send a tweet, when acting on behalf of a business, you will have different goals to those you’d have on a personal account.

So, with this in mind, how do you go about using social media for your business? Hopefully this four part looping guide will get you on the right lines to get your customers engaging with you and your brand.

Listen

What’s the point in posting a status or sending a tweet if your ‘likers’ or ‘followers’ aren’t interested in what it is you’re saying?

With this in mind, the first step of your social media engagement plan is to listen to your target audience and find out what it is that interests them, what they find appealing and the format of content that they tend to engage with.

This stage of your social media plan doesn’t always have to be passive! Remember that you can use online surveys, engage in forums and split test posts to see what gets the best response from your audience.

Engage

Once you think you’ve got the idea of what it is that your potential customers want to see/hear, the next step is to try and get them to engage with you.

Post statuses or send tweets surrounding the areas of interest that you identified during the listening stage – during the initial stages of your plan, you may benefit from using a number of different social media platforms to see where your potential customers are getting in touch and at what time they are engaging with you on each of these networks.

Measure

Whilst the way you measure your success will vary depending on what your goals are, it is important that you know what you’re aiming towards when you start out on your social media engagement plan; are you looking to increase your number of likers or followers? Are you hoping to increase the number of people picking up the phone and getting in touch? Or are you looking to simply boost sales?

It is important that you have a clear set of objectives and are keeping a record of the changes that occur surrounding these goals.

Learn

Following on from my previous point, not only is it important that you have clear objectives to aim towards, it is also important that you learn from your statistics in order to achieve these goals. Whatever your objective, it is essential that you are tracking it correctly – allowing you to identify the strengths and weaknesses in your approach and adjust your strategy accordingly.

By Sarah-Jayne