Social media is the perfect way to communicate with your customers. Unlike TV advertisements, promotion on social media channels allows involving customers in real-time discussions. It helps you build a strong community and raise brand awareness.
However, it is not only your presence on social media platforms but tactics and ways you engage with the followers. The most effective ones are described in this post.
1. Create discussions
Why do people go on social media? Not just to find more information about your company or business. They are looking for direct interaction with you as a company representative or with other customers to share opinions and experiences.
They enjoy being connected, entertained; they love to talk about things they are interested in. Give them this possibility, reply to their requests, get in the conversations, offer some help and guidance if needed. You can use auto-reply messages to show your participation and then continue discussions depending on the customers’ responses. For example, on Facebook, Creator Studio will help to set up auto-replies. There is a perfect tool for LinkedIn — LinkedHelper that manages auto-messages campaigns with smart replies detection functionality. It ensures the campaign will stop if the customer responds.
2. Use video content
For the last few years, video content has been gaining popularity. People consider it more engaging and entertaining. Don’t hesitate to share more videos on your pages. It works perfectly for both B2C and B2B sectors; you’ll probably just need to change the approach and format.
It could be educational content, describing how to get your services or use your product, interviews with experts in your area, or any entertaining videos related to your business.
3. Behind-the-scenes posts
What else is good about social media? You can allow customers behind the curtains. Show them what is going on in your office, how the products are being prepared or developed. Behind-the-scenes posts make your followers feel like they are part of the process.
Try TikTok. Even a funny video of your employee can help engage your followers and customers.
Behind-the-scenes posts also can be shared through Instagram and Facebook Stories. It is a perfect type of content for short videos that are visible for 24 hours only.
4. Educate your followers
Promoting your product aggressively, telling people to buy it — is not always a good idea. Try to educate them instead. Explain and teach them how to use your products or how to become your client and describe what value they will get.
If you sell to other businesses, create a LinkedIn article describing how your business can solve customers’ issues and challenges.
Consider creating unique content. Video might be the best idea, showing in detail the exploitation of the product. People are usually very engaged by it.
5. Track Customer Engagement
There will be no efficiency from any activities you do until you start tracking customer engagement, analyzing and evaluating the results. Check what posts and comments impact your ratings and raise engagement. It is even more important to track engagement in conversation and direct interactions with customers. Most of the platforms have tracking systems. On Instagram, you can find detailed statistics on your profile in general and for each post separately. You can even select a specific period to collect the data.
However, you can always use external tools, such as LinkedHelper — LinkedIn lead generation tool. It provides detailed statistics on every campaign you create for your LinkedIn profile. It shows the number of activities made on an exact date, allowing you to follow the campaign’s progress. You can see how many replies you get to the messages sent and evaluate the engagement rate. Having this data, you can also identify whether you should improve your messaging style, for example.
Keep in mind these simple practices and always be attentive to your followers. Involving in the conversations, seeing what they say about you in the comments and how they interact with the content you share is the best way to improve engagement on social media.