Unlock your social media potential
Social media marketing should be a key part of your engagement toolkit. At the click of a button, you can easily share updates, engaging content and get your brand seen and heard in bitesize scrollable chunks. Which today is how most of us like to digest content, on the go, or while we complete our daily scroll through our newsfeed.
So how can you ensure that when your posts are in front of your followers, you’re going to grab their attention and get them engaged in your brand and what you have to say? Read through our blog and take a look at our infographic to see how you can engage your audience.
Let’s talk about reach
Interaction across your social media channels is easily tracked through the number of likes, comments, and shares, making it simple to evaluate the performance of your social media activity. But reach is arguably the most important metric to look at.
Of course, you want to increase your followers, but the best measure of social media success is an engaged audience, not just a large one.
The way the social media algorithms work means only a part of your audience will be shown your post on their newsfeed, therefore only reaching a % of your followers. We know that not all of those who see your post will engage with your content, so the overall performance of the post may seem lower than you expected.
So, it’s all about ensuring that whatever that reach size is, those followers are engaging with your posts.
Here’s some of the ways social media engagement is measured:
- Shares and retweets
- Comments
- Likes
- Followers
- Click-throughs
- Branded hashtags
- Mentions
To put it simply, every time someone interacts with your social account it counts towards your social engagement and reach.
Create your ideal following
As a business it’s quality not quantity when it comes to your followers.
When we talk about ‘ideal’ we mean customer or client. The people who are going to engage with your brand and ultimately bring business your way. Start by thinking about who your ideal customer is, and then you can start to build your social media presence around what will engage them.
If you’re not sure who your ideal customer is, then consider the following:
What is their overall goal?
What are their pain points?
What are their top priorities?
How can you help them achieve their goal?
Once you understand who your audience is you can start to decide, when to post, which social platforms to be on and what type of content your audience want to see.
Make it clear what you want your followers to do
Questions are often the best way to engage your audience. Running polls, encouraging people to share their thoughts and experiences helps you understand your followers better and enables you to gain insight into what they may want to see from you next.
Don’t be afraid to get creative with your post ideas so here’s some alternative activities which can help with engagement.
- Asking questions
- Encouraging your audience to ask you questions (try an “Ask Me Anything” session)
- Test their knowledge
- Animated gifs
- Spotlighting customers
You’ll soon start to see which areas your audience are engaging with and be able to tweak and repeat to see if you can improve your results.
Make it a two-way conversation
Make sure when your followers engage with you, you do the same back by replying to every comment. Not only will it encourage conversation with potential customers, but it also triggers the algorithms to show that post to more of your followers and boost it to the top of people’s newsfeeds increasing your reach and overall performance.
Your social media engagement should be like a face-to-face event, welcoming people and encouraging conversation between the host and the guests.
Activity and engagement are crucial for every social platform to build a positive brand experience and develop meaningful relationships with new and potential future customers.
Measuring success
The only way to truly measure your social engagement success is by analysing the data and drilling down into the different engagement factors.
Before you start making any changes to your social strategy, create a table of current results. This will be your starting point. Then ensure that you update your table monthly with the exact same measurements to see what trends you have. It’s also worth keeping a separate results sheet for any paid ad activity or social campaigns. This means you can then go back and analyse the results and see what worked and what can be improved for next time.
Over time you should start to clearly see your social strengths and weaknesses and from that you’ll be able to understand your audience and build a social strategy for success, and even more engagement.
Don’t forget to make use of the resources available to you
To help get you started with your own 2022 marketing strategy, we have created a downloadable infographic that can be accessed via the Gamma Portal. Simply go to >> Help & Support >> Gamma Accelerate >> Collateral and search ‘Top tips for social media engagement’
Every Gamma Channel Partner has free access to Accelerate, our online partner marketing portal; a simple and secure platform that’s designed to make it easy for you to customise white-label marketing material, generate new leads and engage with prospects and customers.
To access Accelerate go to the Gamma Portal >> Help and Support >> Gamma Accelerate
