A popular zone for friendly communication for well over a decade, social media is rapidly assuming a more prominent role in the world of nonprofit and business marketing. When used correctly, social media becomes instrumental in creating brand visibility and awareness and boosting growth. And while following social media trends and promoting your brand according to the latest online marketing tips is important, the true key to making sales via social media lies in engaging with users and followers. In fact, engagement is so powerful a tool, in some cases it is considered to have surpassed SEO with respect to its potential to maximize sales and profits.
Here are some top ways to increase engagement on social media and get your brand’s profit margin to soar.
Create a buzz
Often, it can be hard to break through the sound barrier of social chatter and grab your target audience’s attention. This is because the over 3.03 billion active social media users, each with an average of 5.54 social media accounts, want to be entertained and communicated with, not promoted to. But, if you create a buzz, you might be able to sway them in your direction.
This can be done in several ways. You can use humor to introduce or raise awareness towards your brand. You can launch polls or surveys, to give users a connection to your product or service. You can hold contests, promotions or create time-limited offers, incentivizing them to engage in exchange for added value. Or, you can create highly visual ads that keep them guessing – and wanting more.
Be relevant
Stay on top of the latest social media – and real-life news and trends to integrate cultural relevance into your social posts. Increase brand awareness by tying your offering to whatever is up and coming in your industry, demonstrating to your users that your brand is a field innovator, interesting and interested in occurrences beyond product development and sales.
Personalize engagement
Despite an influx of purchases made online, with consumers hailing e-commerce stores for their convenience, large selection, better prices, enhanced price comparison capabilities and a more discrete experience, personalization remains a chief demand – and a pain point of digital consumerism. Simply put, no one wants to engage with a bot.
Personalization gives social media users the customized brand experience they crave, based on their interests, demographics, personal history and online behaviors. When you personalize social media interactions, such as subject lines, responses to queries, predictive recommendations and more, your brand is essentially optimizing engagement to attract and reel in the user, for the long-haul.
Use analytics
To properly measure your success and make adjustments to your social engagement efforts as required, take advantage of the latest in analytics tools, like Google Analytics, or Hootsuite. Analytics tools help you monitor the levels of engagement on various social media and other websites, such as the number of views, click-through rates and conversions. Most analytics tools also allow you to customize which types of data you receive, so you’re equipped with exactly the information you need to effectively grow long-term relationships that drive traffic that converts.