Social media. The digital technique that provides bigger potential marketing rewards than ever before. Unfortunately this must be weighed against the possibly disastrous results. Today’s post looks at how to increase customer engagement on social media, alongside posing some of the key risks so you can use this initiative safely. Customer engagement can be viewed as a connection you make with your customers to produce a desired effect or reaction (Wenzl, 2016). It has been seen as a process that companies undergo that can be boosted by individual events but that should overall be a continuous thing. This theory can be found in this link to the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice. It is especially interesting as social media can be continually updated and used for constant communication with customers. Social media has long been known for its ability to improve various aspects of customer relationships, but determining the outcomes you want to achieve is vital, as with all marketing it must be relevant to be effective. For an overview of three top metrics for measuring engagement click here.

Social media has pervaded everywhere in the developed world, with three quarters of the entire US population using it (Statista, 2018). On top of this, the developing world is catching up and this makes it possible to engage customers across borders and even cultures. Engagement has long been considered something that is on or off, but new thinking has afforded the thought that engagement is on a spectrum and therefore can be measured. With the difficulty in measuring social media ROI being one of the consistently mentioned issues in acquiring funding, or why social media is not used for marketing, assessing engagement levels can go some way to aiding this. For an insight into this, I would suggest this Harvard Business Review article on calculating the ROI of customer engagement.

 

How to succeed

As mentioned earlier, the first step to any successful social media attempt is determining what you want out of it. If, like me, you struggle with the initial thinking in these situations, consider viewing this article outlining nine general goals and handy insights into how to track them.

 

 Competitions

       

Image credit: The PR authority

 

One definite method of increasing engagement is to generate a buzz around something your company is doing. Buzz marketing aims to create publicity and excitement whilst conveying information to a customer (Karr, 2015).  Running competitions on social media is great for engagement because it gets customers actively involved with your brand and can create a buzz if the prize is considered worthwhile. Again, deciding on your desired outcomes is crucial. Well run competitions can increase your customer base, but if the prize or decided action is not relevant to the type of customer you want to acquire it may only lead to short term engagement increases. If looking to engage with a wide range of potential new customers consider a more general prize and aim to go viral. To help you with this check out this blog showing 7 essentials for making contests go viral.

Another reason to properly assess your decision is that competitions can be expensive to run and even more so if you decide to offer a prize, but also as with any social media marketing there are the general risks of the internet. Mountain Dew ran a contest to name a new flavour ,which was un-moderated and led to forum-site members hijacking the competition, creating and voting for names too rude to be published here….

 

 

Video credit: Neil Patel

Content

 

Image credit:  The Social M’s

 

The benefits of engaging customers are well known, however if you need a reminder read this article divulging the key advantages of investing in it. Considering this, using informative content is a great way to engage your current and also potential customers, but it must be relevant to do so (Runyon, 2015). It is important to do some research into what your target market and customers would like to see and would spend time viewing or reading, as otherwise they will not engage with it. Another point to consider is that video tends to be the most engaging type of content, as the average viewer remembers 95% of a message when it is watched, but only 10% when read (Carvalho, 2017). The benefit of pre-planning and having a set content strategy cannot be stressed enough. Not only does it help decide what sort of content will and will not be included, but by doing so you will have key engagement metrics that you can assess each post using, thus allowing yourself to determine which posts have the most success based on your criteria. Future success will depend on you monitoring this and then posting more of the same type to keep engaging those customers.

Unfortunately, despite the vast benefits available, there is an inherent danger to content marketing on social media due to the permanence of internet posts. Yes, you can delete posts that go wrong, but if it has gone severely wrong it is highly unlikely that you won’t be able to stop it being captured and shared by others. For example, Nivea posted a photo on Facebook, which has over 2 billion monthly users (Constine, 2017) with the controversial tagline ‘white is purity’. The racial connotations surrounding the tagline led to huge backlash on social media and the company withdrawing the image.

 

References:

Carvalho, M. (2017). This is Why Video is The Most Engaging Type of Content. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@zipstrr/this-is-why-video-is-the-most-engaging-type-of-content-e5ca46d5cef1 [Accessed 8 Apr. 2018].

Constine, J. (2017). Facebook now has 2 billion monthly users… and responsibility. [online] TechCrunch. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/ [Accessed 7 Apr. 2018].

Karr, D. (2015). Buzz, Viral or Word of Mouth Marketing: What’s the difference? | MarTech. [online] MarTech. Available at: https://martech.zone/whats-the-difference-buzz-viral-word-of-mouth-marketing/ [Accessed 8 Apr. 2018].

Runyon, M. (2015). How To Engage Your Customers With Effective Content Marketing Strategies. [online] Search Engine People Blog. Available at: https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/150550925-engaging-content-marketing.html [Accessed 8 Apr. 2018].

Statista. (2018). Number of U.S. social network users 2022. [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/278409/number-of-social-network-users-in-the-united-states/ [Accessed 7 Apr. 2018].

Wenzl, M. (2016). The 21st Century Definition of Customer Engagement. [online] ReviewTrackers. Available at: https://www.reviewtrackers.com/definition-customer-engagement/ [Accessed 7 Apr. 2018].