What Does An Engagement Strategy Look Like For Businesses Marketing With Social Media?
One question I get asked consistently is, “What is your engagement strategy?”
So here’s the answer, here is the engagement strategy that I use for myself and with my clients.
What is engagement?
When I’m talking about engagement strategy, I referring specifically to marketing your business using social media. All social media platforms, whether Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, make their money through sponsored content. The longer a user spends on a platform, the more likely they are to see some sponsored content and so it make sense that the algorithms used by these platforms are designed to keep users on the platform for as long as possible.
Having a good engagement strategy doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get rewarded by the “algorithm gods” and suddenly, your content is going to be seen by everyone. What it does mean is that the algorithm is going to favor pieces of content that have more engagement than others. Content with heavy engagement will be promoted over content that isn’t getting engagement because highly engaging content will likely keep people on the platform for longer.
So that’s one benefit of keeping your engagement levels high, the algorithm. The other benefit is social interactions.
Social media is social! I know it can be very easy to forget this - especially when you use social media as a main source of marketing and organic traffic for your business. Most users are on social media for a few minutes while they're doing something else or killing time. They're on the platform for to be amused, entertained, and to be social.
Engagement is the social part of social media - so it's extremely important!
What is an engagement strategy?
Now that we've covered why engagement is important, I'm going walk you through the engagement strategy I use with my clients and in my own business.
Step One
Respond to any DMs and to any comments. If someone's taken the trouble to write you an actual sentence for a comment on your post or to share your content, make sure that you're reciprocating with a similar length comment.
Step Two
Engage with your most active followers - those people who always show up for you. Go and show up for them: comment on their content, like their comments, share it, save it.
Note: If you're sharing content, make sure you tag the original user so they can see that it's been shared.
Check in with your active community and let them know that you're there and that you're looking at their content as much as they're looking at yours.
Step Three
Connect with your least engaged audience members. The users whose stories you always watch will always be first in your stories feed. If you scroll right to the end of your stories feed, you'll find the people that you don't look at very often. Start watching those stories and find really genuine ways to engage.
You can also go to your followers list (using the phone app) and you can rank followers by least interacted with. Look at these followers and be very strategic. Is your level of interaction low because those followers don't necessarily fit into your ideal audience? If not, maybe it's time to let them go and remove them as a follower.
If they are ideal clients, why are they not engaging with you? Is the low engagement to do with the content you're putting out or the level of connection they're getting from you? Go and engage with the content these followers are putting out. Remember to engage on the issues that are important to them, not just what's important to you and to your business.
Step Four
Seek out new people. How do you do this? This is actually where hashtags come into play. A lot of business owners marketing on social media think, “I have to put x many hashtags in my post and then that's it, my content will be seen.”
Okay, that's one part of using hashtags - but the other important part is using hashtags to help you find your people. You should be following the hashtags that are relevant to your ideal audience. Seek out the hashtags that are followed by your ideal clients by searching for keywords. Engage with the content on those hashtags in an authentic, non-salesy way so that you get on your ideal client’s radar.
If you're planning to reach out with a direct message, do your research first. One of my favorite ways to connect via DMs is to share a user’s content to my stories (making sure to tag them). It’s one of the easiest ways to get into someone's direct messages and a great way to start a conversation because you already have a subject to talk about.
In a nutshell:
Step one: respond to the people who reached out to you.
Step two: respond to the people who are who are consistently reaching out to you.
Step three: reach out to people who aren't reaching out to you.
Step four: reach out to the people who don't know you yet.
Engagement is the most important part of your social media strategy. I would put having good engagement over having good content any day. That’s because wonderfully well-written, scroll-stopping content is great but, if no one can see it, it's useless.
So that is my insight into engagement strategy. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out as I'm happy to chat more about this.
