Social Media Engagement Strategy

You’ve put in the work to create a solid social media calendar with campaigns to support your business goals, your images are looking great, your captions are on point, you’re using all the right hashtags, but for some reason, you’re not seeing gains in followers or engagement. After countless hours of planning and development, you’re racking your brain trying to identify what you could’ve done better.

Chances are, it’s not what you could’ve done better, but what more you can still do. What many people underestimate is the power of an intentional social media engagement strategy to support their social media content strategy.

How To Win Fans and Influence People

You can post great social media content all day long and hope for people to engage with it but unfortunately, it simply doesn’t work like that. The fact is, you’re competing for your audience’s attention in a sea of accounts that are pushing out similar social media content with the same targeted hashtags that you’re utilizing.

The solution? Develop a social media engagement strategy that is hyper-focused on your target audience. Your engagement strategy should focus on building and strengthening your brand’s relationship with its current and future customers.

How To Develop a Social Media Engagement Strategy

Identify your target audience.

First, start with a clear picture of who your target audience is (age, sex, income level, interests, needs, wants, behaviors, etc.). You’ll end up with several customer personas. Next, identify which social media platforms each of these personas are engaging with.

Define your tone of voice by platform.

Keeping the utility purpose of each social platform in mind, you should then get into the psyche of your target persona on each platform to understand how to communicate with them—by this, we’re referring to the type of information delivered and the tone in which is it delivered. For example, if you’re engaging with a user on LinkedIn, you might want to communicate information in a more experienced tone, whereas on Instagram the same information can be presented in a more casual tone. You should have a consistent brand voice but use a variation of your brand’s tone of voice to match each social platform.

Commit to responding immediately.

Best practice is to respond to comments immediately or within a 24-hour window. The sooner you respond, the more likely you’ll keep the user engaged in the conversation and with your brand in the long run. Timely and thoughtful responses are not only key to creating a great customer experience, but they’re also opportunities for relationship building and gaining valuable customer insights in real-time.

Identify influencer partners.

In addition to customer personas, think about influencer personas. Identify both macro and micro-influencers with a following consisting of the same audience that your brand is trying to target. By engaging with persona accounts through comments and paid sponsored posts, you’ll bring visibility to your brand to their followers who are your potential future customers. When identifying influencers, make sure that their personal brand falls in line with your brand—would you feel comfortable with this person being associated with and representing your brand? Ask yourself would this influencer use your product/service—does this match make sense and does it feel authentic? Examine their followers, do they fit your customer personas? If all these boxes are checked, then move forward and start building a relationship with them to determine what level of engagement you’d like to explore with each.

Make time for social media engagement.

The primary purpose of having a social media engagement strategy is to build relationships with current and future customers. With every relationship in your life, you have to put in the time, effort, and care to maintain relationships. In addition to scheduling time in your day for social engagement, make sure you’re tracking your return on engagement for each interaction. Look for patterns on what’s working and what’s not to refine your social media engagement strategy—don’t be afraid to iterate and switch things up from your original strategy. Things are constantly changing in the world of social media.