Section 3.05 Engaging on SM

 

“The key to engaging content? … Think bigger, bolder, and braver” – Ann Handley

Social Media

Social media has taken its rightful throne in the world of marketing as for many businesses it’s the critical catalyst for brand growth. If done correctly, its effect can create waves of positivity for many businesses to boost brand awareness and increase conversions to improve company profits.

Promoting your brand through social media is therefore vital to businesses, but getting your content on these channels isn’t what gets you the sales. The key to becoming a successful social media user is engagement.

1. Talk About Your Topic (Not Just Your Brand)

In many new situations when you come into contact with new people, it’s important to talk to them about topics that relate to you and your brand. 

2. Join Question & Answer Sessions

Handing out nuggets of gold to customers is as easy as giving them helpful information and answering their queries. Joining Q&A sessions is a great way to provide users with value and gets you seen as a valuable brand. 

3. Share Other People’s Content

If someone else can provide better answers to a query, make use of their content. 

Reposting Customer or Follower Posts

Not only should you share content from different businesses in the industry, but it’s also essential you share your followers’ and customers’ posts too.

4. Make Your Posts Visual

Just like emoticons, images and videos are also great additions to add to social media posts and marketing content in general.

5. Create Polls & Surveys

Another good practice for creating engaging social media posts is through the use of polls and surveys. Social media polls and surveys are super simple for obtaining that needed customer feedback quickly.

6. Run Contests and Giveaways

Offering your customers something in return for tweeting with a specific hashtag, retweeting or sharing your content or becoming a follower is a great way to reward and acknowledge engagement.

7. Engage with The Latest Trends and Issues

Sharing and liking the latest posts on the trends and issues relevant to your industry is a great way to show support and involvement. 

8. Make Your Customers Feel Engaged

Not only should you just share your customer’s posts, but to really make them feel engaged, it’s best to give direct responses to their content.

Using social media tools to find every user who is posting about the brand is vital to ensure users feel like they are connected to the company.

But McDonald’s doesn’t stop just responding to each of their posts, they go one step further to ensure they personalise the response to address each user directly. This can be seen in many of their Twitter replies.

Our head of social media is the customer -McDonald’s

Learning Keywords for SM 

Using keywords to make first-time impressions have more impact and is straight to the point, activating audiences’ conscious thinking faster than elongated sentences.  

Keywords  

This is the process by which popular search terms are used by people on all online search engines (i.e. Yahoo, Bing, Baidu {Chinese}, Google, Ask, AOL, DuckDuckGo etc.). They are strategically used or placed in content writing to force the content to rank higher on search engines.  Today just a few decades later the concept of keywords is also applicable on SM platforms using hashtags to emphasise.  

Reflect back on your experience so far, what have you learnt from the process and any experience gained with us for far? Be creative about your experience, and this will lead you to grow and open your mind to new possibilities.  

Engage with the audience  

Many years ago, content writing’s primary purpose was to inform an audience, at least most people thought it was. The reality is it has always been about getting the audience to take action to buy a product or a service. So, we have two types of content writing to inform or lead an audience to take action after reading.  Today, it serves both purposes with a third factor added to it, 

• Inform the audience
• Lead them into a marketing funnel
• Collect data for business use 

so it could be used over again in several ways; to send marketing materials to the addressee or to sell the data for marketing purposes.  

The highest form of engagement is with pictures, video, blogs, live streaming, platforms offering FREE items etc. 

Summary

• To promote your agenda and profile, use as many of the primary functions as possible. 
• Talk about your topic.
• Engagement is Key.
• Use keywords. 
• Engaging with an audience is about informing them, leading them into a sales marketing funnel and collecting their data. 

3.05 PROJECT GROUP WORK 3.05 Engage online.docx

Activity 3.05

 Write a POSITIVE statement or comment to share, teach or engage with your audience on ALL YOUR social media platforms or simply comment about your studies with us. 

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