Social Media Engagement: The Steps for Improving Yours

Social Media Examiner’s recent study revealed that 83% of marketers claim that social media is important for their business, but they still continue to have a difficult time measuring and attaining the ROI they’d like to be seeing with social media.

We talk about lead engagement and generation quite a bit in our free eBook, “Take Your Social Media To The Next Level”, but here we’ll share some of our new tips and pieces of advice on how you can learn about your buyer through social media that we know will really benefit your business today.

Improving your Social Media Engagement

Review Your Social Data Frequently

Reviewing the statistical data for your social media efforts on a regular basis will go a long way in helping you improve your social media engagement by better understanding your target audience.  By checking in with your data on a weekly basis and following both your worst and best posts, you can answer important questions such as:

• When is the best time for me to post content?
• Which content formats work better, and on which channels? (i.e. video may work well on Facebook and Twitter, but written content may perform best on LinkedIn)
• How much social media is too little? How much is too much?  When you increase posting frequency, does that improve your friend or follower engagement?
• What tone does your audience prefer – a more casual tone?  Or a more professional tone?
• What is my buyer’s personality like (preferences, dislikes, etc.)?

All of these questions should allow you to get a good idea of what sort of engagement you’re getting out of your social media.  You’ll see what and how much certain types of posts are being shared, the click through rates on your posts, and what the comments are and how many you’re getting.

Use Your Audience

There’s a lot that you can learn from your friends and followers on social media sites.  Like we mentioned in the last segment, it’s important that you go through the comments that you receive on your posts.  You’ll be surprised at just how many content ideas you’ll get from those comments.

Even more importantly, if you do a good thorough audit of those comments, you can quickly find out what engages your leads and customers, and what doesn’t.  That way, when you have the time and budget to sink into something to really help give your business a boost (i.e. revamping your blog, writing an eBook, hosting a webinar) you’ll know that it’ll appeal to your audience since they’ve already mentioned it, asked for it, and/or shown an interest in it.

Learn Their Language

This is incredibly important in terms of keywords and SEO.  We talk about keywords a lot in our eBook “How An Inbound Marketing Agency Does: SEO” and explain how you should properly search for them. But one thing that we don’t really get into is how you should really be matching the tone and language of your keywords to that of your target audience.

For instance, if you’re catering to a “beginner” audience for something (i.e. “how to write good content”), you likely wouldn’t use key terms or jargon that those who are “in the know” would use (i.e. “content optimization strategies).

Again, go through those comments and see what kind of language your readers are using to get a good feel of what key words and phrases will work most to your benefit.

The real goal here is to use social media to create a richer, fuller buyer profile so that you can get a better idea of who your customer is, and therefore, how you can sell to them.  That’s what’s really going to boost your ROI.