5 Proven Social Media Engagement Strategies For 2018
WRITTEN BY BARRY FELDMAN FOR HUBSPOT.
In the world of social media marketing, the word "engagement" gets thrown around a lot, but few brands actually know how to achieve it.
Brands might pursue the low-effort game of tweeting, ‘gramming, feeding Facebook, and Linkedin-ing updates about products, services, and educational content, but see little engagement.
Engagement just isn’t easy to produce. You have to be, well, engaging. In your business niche, the “like my page” approach probably isn’t going to be effective as you’d like.
Let’s look at ideas that could make you a force to be reckoned with. I’ve organized them into an AEIOU list. (I want to call it an acronym, but how would you pronounce the five vowels?)
A IS FOR ASK
The best way to engage someone is to ask a question. “How are you?”and “How’s it going?” are popular options in conversion, but too dull for social media warfare.
“What’s your name?” probably won’t work and “What’s your email?” might come off as a bit too forceful. How about …
“What do you think?” Yes! That’s a winner.
People like to think things through. They like to hear from other thinkers. Certainly, they want other people to know what they think. Try prompting your audience with one of the following "What do you think?" strategies:
Probe their personality. Post a question that invites people to share their opinion or weigh in on something.
Play the “test your knowledge” game. It’s irresistible.
Post a poll. It’s easy to create polls on Twitter and Facebook. In addition to engaging your followers, you stand to learn meaningful things about them too.
Respond to my email. Email from brands are bound to ask you to click-through to read, watch, and try or buy something, but how often do they simply ask you to write back? I find this this be an enormously engaging strategy and have seen it work for my brand and many others. Notice I wrote, “Respond to my email,” not “our email” or “this email.” A human-to-human first person approach will be the engaging way to call this play.
Just ask. Interactivity 101: simply post a question. Whether done so in a social stream, blog post, online group or community, or on a Q&A site such as Quora, I’ve witnessed asking followers relevant, provocative, and timely questions creates some of the most engaging and thought-provoking social media activity of all.
