4 Customer Engagement Strategy for Social Media Success

Did you know that increasing your customer retention rates by just 5% can increase your profits between 25-95%?

The interactions that happen online, especially on social media between you and your target audience is essential to the success and growth of your business.

Customer engagement is a cost-effective strategy of staying in touch with your audience whilst helping them solve their pain points.

Social media has created a level playing ground where marketers can utilise the power of brand engagement to this effect.

If you’re going to keep hold of customers online while pushing to acquire new ones, wouldn’t it be worthwhile to learn how to drive meaningful conversations that can keep your audience engaged?

If you keep reading, I’ll show you how you can use these strategies to your advantage.

What is Customer Engagement Marketing?

Customer engagement marketing is an inbound marketing approach that focuses on building relationships and increasing engagement with prospects and customers through personalised messages.

Customer engagement is what happens when brands share intuitive content with their target audience and interact with them in their preferred channels.

Digital customer engagement occurs when you make use of your website, social media platforms, email marketing etc. to drive interaction between you and your audiences.

Why is Brand Engagement Important on Social Media?

Brand engagement is your organisation’s way of telling your audience that you’re actively listening.

This brings about an inbound strategy of engaging at scale and delighting them individually with tailored messaging.

Social media has changed marketers’ approaches in how they engage their audiences. The messages need to be personalised and streamlined to the language of each platform.

Social media brand engagement is important in the following ways:

• It helps you adjust your content strategy

Buyer personas are meant to give you an understanding of your ideal target audience. However, these are pre-engagement data.

By engaging with your audience on social media, you’ll gather new sets of information that can impact your marketing strategy.

Consumer brand engagement affords you the opportunity to re-evaluate your content strategy by plugging the content gap.

• Brand engagement promotes quality customer service

Since brand engagement is a two-way interaction, it can help you discover dissatisfied customers and their pain points.

In a time where brands are actively seeking to pounce on unhappy customers, engaging your audience will help you retain your customers.

The only thing that’s more important than customer acquisition is retaining old ones.

• Brand loyalty programs

Social media brand engagement helps you identify your biggest fans and influencers.

Consumers trust word of mouth recommendations from people they know. Your fans aren’t just fans, they’re your brand promoters.

Brand engagement can help you discover these sets of people whom you can reward during brand loyalty programs.

• Opportunities for new ideas

User engagement in marketing can help you gather reviews and feedback regarding the performance of your products or services.

It can also help you discover new ways to enhance features on existing products.

Read also: How to improve brand perception using social media

Social Media Engagement Strategy

Social media engagement is like hosting a house party. As the host, you’re expected to welcome your guests with smiles, offer refreshments and engage them in fun conversations.

Your job role at point is to entertain them. This you do with your smile and hospitality.

Social media engagement strategy is a way to distinct yourself from the crowd, and a plan you create to interact with your audience in their preferred platform.

If you were a good host, chances are that your guests will speak well of your party to their friends. The same is applicable to social media engagement – they evoke reactions.

Here are a few ideas you can employ to improve customer engagement on social media:

1.      Hold weekly/monthly social media giveaways

Giveaways provides an opportunity to create conversations around your brand, increase visibility as well as follower counts.

These freebies can help you generate engagements. However, they should be tied to a campaign goal.

This could be to:

• Increase follower counts
• Grow your email list
• Boost brand awareness
• Drive engagement
• Promote new products

2.      Interacts with your audience in the comments section

The comments section is where you respond to questions, give timely feedback and interact with people who have shown interest in your post.

With the comments section, you can easily build a loyal community. Try the following:

• Welcome first time commenters
• Take note of regular commenters
• Notice when the regulars are missing and reach out if you can.

See the comments section as an extension of your brand’s customer service.

3.      Create fun and shareable content

Nothing beats content when it comes to social media brand engagement. You need to know your target audience and the type of content that they like.

Resist the urge of self-promotion. If your content is helpful to your audience, it’ll increase the likelihood for them to join in the conversation.

Make it about your audience. Another idea is to share user generated content. Use the content created by your audience in your posts.

Get creative with your post ideas and listen to what resonates with your audience.

Read also: How to develop an effective content strategy in 6 easy steps

4.      Offer discount codes through your influencer network

Influencer marketing is a good way to drive brand engagement on social media.

For every influencer you work with, you can create discount codes that they can share with their followers.

Run this promo simultaneously across your influencer network and you can create a buzz around your brand.

To track commissions or attribute sales, you can include referral tracking links.

How to Measure Social Media Engagement

Lastly, you can measure social media engagements in any of the following ways:

• Likes, Saves
• Shares or retweets
• Comments and DM’s
• Mentions
• Use of branded hashtags

What social media engagement strategy have you successfully used to generate conversations around your brand? I’ll be glad to hear from you in the comments.