Engagement is a result and not a goal

It’s not difficult to figure out social media marketing strategies for your organization. All it requires is focus and some logical thinking. But once the strategy is set out, it is easy to get lost in the details and lose sight of what is really important: the act of engaging with the customer. Engaging doesn’t mean putting up updates about your organizations, posting videos about what you do and stuffing one blog post after another down your target audience’s throats. Engaging involves actually building a relationship with your audience which means you need to listen, converse, respond and overall add value to the exchange.

Engaging through social media is all the rage now. But what does it really take to actually make the connect?

• Identify who your target audience is
• Identify where your customers are
• Find out what content interests your audience
• Ensure that your content is capable of effective engagement across platforms
• Humanize your brand
• Employ active listening
• Build complete customer experiences instead of standalone responses
• Communicate across all silos
• Engage in a mutually beneficial manner
• Create messages that are driven by customer preferences
• Provide a personal touch to conversations
• Ensure relevance and personalization in messages

1. Copy – through copy that resonates with readers, brands keep conveying their stories to their audiences
2. Video – this medium is vastly popular especially now that audiences have extremely short spans of attention. With its potential to achieve exponential reach, one can’t really go very wrong with videos.
3. Audio – podcasts are a convenient, low cost, minimal effort means to address your audience and provide relevant messages.
4. Gamification – the concept of gamification is taking the internet world by storm. It works by capitalizing on the competitive, fun-loving traits of audiences while creating awareness and engaging at the same time.

Everything considered, engagement is essentially the result of providing relevant information and messages to your target audience.

[Image Credit: Newblood.com]