engaging customer through social media

4 Keys To Better Social Media Engagement by @XLConsultingGro

February 25, 2019 by Elaine Slatter Leave a Comment

by Elaine Slatter | Featured Contributor

Would you like to get more social media engagement? Of course, you would, and so do millions of businesses. The social media space is getting more and more crowded every day. We can’t be all things to all people because that just doesn’t work for engagement. So, what are the four key tips to help you with social media engagement?

Community

Your community will help with your social media engagement if they become loyal followers of you and your company’s brand. Take your time to develop your own community. How do you do this? Map out your ‘why’. The reason your company does what it does.

For example, Toms is not just a shoe company, it is a movement.

Its mantra: “With every TOMS purchase, you stand with us on issues that matter.” That’s ‘why’ they are in business.

People who purchase Toms shoes care as much about issues that matter as they do about buying shoes. They can buy shoes from anywhere but no other company is committed to helping others like Toms. Toms supporters are a very committed community of buyers.

Our XL Consulting community, under the Fabulous Fempreneurship brand is made up of women entrepreneurs who want to help develop the women leaders of tomorrow in the business community. It’s ‘why’ we are in business. Who is your community?

Curating

Once you have found your community, the next step is to curate content. Finding content is much easier when you know who you want to engage with. Not all the content you develop has to be your own. Find other thought leaders who share the same community as you and follow them on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

The next step is to engage with these thought leaders and curate their best content and share with your community on a consistent basis. This is the “give” aspect of social media. By promoting their curated content these thought leaders will engage with you and share YOUR content.

Content

While you are curating content from influencers in your market space, don’t forget to create your own content!

This is pretty easy to do once you are following leaders in your industry. You can take a topic that your community wants to hear about and spin it many different ways on multiple platforms. Just don’t be lazy! It may seem easy to connect your platforms together ie Facebook/Instagram, but that is just duplicating content and the audiences on different platforms do not always share the same interests.

For example, the audience demographic on Facebook is not the same as Instagram. The younger community who hang out on Instagram definitely do not have a Facebook profile. They have no interest at all in Facebook. If you have a teen to early 20’s community, they are more likely to have a Twitter account than a Facebook profile.

If your community is B2B or leaders in the business community, then producing content to post on LinkedIn is important. Content for this platform is not the same as the material you necessarily post on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. It is a Business platform so leave out the very personal stuff, it doesn’t fit this platform.

How do you produce your own content for a variety of platforms without sucking up all your valuable time? One of the best ways is to create a content calendar for the month for each platform. This could be in the form of 4 blog posts that can be geared to twitter and facebook audiences, plus 3 videos for IGTV, & 4 videos on YouTube. Add in a couple of podcasts to share on LinkedIn and you have a variety of material that can produce a month’s worth of content. And, let’s not forget photos. Video and photo content can be produced easily on your smartphone because your community will enjoy the personal side of your content as much as the professionally edited content you produce. It will be more real for your community and show your brand personality.

You can show the raw side of ‘you’ by hosting Facebook lives, or Instagram lives. There are a variety of ways to engage your community.

If you aren’t sure what kind of content to develop, search platforms such as Buzz Sumo or Quora or Google keywords. These sites will give you ideas of what a community like yours is interested in learning about and the trending topics. If you have a Facebook group you can poll the group to find out what they need help with the most.

Once you have developed your content you can schedule it to disperse, rinse and repeat many times over with a scheduling tool. My favorite is PromoRepublic, a cross between Canva and Hootesuite. I can use their content suggestions, alter it, select one of the graphics and schedule across multiple platforms all at the same time.

You can always update historic content by adding more relevant news, videos, quotes, and photos to make it new again. If you devote one hour a month to updating existing content, you have created brand new content in a matter of minutes that will help boost your Google ranking.

Connecting

Once you have posted your content on a regular basis, don’t forget the most important part which is connecting. Respond to your community by engaging with their content, answering their comments and taking note of what your community is adding or responding to. This is the listening part of social media engagement. The comments and concerns of your community will help you with increased engagement

Don’t forget to SHARE posts from your community of followers on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. This will show you care and at the same time increase your followers.

Social media engagement is your online marketing strategy, which combined with in person, traditional marketing, will boost your brand awareness and lay the foundation for selling products.

Elaine Slatter

Elaine Slatter is a Small Business Expert, founder of XL Consulting Group and author of the popular book, “Fabulous Fempreneurship”, a complete business guide for women. XL Consulting Group helps entrepreneurs with market planning, strategy, branding, web design and social media. She has over 30 years of executive business and marketing experience and is ready to help you rocket your business to success. Elaine is passionate about mentoring women to become successful women entrepreneurs. To find out more, visit XL Consulting Group or join the Fabulous Fempreneurship mastermind.

xlconsultinggroup.com/

To Market Your Business Successfully Online Can Seem Like It Takes A Village, When Really It Should Take a Targeted ‘Group’

April 12, 2017 by Dina Arsenault 1 Comment

by Dina Arsenault | Featured Contributor

Bing, you get a notification on your phone from your Facebook notifications, you click on it to see what it is and low and behold you have been added to another Group! Are you excited or angered?

Let’s be honest, Groups have about the same popularity as Game Requests on Facebook and tend not to be high on anyone’s popularity list. Unfortunately, many marketers and business owners have ineffectively used them as a means to spam individuals to like their pages or buy their products or services which goes against the very nature of why groups were created – To build and create those all to important relationships online with your target audience.

Effective social media marketing today is a medium which puts building an authentic relationship with one’s followers at the forefront. This is achieved through authenticity speaking ‘TO’ your target audience and not ‘AT’ them. Groups when used properly can achieve just that.

Groups generally are an under utilized strategy that business owners need to be using effectively for their online marketing strategy. I will discuss three ways they can achieve this below.

Here we go…

Coaching or Mentoring

Having either a private or public group centered around you mentoring or coaching its members is an excellent way to position yourself as a expert in your field. This is also a great way for people to connect and inspire each other either in business or in life. Real Relationships can be formed, which then can be taken offline either in sales or in business connections. It is a wonderful atmosphere to share ideas, work on joint projects and create an overall positive community around your brand.

Networking

This one probably seems the most logical and generally is one of the most popular uses for groups we see. This is where you need to be selective with which the ones you choose to belong to. This generally is where you will see individuals spamming the newsfeed with sales pitches or promotions. You really need to be cognizant of the group posting and participation rules. When done correctly, networking groups can be a valuable space for sharing with other business owners and entrepreneurs, finding new clients, getting ideas and or providing advice or inspiration to others.

Online Marketing Strategy

It is no secret that the continuous changes to the Facebook Algorithms has made getting effective reach and engagement on our biz pages that much more difficult to obtain. An effective strategy that can work to boost this, is to spend the time engaging, supporting and building those all too important relationships online within the confines of Facebook Groups. If you follow the number one rule of providing value first, true connections will organically occur over time. What you will find is that others will happily return the support back to you by liking, commenting, sharing and checking out your own biz page in the process. Unlike your own pages, groups don’t have algorithms to deal with, so the added bonus is that every group member will get notified when you post or share within the group, so you have even more of a chance of the right people seeing your content than merely on your biz page alone. Groups are paramount for your content getting seen by the right people. Once you know who your target audience is, I suggest that you find a group that ‘they’ likely would be a part of. Share content from your own biz page that you think your target audience would find value in, and ALWAYS follow the groups posting guidelines, never spamming or just ‘selling’ you or your business.

So as you can see, when used effectively, Facebook Groups are an untapped ‘gold mine’ of opportunity and connection for both you and your business. Now, with Facebook beginning the staggered roll out of business pages having the opportunity to share from their business pages as their business page, it has become an even more important strategy to utilize.

If you have any questions about how you can utilize Facebook Groups for you and your business, please feel free to contact me, I would be more than happy to help!

Until next time, Happy Grouping!

Save

Dina Arsenault

Dina Arsenault Digital Media Strategist and the undisputed reigning Madame of creativity, community and connection for the Ontario Chapter of http://acueconsulting.com/.

A celebrated and sought after speaker and writer, Dina is a caffeine fueled and food delighted ( locally sourced of course) Community Builder, Relationship Nurturer and all around Small Business Supporter. Dina’s online expertise is driven by her desire to promote your business online while connecting and elevating others in the process to foster community and the all around ‘good feels’. If you want to be visible, connected and engaged with your community (and exposed to great food and fun) Dina is your gal!

acueconsulting.com/

Three Strategies to Get More Engagement on Your Social Media Pages by @social_strat

March 31, 2014 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

by Crystal Girgenti

Many small business owners dive into social media when they begin to promote their business online. They see the value that others have placed on using the sites to grow a business and gain new clients, but after a while they begin to form doubts.

When using social media, the likes, shares, and comments on your posts are what help drive traffic and expand your reach. If a fan comments on your posts, all of their friends see the comment and a link to your page. That is the real power of using social media. In addition, when people are interested in your content, you become more motivated to share and help them further. It makes you feel wanted. You can make a difference.

You may get a few likes here and there from that super loyal fan, but you want and need more. So what happens when you’re posting, but not getting any feedback or engagement? You begin to feel like you’re talking to a wall. It’s natural to become discouraged, think social media is a waste of your time, and give up.

But not so fast!

Try these three strategies to get people liking, commenting, and sharing your posts and pages:

1. Start with a targeted group of individuals and offer information and solutions geared towards their needs. For example, if you’re in the fitness industry, offer tips and tricks specifically for women trying to lose weight before their wedding. Don’t worry. You won’t miss out on helping your other fans. In fact, your post will most likely be shared more often because your audience can think of someone off the top of their head that this information can serve. You’re following will become more interested because the content resonates with them. They can comment because they know what you’re talking about and will even ask questions to see if you can help further. Imagine clients coming to you for help instead of you finding them? Change it up every week or so and offer solutions to a different group. Find out what their hobbies or interests are and get them talking!

2. Ask your audience a question. By simply posting information and promotions, you are having a monologue. The goal of using social media is to engage in a dialogue, where both parties are talking to each other. If you get in the habit of simply pushing information to your audience, they will not be offered a chance to provide their comments or opinions. Perhaps you have a product that comes in blue or purple. You can ask their opinions on which color they prefer. Or you can ask them what they need help with. Involve your audience in your business decisions. Not only will you gain valuable market research at no cost, but you’ll gain a following who sees that their opinions are valued.

3. Lastly, reaching all of your fans can be difficult when posting once or twice per day, especially with Facebook’s ever changing algorithm which determines how many of your fans are shown your posts. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a steady decline in the number of fans who see your posts because of these changes. A quick fix for this is to post more often and increase the number of posts you send out per day. You won’t bother people if you are sending out valuable, usable, and interesting content that encourages conversation. Many small business owners will use the “I don’t have time” excuse when told to post more often. You’ll need to decide for yourself what is important to your business. In my opinion, it is always worth your time to engage in conversations with the people that pay you!

Take action using these strategies one at time and you should begin to see a steady increase in the engagement on your pages. Let your audience know that you genuinely care about them and you will be rewarded with increased revenues.

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Crystal Girgenti is a small business consultant who helps start ups, non-techies, and beginners grow their business with the use of online marketing and technology. As a statistician in the past, her knowledge of technology and measuring success, along with her enthusiasm in helping individuals share their passions, has made her a sought after advisor to small business owners. You can grab a copy of her FREE report “100 Things Every Business Must Do To Succeed Online” at http://www.social-strategist.com

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