Social media is the key to reaching untapped markets and engaging with other merchants and sellers for partnerships. Engaging with them lets them know the business exists. Posting on a regular basis makes them aware of the brand’s activity which encourages people to reach out get to know the product or service. When this happens, it’s a must to respond in time to convert curious visitors into customers. The positive customer experience with an online marketing agency is a form of engagement, a product of SMO.

Engagement: A Measure of Social Media Success

Engagement measures how much and how often users interact with the content on the brand’s social account. Each social platform has a metric measuring social media engagement.

Below is a breakdown of the different engagement touch points from the social platforms. Any form of sharing leverages engagement and amplifies its effects.

Facebook

Organic Likes

Paid Likes

Unlike

Mentions Impressions

Links Clicked

Reactions: The reaction button on a post enables users to share different reactions to the content – Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad or Angry.

Twitter

Replies: a user sends a tweet directly to a handle. Replies appear to the brand’s and user’s feed as well as the feeds of users following both handles

Favorites: a user approves or likes a tweet

Instagram

Likes

Hashtags

Followers Gained

Comments: proof that audiences resonate with a post

LinkedIn

Likes

Comments

Interactions: the number of times people have liked, commented on, or shared a post.

Engagement Rate: the number of interactions, clicks, and followers acquired divided by the number of impressions

Engagement metric highlights the success of social content. The number of clicks, likes, comments, and shares of individual posts are all part of the core engagement metrics. To maximize its value and make use of the date from each social platform, it helps to calculate the average daily response rates, response rate, and inbound messages over replies sent from day-to-day operations or within the selected date range. Knowing which social media engagement metrics to track generate accurate data to improve audience reach, social media performance, social media marketing.

However, social media engagement isn’t successful if the brand’s goal is to gain viewers and increase follower count without a proper content strategy. There’s still an extensive online community still unreached and untapped which a business can access through social media engagement. To balance its time between developing engagement efforts and building a content strategy, it can use tools to automate responses, manage discussions, schedule posts, and track engagement metrics. It’s critical to ensure each conversation with a customer resolves a problem and ends in satisfaction.

Ways To Utilize Social Media Engagement Metrics

With several social platforms to utilize, the brand must double its focus on how to encourage activity from different users. Targeting the metrics is the key to promote engagement.

There are several ways to enhance audience engagement to help target company goals. Below are some of the techniques to use the findings from social media engagement.

1. Gather a team to work on social media presence.

The company must have a team answering questions, responding to comments, and concerns to ensure full-customer engagement. The team must be ready to tackle incoming queries and equipped to supply information to all inquiring users.

A social media team must have:

• Content Creators – They come up with ideas to create and schedule content. They keep the brand active on social platforms by consistently filling the editorial calendar.
• Community Managers – They keep transactions on a positive note and maintain the situation and news about the brand positive.
• Public Relations (PR) – They handle brand exposure, partnerships and collaborations with customers, clients, and businesses.
• Sales – They provide specific content to drive engagement among specific parties.
• Support – They are members on standby yet always available in case problems and other glitches along the way.

2. Plan content based on data.

The metrics shows which post types and content gain much attention. It distinguishes the attract followers and which don’t.

3. Concentrate on a demographic.

Facebook Insights provides a breakdown of your audience. It shows the gender, age, and location of users engaging with the brand’s posts. The engagement metrics show the trend and movement of the audience and notify the brand to drive its marketing campaign towards the right market.

4. Gauge the success of marketing campaign and product launches.

Immersing in social media gives customers a chance to address their comments and feedback on the brand’s product and services.

5. Assess growth and performance.

Social media metrics quantify the performance of the business. Following the engagement, rate presents the rising popularity, growing community, and increasing conversion rate.

6. Discover brand enthusiasts and influencers

People who are always on the platform can boost the brand’s exposure through initiatives and projects.

Social media engagement takes the bulk of the work of SMO. When the business learns to treat likes, reactions, comments, and follower count as a form of communication with users; it gains access to audiences and potential customers on various social media platforms.

GIFs taken from Giphy

Icons by Raphael Silva

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Why paid social media?

While this is not telling that paid social media will overtake organic social media, it is thereby safe to say that paid social media is here to stay. Paid will be an essential part of the SEO and SMM portfolio. Why? Because…

• Social networking websites need profit, too. They also have bills and people to pay, and this is only possible through having a marketing arm in their platform.
• Social platforms are growing in popularity. These are increasingly becoming an ideal place to achieve mass awareness. Thus, big brands that are willing to pay high for social media advertising are also rising in number. Small brands will certainly follow the trend.
• Social networking sites will have their respective marketing platforms in the future. Facebook has been a leader with which other sites are taking cue from.

A different approach

Because it is paid, the strategy unquestionably requires a different approach. When we say paid, it simply means sponsored. Users mostly see these sponsored contents on Facebook although it was reported that Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram will follow suit in no time. You might have noticed that Facebook is filling your feeds with sponsored posts. These feeds are paid contents.

Fundamentally, what we see is the direct opposite of working your way to earning your rightful place in the feeds. Organic social media, which uses contents that people love, is not earning the returns that are expected of it. Put simply, organic social media is not really driving engagements thus your content should be good enough so people will look at it.

On the other hand, paid social media is more of creating attention-grabbing posts. The aim of these posts is to stand out given the clutter in social media feeds. With standing out comes building the brand, which is blatantly conveyed using paid social media. While paid social media is trying to be non-intrusive as possible, paid social media is interruption marketing in reality. Brand owners pay for interrupting people with their promotional messages.

With these, there are important elements of paid social media that we must consider. These include but are not limited to:

1) Interesting posts that people will read, engage to and share

2) Informative posts that build business value

The way to prepare

If you strongly believe that paid social media is the future of social media, then you might as well prepare for it. In the meantime, consider establishing both strategies into your SMM. Define the types of contents that you want to promote as paid and organic.

Start experimenting with the paid platform. For one, paid advertising is still in its infancy thereby there are several opportunities for growth. Why don’t you grow with the platform starting today so you’d be in a much better position once it matures? Hey, it is still marketing – remember the first-mover advantage?

Let me end the discussion by saying that not all social media updates are appropriate as paid, and not all paid posts will be suitable as organic posts. This is the great divide that should guide the SEO and SMM campaigns. As such, organic and paid social media will not be for everyone; they are not universal separately and together. Know that each requires different sets of strategies, approaches and skills.

Image credit: NxtFactor.com

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