Social Media for Participant Engagement, How to & Guide
Engaging With Your Audience
If all you’re doing is sharing some content with your audience though the occasional message, updating them with pictures, posts and articles – you aren’t using social media for participant engagement to its fullest.
The great thing about social media is that it lets you actually engage with your audience and talk with them.
This presents networking opportunities and at the same time allows you to get feedback about your products, and more importantly, your brand and trust appeal.
What’s more, it facilitates ‘influencer marketing’. The art of finding people who already have a big following and getting them to share your posts with their audience (resulting in new followers for you).
To benefit, it’s important that you treat your social media as a ‘two-way’ channel of dialogue not just a post it board.
That means , that YES, you should be responding to all the posts and questions that people have and post.
This will increase engagement several fold as it will help people to feel as though they know you and as though they have a relationship – thus they’re far more likely to share what you post and to make comments when you ask questions.
At the same time, you should also work to encourage engagement.
This means inviting people to comment, asking for opinions and taking part in active discussions. Join some communities and post advice, tips and questions as your brand without expecting anything in return – you might just make some friends who become fans and thereby customers.
It’s better to have a few followers who are highly engaged and loyal than it is to have a million who never actually read any of your posts. And as ‘1,000 True Fans’ famously hypothesizes, a few genuine fans is all a company needs to make a lot of money and to be completely resilient against changing markets.
Getting Started with Social Media for Participant Engagement
When you first get started, you need to ensure that you have a strong brand (your brand starts with your domain name choice) and that this branding is consistent across all of your social media accounts. The key here is to have a visual language and a persona that will ensure your visitors know what to expect from you while at the same time making your content instantly recognizable.
A good brand will tie all your social media efforts together and it will make you look far more professional. Most importantly though, it will turn every interaction into an opportunity to strengthen your visibility as well as your authority.
If you don’t already have one, then create a good logo and come up with a tagline/mission statement. Create some images that can be used as cover images and that will use the same colors that are in your logo. Now ensure that the same design language and branding is present on your website, set up multiple social media accounts and link them altogether as much as possible.
The Objective of Social Media
Now you have your social media accounts and you’ve created ways for people to find you, you need to start filling all of you accounts and pages with meaningful content.
This means starting with high quality blog posts for your website. This is the basis for content marketing and you can use this to ensure people want to come back to your site, while at the same time reinforcing your authority and knowledge on the given topic. This will give people a reason to subscribe to your site and potentially to follow you on social media through the supplied links, feeds and buttons. It also means you can share your content to social media and thus bring people from your social accounts back to your website.
Meanwhile, the social accounts themselves can also be updated with status updates and photos. Just as with your blog posts and articles, the objective here is to provide value. Think of these almost like mini-blogs with precisely the same objective: to establish yourself as a leading authority in your field while at the same time providing people with entertainment and information.
The mistake that so many businesses make is to use their social media accounts only to promote their business. In doing this though, you don’t give people any reason to follow you – most people don’t want regular adverts sent to them! Instead then, look at ways you can offer something interesting, entertaining, inspiring or valuable through your social media account while at the same time keeping it on-topic.
In other words, you should be viewing your social media as a product in itself – to the point where it can stand alone as its own business almost.
So if you are selling cupcakes, then you don’t use your social media to keep writing about how great your cupcakes are. Instead, you show pictures of delicious desserts to Instagram and Pinterest, you post recipes to Facebook and Pinterest and you update Twitter with ‘baking tips’. Maybe you also run some competitions, or you ask users to send in their recipes and photos of what they’ve made.
Suddenly, you’re now providing actual value and you’re giving people who have stumbled upon your social pages a good reason to start following you. Over time, you will also build trust and authority in their eyes as you continually provide value and they’ll thus be far more receptive to your marketing messages when you do occasionally share them.