The Art & Science of Social Media Engagement

The world is growing at an extraordinary pace, and social media has played the major act. Today’s consumers make decisions based on the online discussions and user reviews of the product/service or the company. The major online platforms include Facebook and Twitter, where reputations are defined by the number of likes, shares/ re-tweets, and comments. People have become more informed, and the sources of this information are ever new and ever more. Facebook alone holds over 1.23 billion monthly active users. Needless to say, social media has become cardinal to how we converse, interact and take decisions from pin to plane, on a daily basis.

Targeted Social Media Engagementr
Taking into consideration the speed of social media, a message can go from popular to completely forgotten, supported to totally disgusted in a matter of seconds. It all depends on the quality and the content of the post. The key factor in ensuring the genuineness and trust of the followers, customers or partners is to think about what your message means to them. Authentic social communication calls for you to be honest about what your brand represents and offers and what can you provide your customers with.

Social Media has provided people with a way to practice their right of expression by allowing them to express their opinions and experiences online about a product, brand or company. These comments and posts can be negative or positive and are visible to a vast audience. They do not determine the market stability of the brand or the company, but they sure represent how that brand is affecting the lives of its customers.

How Social Media Engages?
Up until now, social media was traditionally used for marketing, branding, promotion and recruitment by enterprises. Other than being just a social media page used for marketing, customers now expect a company’s handle to look prominent because they search for reliability in it. Social media is now integrated into the way businesses are carried out today. It exhibits how companies track engagement and sell products. Being active on Twitter, posting fresh content on a blog actively, sharing videos on the YouTube channel, posting pictures on Instagram, keeping people updated on Facebook and the integration of all social media technologies is vital for brand endorsement.

In elementary terms, Social Engagement is the interaction between people and businesses on the social network.
Facebook engagement includes posts, likes, comments and shares.
Twitter engagements include @replies, retweets, and mentions.
LinkedIn engagements include the number of interactions on a post, the clicks and followers acquired divided by the number of impressions.

A recent survey conducted by NM Incite’s “State of Social Customer Service Report” claims that 71% of consumers who experience a quick and effective brand response on social media are more likely to recommend that brand to others. That compares to just 19% of customers who do not receive a quick response.

While Social Engagement is gaining tremendous popularity, some people are averse to the idea because they think that there is no way to measure the Social Media Engagement impact. Or they do not understand the value and impact of how social engagement affects their business.

Social Media Monitoring or Social Listening is one of the most ignored and missed opportunities for businesses. Social Listening involves monitoring how many people have viewed your posts, what are they saying about your business on social media and the issues that affect it.

A proper social listening approach will allow you to know what your competitors’ next move is, so you can offer better services according to those prospects. It will also allow you to identify someone who makes a negative remark about your business without even mentioning your social media handles, and this will allow you to rectify the issue before the negative comments spread any further.

Social listening allows you to gain an exceptional insight into what your customers, competitors, and industry influencers are saying, enabling you to stand higher than your competitors and to develop better products, services and relations with the followers.

Tools For Social Media Managemntr
Tools like HootSuite, TweetReach, Klout, Social Mention, HowSociable and many more are available for effective social monitoring and tracking brand mentions, competitors, keywords and industry terms. This can help you create strong reports on your social media impact.

Analytics help you make informed decisions. You can decide what type of content generates a better response on your social media. Initially, you can use the built-in options such as Facebook Insights, which tells you the reach of your posts and the number of likes, shares and comments on it. While this is free, some of the others are paid accounts, like Flikr Stats, and Vimeo Plus Stats. A copyright holder on YouTube gets access to the YouTube Content Manager which includes vast data on your video reach.

Some social media management tools, such as Radian6, Vitrue, Postling and SocialTALK are equipped with all enterprise-level tools built specifically for brand management. Tools such as Coremetrics, Omniture and Webtrends come with numerous analytic tools which are very helpful already, but they are tweakable making them more suitable for your kind of needs. A majority of these social sites offer an API, so developers can built off of data.

Businesses are innovating and growing at an extensive speed and it can be intimidating to add yet another file in your briefcase, but it is about time you start to transform your company into a social business. Social media has gone way over the fad stage. It is not going anywhere anytime soon and it is up to you to clutch it close or push it off, but you and your customers are sure to be affected. The world is engaged in this social conversation with or without you. The chance to leap in is available with one touch. If you haven’t already, it’s about time you hop in.