Winning on social media is all about engagement. Whether you’re a Las Vegas fashion boutique or convenience store, social media engagement will be critical to speeding pass the competition.
What is social media engagement?
Social media engagement is the holy grail of digital marketing. More specifically, it is the process of interacting with your online audience on a daily if not hourly basis. Active user engagement consists of:
- Likes
- Retweets (RT)
- Shares
- Comments
- Mentions
- Replies
What can #hashtags do for your social engagement?
Hashtags are a mighty, mighty tool. A hashtag is a keyword (in the social media spectrum) that can be extremely beneficial for your brand. There are several ways to implement the use of hashtags to enhance your social engagement. Hashtags will give your posts brand leverage when being seen or heard:
- Branded hashtags (#TMCreativeLV, #LVMS, #InsideZappos)
- Hashtags that participate in trending topics (#WhatYouDontTellCustomers, #NationalCoffeeDay)
- Hashtags that help your story or post engage in twitter chats (#VegasChat)
Hashtags are also great for creating a loyal community, tracking your social marketing campaigns and reaching new audiences. By incorporating hashtags that are already followed, your ad, post or information piece may get picked up and exposed to a new audience who is already searching the same like category.
Images are worth a million likes, retweets and shares
Did you know image based-content attracts more engagement than any other content posted to social media channels? As a retailer, having awesome visually stunning information is critical to driving interest back to your website, ad or landing page. Photos, images, videos, vines and more; users love them all.
Industry Pro Know: We find that sharing humorous, emotionally engaging, colorful and inspirational visuals drives better engagement when observing the general social media landscape. These types of visuals give your audience a reason to stop scrolling and can pique interest for them to get to know your brand a little better.
Schedule out your posts and automate to stay ahead of the competition
Creating a social media content calendar will keep you on track and ensure that you’ll get the most out of your social marketing. Planning ahead helps you to cover all the content bases pertaining to what types of content and when to share it.
Consult with an experienced digital agency to construct a formalized social marketing content strategy before you begin. Even better, have the agency pre-populate your posts using an enterprise level software that combines quality analytics that you can review regularly. By leaving the heavy lifting to experienced pros you’ll have more freedom to post and engage with your audience in real-time to deliver an authentic “in the moment” experience. Being “in the moment” is a great way to show there are real humans, with real reactions that the user can converse with.
Industry Pro Know: Schedule posts to release at a variety of times and days through out the month. Monitor activity at the end of each month and adjust the release time of them in the next month based on any engagement patterns you recognize.
Social marketing should be one of your “go to” mediums. Use it effectively to increase your customer base online and to send foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar location.
Need some help getting started? We can craft a social marketing plan to help you achieve your social marketing engagement goals and increase your bottom line. Give us a call at 702-341-0030 to schedule a complimentary consultation today.
Note about the author: Marketing Coordinator, A.K.A, Digital Diva, ShaDrena has spent the last four plus years posting, tweeting and blogging on behalf of local and nationally recognized startup and nonprofit brands. From content creation, to contribution on social marketing plan design and delivery – say hello to ShaDrena. In off hours, you can catch ShaDrena surfing the web reading about latest pop culture and social marketing trends via HubSpot, NewsCred, AdAge or Digiday.
