And it’s just as important to know what NOT to do. You don’t aggravate them. You don’t inundate them with irrelevant—or worse yet, unrequested—messages. You don’t hard-sell them in channels where they don’t welcome the hard sell.
The reasons for these dos and don’ts are very clear. Ignore them, and you not only may lose your audience’s attention; you may lose them as audience members altogether. That’s because engagement:
1. Increases social media visibility
2. Improves email deliverability
3. Increases mobile app usage
Engagement for Social Media Visibility
Social media doesn’t exist without engagement. Indeed, the fundamental unit of social media is a connection between two people who share content that is meaningful to them. Not to get all “Maslow-y” on you, but people socialize to fulfill some hole in their hierarchy of needs—be it love, belonging, esteem, or self-actualization. People engage with brands via social media for the same reasons—to serve their needs.
Facebook gets this. It’s why they use an algorithm with over 100,000 different factors to determine what posts are displayed and prioritized in their users’ News Feeds.6 This algorithm (once known as EdgeRank7) looks at the affinity between people, the type of content posted, and the time the content was posted to determine if the content should show up in someone’s News Feed. The net effect is to suppress posts from people who aren’t strong connections or limit the distribution of stale or uninteresting content.
And this is how brands only reach an average of 16 percent of their total Facebook FANS.c Whether by Facebook’s algorithm or by the user’s own hand (choosing to hide content or dislike a brand altogether), your wonderful posts meet an ignominious end, unseen by the vast majority of your FANS.
There is a solution, however; it’s called engagement. With better content—content that inspires likes, comments and shares—you grow your affinity with your FANS. This, in turn, increases the likelihood that your FANS will see your next post. Other ways to enhance engagement on Facebook include:
Interacting with FANS: Facebook excels when it connects people with people. So why not act like a real person and congratulate a FAN on an accomplishment, or share their content? It both humanizes your brand and boosts future post visibility when it resonates.
Serving customers: Like it or not, Facebook sometimes turns into an open forum for customer service issues. Rather than approach these fearfully, embrace them as a chance to resolve a customer issue while increasing your EdgeRank-worthy engagement.
Posting pictures: By one estimate, photos on Facebook receive 53 percent more “Likes,” 104 percent more comments, and 84 percent more clicks than posts with just text and links.8 There’s a reason Facebook bought Instagram: Pictures drive engagement across desktops, smartphones, and tablets.
Asking for open-ended questions: Whether asking for FAN opinions on a new product or simply helping them waste time with a humorous question, posts that ask for input tend to receive it.
While Facebook is currently the only social network to boost and lower posts based on engagement metrics, the others won’t be far behind. As they scale and add members, there’s simply too great a signal-to-noise ratio and too great a risk of inundating users to the point they tune out. So, the next time you see your company’s social media person “just Facebooking” or “just tweeting,” remember that they’re helping to keep your social audience attention for the next time you really need it.
Audience Exercise #6: Find the Narcissistic Brands!
Narcissism is a personality disorder characterized by an excessive sense of self and a lack of empathy for others. The last thing you want to be on social media is narcissistic, because nothing kills engagement faster than a stream filled with self-absorbed, self-promotional posts.
For this exercise, I’d like you to go on the hunt for narcissistic brands on Facebook.
Step 1: Pick three competitive brands not in your industry.
Step 2: Visit the Facebook page of each.
Step 3: Log each of their posts for the past month based on whether they were self-promotional, FAN interactions, or shares of others’ content.
Step 4: Determine the percentage of Facebook posts attributable to each type.
Step 5: Log the average likes, comments, and shares for each type of post.
Find any narcissistic brands that only talk about themselves and never interact with any FANS? Better yet, did you find any correlation between unselfish interaction or sharing and the volume of engagement a post received? Social media rewards brands that engage their FANS and FOLLOWERS like real human beings—just like we reward friends who care enough to ask us how we’re doing. Emphasize the me in social media at risk to your own engagement.