Do you feel like you are creating incredible, engaging content on your social channels but experiencing ….crickets? The problem may not be your content, but your habits. While we’re all guilty of assuming our strategies will work, that can be a fatal error when it comes to digital marketing. Building a powerful brand presence that generates fame on social media isn’t easy!
If you’re struggling with low engagement on your socials, which can range from the number of impressions to the number of comments you get, you need to make some adjustments to your social strategy. Check out three things you can do to boost your engagement and take your social media strategy from dead to magnetic.
1. Make sure you’re talking to the right people
If you’ve done your homework, you’ve defined your ideal audience. For example, a healthtech company may know they want to reach key decision makers at hospitals. That includes nursing managers, CMOs, and directors of marketing managers for hospitals. All their marketing materials are geared toward those audiences, and it’s who their sales team tries to get in front of.
So naturally, that’s who they target on social media, and not only through organic messaging. They even target their LinkedIn ads towards people in those positions. The problem is, the response rate of 1% is much lower than the industry average 5% on all those platforms.
Why? Because although it’s the right audience, we’ve found that they’re not always on the platforms you may think. Potential clients in those positions aren’t at their computer for the majority of the day, and they aren’t checking their phones very often on those apps. What we’ve found from working with hundreds of clients is that there is often a hidden and surprising audience most companies skip right over.
Consider switching up which staff members you are trying to connect to through your social channels. Often, it’s their support staff or assistants that spend more time on social media. That matters, because they’re often in the daily grind and recognize the need for what you have to offer more than the decision makers do.
Let’s look at another example. Say you have a powerful electronic medical records (EMR) cloud-based software, and you firmly believe it will simplify the administrative side of running a practice. As in the above example, you want to target the decision makers, which is often the office manager, the CFO or others in positions of authority. It makes sense to target them, but who else is missing? The support staff, the front desk/receptionist and appointment scheduler. By adding this audience to our clients campaigns, we’ve seen engagement rates double.
Who surfs their social platforms during the day? Over lunch? In the mornings? Although doctors participate in social media, are they positioned to respond to ads?
And while your product or software may improve the life of the person in charge of the practice, what if he or she isn’t always aware of the day-to-day hiccups that come with office management?
2. Reevaluate your own posting habits
A few years ago, what time of day you posted organic content on social platforms mattered. In the healthcare industry, early mornings were great times to share content, as well as late in the evening.
Now, however, your content isn’t going to show up in people’s feeds based on when you post. That’s because social algorithms favor relatable content over well-timed ones. If you regularly post at, say, 10 a.m., noon, 2 p.m., and 8 p.m., that’s great. But it doesn’t really matter.
The more engagement you get on your posts, the more likely your future posts are to be shown to people. That’s what it’s about — quality and engagement.
Take a look at how your own social feed is set up. Do you see posts in chronological order? Probably not. No social platform shows things chronologically any more. This means that you can’t count on the timing of your posts to boost engagement. Instead, focus on creating content that gets people to engage with you. More on how to do that next.
One thing does matter when it comes to timing, though — response time. Make sure you have someone available to answer customer questions and comments quickly.
3. Create engaging content
Does your social strategy consist of sharing links to blogs on your website? Unless you’re creating a catchy caption to accompany it that invites your followers to connect with you, that won’t get you a whole lot of traction.
Right now, the content that gets the most engagement is video. You can see through the popularity of TikTok that short form video content is not only effective at reaching your audience, but addictive. TikTok really throws traditional marketing on its head when it comes to engaging with customers. The videos are authentic and silly, while inviting the audience to connect and form relationships with the content creator.
If people are engaged with your content— which we define as comment, liking, and sharing your posts — your post will show more frequently in your audience’s social feed. Engagement is the primary driver behind visibility.
Examples of engaging content include:
- Showing behind-the-scenes photos and videos of your team at work
- Joining “challenges” on social platforms (check popular hashtags for content people are engaging with!)
- Feature plenty of graphics
- Share testimonials from happy customers
- If you quote experts in your field, tag them!
There are many ways to post interesting content that resonates with your audience. Engagement is the unicorn you need to make social feeds work for you and show up more frequently to the right audience. My suggestion is to try one of these three strategies today, give it two weeks and measure to see what impact it had. You’ll be suprised by what a simple change can do for improvement.
If you need some help kickstarting your social media platforms or want to see which platforms would fit your brand, schedule a meeting with us. We’ll talk it through with you and see how we can help!
