It’s time to up your game from vanity metrics to getting value from building relationships, as Rachel Miller, social and influencer marketing expert explains.
How’s the engagement on your social properties? Are you still chasing follower counts and impressions? Do you give your marketers a hard time when those and other vanity metrics go the opposite of up-and-to-the-right?
It’s
like a tree falling in the forest when no one’s around to hear it. When no one engages with your social posts – your content is silent. No one is hearing you.
You
want to be seen. You want to be heard.
So,
what do I mean by engagement? Social
engagement refers to Likes, Hearts, and other non-committal actions. Meaningful
engagement is clicking through to your destination URL and everything that happens after that. Meaningful engagement will drive business value for you. This is the metric you should be seeking to increase month over month.
While
it feels good to see that one of your social posts has 2K Likes and even more ReTweets, this sense of “feel good” falls flat when you review the page analytics and discover that only a couple hundred people have visited and half of them didn’t stick around
long enough to consume the content.
What
can you do to improve the meaningful engagement rate on your content?
I
recommend auditing your target personas and seeing how they correlate to the social landscape. Are you posting on the best social channels for your target audience? Are you using industry language in the social posts that accurately speaks to them? Are you
using the correct imagery to encourage them to click and learn more? Knowing who you’re talking to and how they want to consume content is a key driver of meaningful engagement rates.
What
else can you do? Stop worrying about who is following you.
It’s
incredibly difficult to control who follows you on social media. So forget about the bots and the wackadoo’s and focus on curating a community of people who share your expertise or who are seeking solutions to problems you can solve. Proactively engage with
your community to build rapport and facilitate discussions in and around your areas of expertise. This creates a hub of activity primed for meaningful engagement.
.. forget about the bots and the wackadoo’s and focus on curating a community of people
And
there’s more. Be more human.
Review
the last few posts on your social properties. You may be talking to your target persona, but do they read like an intelligent human wrote them? Or an intelligent machine? Do not underestimate the power of human storytelling and its ability to generate engagement.
People love people. Ask questions. Share a quote from a client. Freely give out advice. Adding a human voice to your social posts makes your content hyper-relatable and desired to be consumed by your target audience.
It’s all too easy to broadcast your content and keep feeling good about your social engagement numbers versus meaningful engagement. To keep all of your business metrics on the up, strive to be more purposeful and more interactive with your social messaging.
Your voice will be heard.
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