Why Don’t I Get Any Social Media Engagement for My Business?
You’re on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. You have followers, fans, connections and subscribers but no one seems interested in your posts. What’s more? You’ve invested time, manpower and money on having employees or yourself update profiles and monitor social networks, yet you have seen little to no return on investment.
So, you’re asking why you don’t get any social media engagement, right?
Let me answer that question with 5 questions:
1 – Are You Consistent with Your Posts?
Get on your Facebook or Twitter account. If the last time you posted wasn’t yesterday or today, that could be an issue. If it was yesterday or today, but before that you hadn’t posted in a week or longer, you still have a problem.
Granted, different social media outlets will require different levels of consistency. With Twitter, for example, you want to post at least once a day to stay relevant to your followers, though 2 to 3 times might help you out a little more. On Facebook, you’ll want to post at least every 3-4 days, but once a day is definitely a better schedule to follow.
That being said, another aspect of consistency is your responsiveness. If someone does comment, do you respond? If you get a retweet, do you return the favor or thank that user? You want to consistently interact with followers, fans and the like. Show that you’re a person behind the brand, rather than a robot posting status updates and tweets.
2 – Do You Ever Go Off-Brand (without being off-brand)?
What? How can I go off-brand without being off-brand?
Well, there are two types of “off-brand” that you’ll have to consider.
The first is your company persona, culture and values. This is the kind of brand that you want to maintain as much as possible. Hearkening back to consistency, your company needs a consistent personality, which you develop through proper branding.
The second type of branding regards your product and/or service. Your company is built upon these sellable things, so it’s safe to say that your brand has some basis on what you sell. That being said, what you sell doesn’t dictate who you are.
Let me stress that: what you sell does not dictate who you are.
In other words, you (as an actual person) can be a “nice guy” and sell cars. Typically that helps the selling process along. You could be an “intelligent woman” and sell pet rocks. It’s a dumb product, but you have to be pretty smart to sell something that seems so stupid.
Your business can operate similarly on social media. Your luxury fashion company can maintain a classy, refined persona without only ever talking about your Spring/Summer collection. Your mom & pop hotdog stand can keep that americana feel by posting pictures of stuff other than your own greasy, delicious food.
By going off-brand in regards to product focus, while remaining on-brand regarding persona, you open up your posts to more topics, giving followers more opportunity to engage with your pages.
3 – Do You KISS?
“Michael always says, ‘K-I-S-S, keep it simple, stupid.’ Great advice. Hurts my feelings every time.”
-Dwight Schrute
While social media can be a great venue for advancing important political, social, economic or scholarly issues, typically that’s not your goal with a business page. If it’s engagement you want (and, trust me, you do): the simpler the better.
If you ask a question, limit the choices. Yes or no? Chocolate or vanilla? More or less? These sorts of either or questions make for easy quick responses from users who really don’t want to take the time to think. It doesn’t mean that they are dumb, it just means that thinking takes extra time, and so does writing out long, convoluted answers.
Once you get an answer, however, the user may as well be hooked. You can respond to their comment, retweet their answer or whatever you can think. Then, you can start a real conversation, get other people in on it and turn the simple question into something more meaningful. With an easy, minimalistic initial question or concept, you can turn a conversation into a real connection with your fans.
4 – How Often do You Incorporate Images?
Phone pics, office candids, customer submissions, memes… The list goes on.
- When you post a status update, do you attach a related image?
- When you have an event, do you post pics and tag people or other businesses?
- When something random and funny happens in your office, do you take a moment to snap a photo with your phone and tweet it?
People respond to images because they are easy, relatively open to interpretation and personable. Furthermore, they draw attention, whereas text by itself tends to deter attention.
As a general rule, post at least one image to Facebook a day and post images to Twitter whenever it fits. For Instagram, images are everything. In contrast, for LinkedIn you’ll probably want to steer away from images (stick with your headshot on this network).
5 – Have You Taken Time to Learn?
This is Mr Feeny – he educated every millennial.
Here you are – you’re learning just by reading this post!
But, do you know the nitty gritty aspects of social media marketing? Do you know how to get in a groove/schedule with posting? Do you know the etiquette and best practices for each network, as well as their respective demographics, history, trends and news coverage?
Chances are, you probably don’t. Luckily, it’s fairly easy to stay informed and to get educated. You can take a look at Mashable.com every once in a while as you get acquainted with using a new profile on an unfamiliar network. You and your team could even try a social media seminar – feel free to contact us for information about this sort of training.
Honestly, the more you learn, the more you realize that social media marketing is hard work. It takes creativity, lot’s of time, attention, street smarts and more. And that’s why we do social media for out clients – because it’s a daily process to learn, adapt and create successful pages.
Tags: Social Media Marketing