10 Social Media Best Practices for Engagement

10 Social Media Best Practices for Engagement

Social media lets you directly connect with your customers, prospects, and brand representatives about everything from products to challenges. But do you know how to use engagement to solidify these relationships? This blog post will cover 10 social media best practices for engagement that you can begin working on today.

1. Follow Back and Interact

If you’ve got a healthy number of social media followers and you’re only following a handful back, that tells everyone that you’re not interested in what your community has to say. Follow back and interact. This will help grow your overall following and create goodwill within your community.

Plus, when you follow back, you may receive some public thank-yous, allowing you to chat with your community members, learn more about their interests, and deliver on their needs.

2. Keep the Social in Social Media

This one seems obvious, yet many brands and individuals using social media don’t get social with their followers. Should you engage with your influencers? Yes! Should you engage with your customers? Absolutely! Should you engage with everyone who reaches out to you? Indeed, with a few exceptions (Avoid trolls and spammers). Social media is about relationships, first and foremost. Step outside your comfort zone and expand your horizons. Not everyone you connect with has to be like-minded. Diversity breeds inspiration!

Also Read: 5 Must-Know Social Media Etiquette Tips

Don’t overlook social media monitoring and engagement platforms; there are plenty out there, like SproutSocial, Sprinklr, Hootsuite, and my favorite Agorapulse. They’ll help you find brand mentions across the social web to connect you with people interested in your product or industry.

3. Determine Your Voice and Tone

Is your voice very corporate, or is it a bit more casual? What you’re sharing says as much about you as it does your audience. Does your voice represent your brand? If it does, is it representative of the demographic you’re trying to reach? If your tone and voice aren’t appealing to your prospects, it’s time to change it up. Though it’s crucial that your social media engagement be as unique as your brand, it’s also important not to stray from your brand’s image. Let your corporate culture be your guide.

4. Keep it Short

According to Strategies for Effective Tweeting: A Statistical Review, “Tweets containing less than 100 characters receive 17% higher engagement than longer Tweets.” While Twitter limits your messages to 280 characters, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networks don’t heed the character limit. Sometimes, the shorter, the better!

5. Create Brand Awareness

Social media platforms offer the potential to increase your public profile. You can create grassroots campaigns, engage with influencers in your industry, share content from them, and stay active in conversations. If you create and share worthwhile content, you’ll be ready for the time when industry influencers send a flood of new followers your way.

6. Don’t Over Share

“Sometimes being able to publish every whim that scans across your brain is the best thing in the world. Sometimes, it can become a real problem. The killer is this: when it is a problem, you’re usually the last to know, and the damage is done.” – Mitch Joel.

While it’s important to stay in the loop and maintain social relationships, posting too often, whether it’s photos, status updates, or frequent Tweets, can turn off your audience. Focus on sharing items that are of value to your community and reflect your brand. Creating a content calendar can help you with this.

7. Don’t Always Feel Compelled to Jump In

Much like oversharing, you don’t have to be a part of every conversation mentioning your company. Sometimes it’s better to let your employees, influencers, and other community members interject before or instead of you. Determine what types of posts you want to respond to and which ones you want to sit out. Having a social media playbook will help to define when and where you should be a part of the conversation.

8. Be as Transparent as Possible

Openness goes a long way in social media. It’s a big part of building trust with your community. Give your customers behind-the-scenes access to your business by creating videos, live-streaming meetings, and internal company events, and introducing your team this way as well, or creative employee profiles with links to connect.

In turn, prospects will take more of an interest in your brand and stay in touch when it comes to updates.

9. Be Proactive, Versus Reactive

Monitor general feeds in your industry; for instance, at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, I monitored “social media marketing” to pick up a variety of posts that didn’t mention the brand but were still valuable. This strategy reveals new conversations you may wish to take part in and enables you to establish new relationships. It’s also a great way to catch any issues before they become a potential crisis.

10. Respond to Negative and Positive Feedback

Though responding to positive feedback and deleting the negative may be tempting, don’t. Instead, respond to positive feedback, thank your community for sharing your content or recommending your products, and invite members to share their stories through interviews or as guest bloggers on your site.

If you receive negative feedback, consider it constructive criticism and an opportunity to improve. If someone is complaining, it’s more than likely they’re looking for a resolution from you. Very rarely do people merely want to complain. Therefore, respond as quickly as possible and avoid the urge to purge.

What tips do you have for engaging with people across social networks? What best practice would you add to this list? Do you think brands should follow everyone back and interact? Share your thoughts with me in the comments area below.  If you need help with your social media, I’d love to help. Reach out, and let’s create a tailored plan for you.