Online engagement is about engaging with the customer, with the goal to encourage them to pay for a product or service. The best local social media agency understands that online engagement is an important part of social media marketing and that it’s a major factor towards the success of a business’ digital marketing efforts.
When really describing engagement your local social media agency needs to analyse it, and assess the extent to which a person has expressed genuine interest in the content or other interactions (or lack thereof) that took place. Essentially, this means telling the difference between trolls, supporters who don’t have any intention to buy, and commenters who could actually become customers.
In our experience, an individual in this latter grouping will have a heightened sense of 'inquisition', asking for more details about what they have an interest in. What is interesting is that once you identify this 'inquisition' you (or your local social media agency, if you’re outsourcing the work to them) can then start a dialogue with them about their interest or something specific that you have to share. If you have built a meaningful conversation with people, they will then begin to create a relationship with you.
What is Involved in Online Engagement?
Any reputable local social media agency recognises that to engage with your audience, you’ll first need to research your audience to understand their interests. The ways you can engage with the audience includes directly communicating with potential customers, creating posts that appeal to your audience, encouraging user activity for example with a poll or a trend, using a ‘call to action’ in your content and posts, and so on.
To have an engaged customer, this local social media agency knows that you also have to fully engage the other person who has expressed an interest in knowing more about your offering. Beyond this, you must then be sure that the person is in fact willing to move forward to taking a full part in the buying process. Unlike meeting face-to-face, it is also important to know that the other person is in this expanded state of mind.
Dealing With Trolls
There will always be the other person who is looking for the door to close, they are looking for everyone to be as far away from being your customer and as miserable as possible, but let's not argue with them because that’s a fight that you can’t win. Any interaction with trolls usually just leads to online mud-slinging rather than getting them to back down or change their views, because what they’re actually after is the argument and the attention - the very things that make you look bad. No matter how much you may want to, our local social media agency knows that the best move is to obey they advice and ‘don’t feed the trolls’. Just don’t get involved.
Expressing Yourself Online & Behaving Appropriately
The best local social media agency finds that the type, or ‘language’, of online engagement and interactions differ tremendously between different types of platforms such as your website, blog, social media sites, etc. In your website or blog the engagement would be through the use of comments, while on social media it may also involve how people ‘like’ and share your posts. Interactions can also differ for example between different social media sites alone. Your approach will differ depending on the platform that you are using.
It is a completely different approach when you want to show the other person that you have open lines of communication with regular customers and take an interest in their social activity. As with anything, there is an upper limit too this and too much interest can also make you look bad, but when you strike the right balance and do so in a way that comes across as genuine and caring, it can really help your digital marketing efforts succeed.