Gettin' Your Team Engaged 💍
We’re definitely talking about social media engagement, not diamond ring engagement, but guaranteed this post was inspired by the very shiny ring on my finger! We’re going back to basics, and talking about why social media engagement is important, but also how to ultaise your ‘Crew’ to increase your engagement.
The way to get more engagement, is to have engagement to start off with.
| social media engagement: the public shares, likes and comments for an online business' social media efforts. Engagement has historically been a common metric for evaluating social media performance but doesn't necessarily translate to sales.
The way that the algorithm (the order of posts on a timeline) works on almost all social media platforms is this: the more engagement a post or profile gets, the more it’ll show up in more people’s newsfeeds. Whilst engagement isn’t a tangible measurement of Return on Investment (ROI), engagement is the optimal tool to increase the amount of eyes that are seeing your content, and therefore increasing the amount of people who know about, understand, are familiar with, and ultimately will buy from your brand.
This is all good to know, but what if your brand is just starting out, or you do all the right things by posting consistently and replying to comments, but you just seem to only get a hand full of likes per post? This is often enough to convince people to give up on social media altogether - it’s just too hard.
That’s where your ‘Crew’ comes in. Your Crew is a group of your biggest supporters. Whilst this will, inevitably include your mum and your old aunt who still hasn’t fully got a grasp of how Facebook works, it should also include the people who work with and for you, your immediate circle of friends and family, and trusted business contacts who support your brand. This might be, say, a group of about 20 to start off with.
This 20 is enough to start off your Facebook page, but even if they’ve ‘liked’ your page, their job isn’t over yet. That’s what this document is for - to explain the power of the Crew and why it’s so important to have them 100% on board when it comes to your social media presence.
If 20 people with a network of 500 people each like or comment on your post, there’s a high chance that about 5-7% of their network will see that activity - that’s approx. 500 newsfeeds that your content could appear in (that’s called ‘reach’ if you’re looking at your analytics page). If your Crew takes it a step further and decides to ‘share’ your post, about 10% of their network will see it - so that’s just jumped to 1000 newsfeeds featuring your content. You can do so much more with the power of community.
Think about it this way: when your friend tells you all about their new car, you may not be looking at a new car for yourself quite yet, but you’ll listen to all the amazing things about their new ride intentionally, because they’re your friend and you trust them. In 6 months or a year’s (or 3 years…) time when you start looking for a new car yourself, your mind will automatically turn to the recommendations of your friend, and that brand or model of car will already be miles ahead of any other kind of car that you could consider. This is social proof, and social media is built upon this concept of social proof - it relies and exemplifies that fact that if someone you love, trust, and interact with often promotes a brand, product or company, social media will assume that you may love it too.
So with this in mind, if you want your brand to be in front of the eyes of people who may be likely to hire or buy from you, it’s important that you enlist the help of your Crew. People trust your Crew, and those people are likely to then tell their people about your product or brand, and the Chinese Whispers of social media will continue to evolve, but it all starts with your Crew.
Below is a guide for how your Crew should interact with your brand online to better your chances of your content appearing in people’s newsfeeds, and ultimately secure you more sales in the long run.
Facebook
Share posts with a caption
We’ve all seen the people that just hit ‘share’ with no context, background, and explanation of what that post means to them. Social media is a social platform, and people want to know why you’re posting what you’re posting. Instead of simply hitting ‘share’ and calling it a day (snaps for you), why not explain what that post means to you?
“My office has this really cool plant that looks like this, but we’ve noticed it’s starting to go brown on the leaves - can anyone help?”
“We celebrated our 5 year birthday at <business name> today! Yes we ate cake”
“<business name> has just announced that we’ll be adding consultations to our services list for <clientele>! Do you know anyone that would be interested in this?”
Notice the questions - encouraging people to respond is an excellent way of increasing engagement.
Make the posts appear first in their timeline
When you open Facebook, go to your business’s Facebook page, then hit the three little dots - this will open some page settings which one of them will be ‘following’. Go into the ‘following’ option, and you’ll see that there’s three further options: ‘unfollow’, ‘default’ or ‘see first’. Select see first, that way you’ll never miss a post.
Tag people in the comments of relevant posts
I cannot stress ‘relevant’ enough. Tagging people in irrelevant content is the quickest way to lose friends (second only to sending messages that say “copy and paste this or else…” If your business posts a helpful tip that you think might help your friend who also owns a small business, tag them! If your business has just released a product that you think your sibling might benefit from, tag them!
The age-old ‘Like my business’ page please!’ post!
While not recommended to do frequently, if your business has just started out, or if it’s a handful of likes away from a milestone number, why not share the profile with a simple “We’re 6 likes away from 500 likes! Please jump over to my business’s page and show it some love!” People are always happy to support you in any way they can.
Like every post. If you’ve done step two, the posts should be appearing first up in your newsfeed whenever you open the app. By at least liking the posts, your increasing the chances of your network seeing your business’ content (remember the 5-7%?). It doesn’t cost you anything, just hit ‘like’!
Instagram
Share to stories
Similar to sharing Facebook posts with a caption, if your business has posted something particularly interesting or irrelevant, share the post to your Instagram stories with a quick caption saying something like:
“Look at this cool thing we did at @businessname”
“We celebrate our 5th birthday today at @businessname”
“Check out these amazing results that we got at @businessname for @clientname this week”
There’s less of a need to ask questions here (although questions never go astray!), but more of a need to ensure you tag the business/s that you're talking about so that people can go straight over and check them out.
Tag them in your post
Are you posting about your business, posting a photo of you at an event for your business, or posting something relating to your business? Make sure you tag them in both the picture and the caption - tags are considered a stronger form of engagement than just liking or commenting, so Instagram will value your tag.
Share their posts in your DMs
Similar to tagging, sharing in DMs are also considered a stronger form of engagement - likewise to tagging people on Facebook posts, if your business posts a product that you think your friend might like, share it in their DMs! Do you think your colleague might like your business’ next networking event? Shoot through the post to their DMs and let them know!
Like and save posts
Similar to liking posts on Facebook, double-tapping and saving posts on Instagram will cost you literally nothing, but will do wonders for the engagement of your business’ posts. Saving is the third strong engagement technique, so if Instagram notices that people are saving posts, it’ll think that it’s a valuable post to show in more people’s newsfeeds. To ‘save’, simply hit the bookmark-looking logo on the bottom right corner of any post.
LinkedIn
With less content going up on LinkedIn (generally no more than 1 post a week is enough to maintain a good engagement rate), Linked in requires less engagement from your Crew.
One of the main things to do on Instagram is ‘liking’ or responding using any of the ‘like’ ‘celebrate’ ‘love’ ‘insightful’ or ‘curious’ reactions
Commenting, similar to commenting Facebook posts, increases the chances of LinkedIn sharing the content with your greater network
When commenting, ensure it’s a couple of words, and either making insightful, informative, or encouraging
“This is a great post, well done team!”
“What great results for @clientname!”
“@colleague this is a really insightful piece”
Sharing posts
Similar to sharing posts on Facebook, ensure that every time you share a post from your business, you ensure that there’s context or some kind of caption being shared along with it - why do you think your network will benefit from reading this post?
All of these should be done with your discretion, and ensuring you’re not bombarding your networks with too much from your business. As someone who works for your business, however, you should be enthusiastic and excited about things that are coming out of your business, and this should be highlighted and replicated in the way that you share their content. Remember, the more engagement you have with your brand’s content, the more people will see their stuff, and whilst you may not be their primary audience, someone who follows you or is friends with you just might be.
