Increasing brand engagement on social media

Engaging users multiple times can improve important metrics like clicks and conversions, build trust in your brand, and create opportunities for new leads. Use these strategies to drive repeat engagement in your social media campaigns:

• Host a weekly or monthly online Twitter discussion with live Q&As and knowledge sharing.

• Create a hashtag to help people find your company and contribute to discussions even outside of official chat times.

• Reach community members looking for meatier posts with Medium.

• Capitalize on recurring social memes, such as Throwback Thursday (#tbt), as long as they make sense for your brand. Watch for new recurring memes that may be relevant as well.

• Target professionals in your community by posting to LinkedIn with relevant information, links, hashtags, and videos.

Which teams should you involve?

• Social

• Corporate

• Communications

• Marketing

• Web/Design

• Sales

• Customer Service

3M Racing, a department within 3M, engaged audiences by allowing them to vote on which throwback logo would adorn the 3M Racing car. The contest lead to five times their average monthly Facebook fan growth.

User-generated content (UGC) is a must-have for marketers: it builds credibility with your audience, improves performance on every digital marketing channel, and increases time spent on websites, email click-throughs, and online purchase conversions. UGC can be in any format, but pictures, videos, memes, and text are used most commonly. Brands that successfully leverage UGC view their customers as communication partners, giving them a measure of freedom with the brand’s messaging and offering meaningful ways to participate:

• Get the customer in on the ground level: instead of using traditional marketing.

• Host a social contest tied to your latest brand campaign or a new product launch.

• Create an always-on brand hashtag where fans can share feedback, funny stories, or general comments.

Engagement & participation

Urban Outfitters and HBO connected with young, hip viewers with a #UOxGIRLS photo contest. Fans could win a year’s rent or a $5,000 gift card for home furnishings.

Pull positive mentions of your brand from any social channel — keeping in mind regulations around consent, of course — and embed them into your website or other digital touchpoints. Look for creative ways to collect and visualize this content, such as leaderboards, polls, counters, maps, and fill-in-the-blanks. These integrations are great ways to increase engagement and add authenticity to your brand.

The goal is to keep people coming back

Blue Apron features recent social mentions on their website, building authenticity with their website viewers and encouraging them to join the conversation on social media.

• Use social media management software, like Khoros Marketing, to find brand mentions and brand-related keywords to reply and join the conversation.

• Incorporate social sharing options on all corporate web pages.

• Always ask customers for feedback, comments, and especially success stories. Amplify great stories across all relevant channels.

• Include relevant hashtags so your audience can follow the conversation and participate. Combine brand-specific hashtags with trending hashtags to engage both loyal fans of your brand and new audiences.

• Incorporate video and livestreaming to connect more intimately with your audience through platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.

• When appropriate, offer incentives for participation, such as exclusive discounts or giveaways.

• Give your audience a chance to provide input on product features, service offerings, changes, cause-related projects, and other company decisions.

Encourage two-way conversation by posting open-ended questions on blog articles and social posts, incorporating social polls on your website, and responding to social media comments from fans and critics alike. (If you’re interested in scaling your customer support abilities on social media and other channels, check out Khoros Care.)

Khoros Marketing helps you simplify your social media marketing operations with one platform to manage all of your enterprise social accounts. Our software is built for enterprises with industry-leading support and product coaching to increase brand engagement and accelerate sales. Request a demo today to learn more.

Key features:

• Publishing, Planning, and Labelling

• Governance and Approvals

• Analytics and Reporting

• Paid and Organic Management

• Moderation and Listening

Success story: National Instruments

National Instruments, an engineering company based in the U.S., has a strong global presence, but their social presence was a patchwork of 57 different accounts, making it difficult to coordinate their strategy and increase global online engagement. Khoros Marketing offered a way for National Instruments to consolidate their accounts onto a single easyto-use platform, allowing their marketing team to collaborate on content and connect with the audience in an efficient, fan-facing way.

Key results:

• 464% increase in engagement over six months

• 27% YoY increase in followers with 0 fan-acquisition dollars spent

• 50% decrease in time spent contributing content globally