Engagement is essential for every social media platform. It’s not enough for your brand to simply have a presence on these platforms. Your brand must also be actively involved in the communities your target audience is involved in.
This is a common question that many brands ask- why is our engagement on social media so low? Well, it takes two to tango when it comes to social media engagement. Your target audience won’t start engaging with you unless you take the initiative first and encourage them to have a conversation.
1. Build an Authentic and Unique Brand
Your brand’s message should be unique and should emphasize how your brand makes your customers’ lives better. This message should be reflected in all aspects of your website, from the copy to the design to the overall tone and personality. This will help you stand out from other brands in the market.
Since social media platforms are public, they can be used by brands for marketing purposes. However, with an increasing number of fake accounts and fake followers, it’s important for brands to be authentic.
If you want people to trust you and buy what you’re selling, you need to be authentic.
This is why user-generated content is so popular. People are more likely to believe content that comes from other users, rather than from a company or organization.
2. Check your product-market fit
Product-market fit is how well your product fits the needs of your market. In other words, if your product-market fit is good, your product meets the needs of your target audience and you will have few problems selling it.
To determine if you have a good product-market fit, you can use various methods. A good way to start is by creating a landing page and then measuring how many leads it generates. This will give you an idea of the demand for your product.
To figure out how loyal your customers are, you can look at customer retention and satisfaction rates. You can also see how many people are talking about your brand positively. Surveys and conversations with customers can give you more information.
3. Post regularly on social media
Creating just a page on a social media platform won’t make people notice it. However, if you’re active and regularly post content that’s designed for that channel, social media will bring more attention to your profiles.
To stay visible to your target audience, it is important to be active on all the platforms they use. The number of people using social media is increasing every day, so make sure to take advantage of this and stay active. Follow, engage, share, and comment to help you stay in their minds.
When someone interacts with your posts on Instagram, you should respond to them. This is an opportunity to engage with your followers, to get to know them better, and to make a good impression on them. You should make it a point to engage with anyone who communicates with you, provided they are earnest in their interaction.
The comments sections of websites can be useful for finding out what people think about a particular topic and what could be done to improve it. This information can be helpful in finding a profitable niche with lots of potential for growth.
Twitter can be a great place to see what’s trending and find new market niches. By finding the right hashtags, you can write tweets that will be popular and profitable.
4. Build an audience community by engaging
If you want your brand or company to be successful, it must be seen as something that is desirable and worth investing in. Your brand must also have a significant impact on social media communities.
Even though you may have a large following on social media, your job is not done. You need to keep your followers engaged so they become loyal customers.
5. Create a data lake
If you want to use a growth hacking approach, you need to have a lot of raw data. Here is the main information you can look for:
- the source of a customer’s first visit to your website;
- the pages a customer looks through on your site;
- the source from where they’ve signed up for a trial;
- the interaction with features of your product;
- the customer lifetime value;
- the references each customer makes;
- the results of those references;
- the reasons for avoiding your product.
It is important to think about how you will collect data, where you will store it, and what tools you will use to analyze the information. The easiest way to do this is to use CRM software. It is best to choose an analytical system, as they are made to manage data about your customers.
6. Practice both proactive and reactive engagement
If you’re producing quality content and actively sharing it on social media, you’re encouraging your audience to consume and engage with it. But what about the sections of your audience who don’t see your posts in their feeds?
Most businesses post their own content and engage proactively. However, they can also be more reactive and strategic by targeting new social media users. They can do this by interacting with their posts, following them, liking and commenting on their posts. When users engage with your content, you should engage back so they feel valued. This will result in them following you or being more engaging with your content.
Participate in trending conversations
If you want your brand to be visible, keep up with trending and relevant conversations on social media. Many people who follow and participate in these conversations will be interested in your brand if they know it exists. So go ahead and join in these conversations; it will do wonders for your brand’s visibility.
7. Pick your North Star metric
The North Star metric is designed to keep a company focused on its long-term goals and on making the most of its opportunities. In recent years, North Star metrics have been adopted by many Silicon Valley companies. Having a North Star metric can help a company avoid getting sidetracked and unfocused.
Each company picks its own most important metric, depending on its growth model and the value it provides to customers. For example, Facebook’s goal is to increase the number of daily active users. For companies that use a subscription model, the metric might be the number of premium subscribers, or customer lifetime value.
To find your metric, or “North Star,” think of what will help you achieve long-term growth. For example, if you develop an eCommerce business, you can grow due to the number of purchases per month.
8. Improve your pirate metrics
In order to increase your North Star metric, you will also need to focus on the pirate metrics. The pirate metrics, also known as AARRR, is a system designed to help startups comprehend the customer journey and improve their sales funnel. AARRR is an acronym for acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.
Now let’s get into the details and find out how to work on every step:
- Acquisition. In this step, you should revise your customer acquisition channels. Find out the one that drives the most valuable traffic and the one that has the lowest cost. Try to improve your conversion rate on these channels.
- Activation. Ask yourself how good the user’s first experience with your product is and when a potential customer realizes the real value of your product. You can reinforce the activation with a polished value proposition.
- Retention. Try to understand how many of your customers you retain, and why others go. T
- Referral. Think through the ways you can turn your customers into your brand advocates.
- Revenue. Mull over the question of how you can increase your revenue.
The key indicators to pay attention to in the final stages are your Net Promoter Score, customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost.
9. Keep track of competitors’ conversations
It is a good idea to keep an eye on what your competitor is doing and to join in on conversations they are having. This will give you a better understanding of their customers.
If you want to reach your target audience, you need to be proactive and engage with them instead of bombarding them with content. Reactive engagement will help you put your brand out there, identify potential customers, and start a conversation with them.
10. Build a backlog of ideas
If you have a lot of data and well-defined goals, you can start thinking about ways to expand your business. The more ideas you have, the more regular experiments you can run. Being consistent is key to success when testing, so you should have a backlog of hypotheses and creative ideas.
For effective work, your backlog should fit the following criteria:
- it has a place to create a list of ideas;
- it lets you add a description and hypothesis to each of those ideas;
- it allows you to prioritize ideas;
- it enables teamwork;
- it lets you save the results of your tests.
There are many tools that offer the opportunities listed above, such as traditional Google Sheets and Trello, to specific software like Experiments by GrowthHackers.
You’ll need a wide set of tools to perform all the necessary tasks, including: running tests, tracking results, replenishing your backlog, and automating processes.
Growth Hacking Tips
Ensure you can scale
If you’re considering growing your company, make sure you can handle the increased demand first. Otherwise, you may want to skip growth hacking.
Check up on the main points of your business and try to answer the following questions:
- Is your team ready to manage the increased number of leads and prospects?
- Can your infrastructure cope with bigger arrays of data?
- Will your current business model work effectively for an upscaled company?
- Can you cope with the increase in expenses?
If you want your startup to be able to handle rapid growth, you need to evaluate your processes, team, and resources, and make sure you’re psychologically ready to deal with a larger business. If you’re not prepared, the consequences can be disastrous.
Leverage your strengths
The second way around is to focus on building on your strengths. There are two approaches to improvement. The first one implies focusing on tackling weaknesses to get well-rounded expertise. The problem is it often leads to mediocre or average results at best. The second way around is to focus on building on your strengths.
The focus on using strengths is the second approach. For example, if you want to promote a new product, you could use email marketing or influence marketing. While you don’t have experience working with digital influencers, you have a large mailing list of loyal customers. Most likely, email campaigns will bring in more sales with little investment.
Do not be scared to attempt different marketing strategies and only continue with the ones that result in success. Keep in mind that growth hacking is all about experimentation and finding methods to produce more pronounced effects with less work.
Book more time for tests
You can spend hours discussing the effectiveness of ideas and hypotheses, but these conversations are only speculative and may lead to completely different outcomes in practice.
Testing hypotheses is preferred to talking about them. Meetings should be short. Good choices should be made and implemented to get provable results. Poorly-performing practices should be refused or improved.
Make sure you give yourself enough time to test your hypotheses. Many of the strategies will not give you reliable results until after a few weeks or months. Do not try to get rid of some practices after only a few days of testing.
Suggest ways to improve the product
This will increase their faith in your product. If you want to win your customer’s trust, one great way to do so is by implementing their suggestions. By creating a specific landing page that demonstrates how much your team has worked on their suggestions, you can show your customers how much you value their input – which will in turn increase their faith in your product.
You can do all of the above using various content formats like:
- Polls
- Q&As
- Short videos
- Facebook/Instagram Stories
The image you present on social media will influence your audience’s decision of whether or not to maintain a relationship with your brand. These tips should help you to create a strong social media presence.
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