When it comes to Australian businesses and social media engagement, make sure your account is a dinner party, not a soapbox. Engagement has become the primary goal across every social media platform, because honest engagement equals return customers and better rankings.
While it’s easy to create an account, the challenge lies in creating an active, engaged audience that believes and trusts in your content.
When launching your social media presence, be mindful of who your audience is and what social platforms they are likely already using. Then create your social media profiles to fit the culture of each platform, using existing users as your guides to create your audience.
Customers will appreciate the dedicated efforts, communication will persist, and your organic following will grow.
As social media engagement grows in importance, it’s vital that your business knows how to correctly connect with your target audience, to maximise their promotion online.
Build community
Build a good rapport with your followers.
Consumers are demanding realistic depictions of life from brands, and businesses’ social media accounts are following suit. Abolish any ideas of perfection and show imperfection and real life. It’s what your customers are going through and what they’ll connect with most.
Make it a point to interact with your consumers, posting comments, liking mentions or tags, and asking or answering questions. Having an active back-and-forth with your consumers humanises your brand and helps your customers see that there are real people behind the posts.
This makes them more likely to develop a connection to your business and can drive up sales, especially since more than half of consumers will follow or look at a brand’s social media before purchasing a product.
Therefore, your social media presence – or lack thereof – can make or break a customer’s decision to conduct business with you.
Be quick to reply
Prioritise one-on-one customer communications. If a customer reaches out to you on social media with a question, don’t let it go unanswered, especially for more than 24 hours. Your interaction or lack of, has the potential to make an even larger impression – either negative or positive.
Facebook makes a business page’s response rate public, and your Twitter profile shows replies publicly too, so it’s in your best interest to answer every message that comes in.
While crafting an individual response takes time, it’s all part of providing top-notch customer service in a timely fashion. Writing a promotional post can wait if it means getting a customer the answer they need.
Just like email, telephone, and even in-person interactions at brick-and-mortar locations, Australian customers want and need to be acknowledged on social networks. That ability to be seen and heard, in turn, works in favour of marketers, because people are actually much more receptive to brands that take the time and effort to answer their queries on social networks.
Be thoughtful
Social media channels today are so saturated with promotional content to the point that feeds are flooded with content that doesn’t offer value. Consumers are looking for social media engagement that matters to them, and makes them feel seen and valued by your brand.
You should be acutely aware of your brand voice when you are working on social media marketing ideas.
This means finding a tone and personality that suit your brand, its mission and its values, and making sure all of your social media posts embody it. The best brands on social media have a voice that is authentic to who they are and who their fans perceive them to be.
Be authentic
Brands should remain authentic in their messaging, especially when using popular memes and slang terms.
Australian brands need to be very careful about this; otherwise, they risk alienating their customer base. Don’t use slang language in marketing messages, especially when it doesn’t fit the audience.
Focus on a few channels to begin with, and curate your audience. New social networks and apps pop up all the time, but that doesn’t mean your business has to be on every single one of them. It’s better to have a well-executed, active presence on two or three social networks than a mediocre presence on each popular channel.
For example, Instagram may be a popular platform, but it may not be appropriate for your business.
Don’t be lame
We often see Australian brands posting for the sake of posting, which diminishes their social presence, because it doesn’t add anything of value. Posting stock photos and lame quotes just because you feel you need to post dilutes your image and brand.
It doesn’t matter if you are one of the countries largest airlines, or a one person Perth home interiors business, you need to consider how your social media engages your audience.
All the best of luck in getting social media engagement for your business!