5 ways to drive Engagement, Likes are so Last Year

Brands are stuck in many ways with Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ due to the nature of the news feed. Social Feeds have begun to look like the stock ticker display that scrolls in Times Square… You look away for a millisecond and you miss so many relevant items that you start to lose count.

If your customers and followers are not on at that moment, you just missed a massive number of people that you could have potentially engaged with. A more sophisticated approach is required to maximize your content marketing ROI. You must go beyond timing content and general post optimization. While necessary, these are small factors needed to reach social mass.

“The Numbers do not lie”, we always say. What is your social engagement in comparison to your followers? In our previous post “Be Relevant or Die” we highlighted the fact that brands must enhance their engagement strategy to increase content marketing traction. With the recent chaotic changes over at Facebook, and the filtering of posts made by 3rd party API’s, Facebook is now back peddling off filtering. In return most of you have seen your feeds interaction start to rise, or the number of posts showing up in real-time increasing. Regardless, most brand news feeds are still at sub 1% engagement levels, pointing out the cold reality that even the best content is not seen by the masses or target audience. The challenges are real and the competition to capture the consumer’s ability to share content is never more palpable than now. Unleashing the potential of your content is not easy, however, going beyond the news feed is our primary focus in 5 ways to drive engagement. 

Recently, eMarketing reported CMO’s are focusing on the nexus of social data, engagement, and user intelligence to drive greater relevance. Noted in the post is the emphasis placed on social media strategy, customer analytics, and data management.

These largely reflect the marketing aspects CMO’s felt they had the most room to improve; Over half the respondents indicated social media as a key engagement channel for customers and which almost 3/4 felt unprepared to leverage the large amounts of data that continue to flood the online marketing space.

Problem: Massive data, low response rate when content trends, and lack of action to encapsulate greater engagement.
 
The need to be more relevant and induce people to not only interact but also share has raised the bar again to getting your post action in the coveted news feed (friend’s / followers conversation stream). The on-going debate about which social network will create greater value can make one’s head spin. Twitter is about clicks and more authority, where as Facebook is more about engagement. Now Google+ is touting they have more engagement. PHEW!!!  For a brand marketer they are being measured on how many units are sold or traffic being generated that results in direct client conversion. The “how” is somewhat irrelevant. The elusive Social ROI behind social is not simple since there are so many factors happening in a single promotion. But one fact remains, the metrics (numbers) on your own brand feed. You’re not alone. The tsunami of content is one cause of post engagement atrophy.  Quality of followers and quality content is an amazing combination and must be fostered. In another recent post “Relevancy meets passion…” we postulate that the best indicator is crowd approved action based on their intent, but how do you reach scale with your content once you know it’s good?   

1. Trending Content
Content that starts to trend on your brand is gold. The immediate reaction and how to cross-pollinate this information via other channels will be covered below. Some posts are better than others and the ones that are most relevant are ripe for content recycling on active days and times.  This powerful approach not only scales with engagement but it will increase your organic reach if done correctly. On average this approach provides more than 30% amplified engagement rate and some we see as high as 100+%. Most brands will “post and forget” while others have a hard time putting previous content back out thinking they are spamming.  Content half-life is short for Facebook and Twitter. The majority of your followers never saw the post to start with.  Worried about losing followers?  Focus on engagement measurement, and tap into the recent addition to Facebook statistics, which can validate even more reasons why engagement is critical to your strategy.

2. Facebook Sponsored Stories
Sponsored stories are one way to enhance post engagement on trending content items. It’s been proven that showing friends who liked the post, or what they engaged with, prompts the friends of friends to engage as well. The price is going up on sponsored stories. The average costs are in the range of $0.32 to $0.85 a click (CPC). Using Precise Interests (keywords) is a proven way to drive greater targeting and is a must if you desire a greater level of engagement. Avoid zombie clicks. For a brand, who cares how many clicks you get? It’s how many converted that’s the real measurement. For more on this topic see Maximizing Facebook Ad Buy.

3. Promoted Tweets and Target Timelines
Using trending content items in a Promoted tweet to followers costs $0.50 CPE (cost per engagement) such as click, re-tweet, favorite and reply. You can go broader with Target Timelines; “Users with similar interests will see your Tweets in their timelines.”  However, you can’t control who sees your tweet nor the quality or the click statistics. We have found that targeting using keywords yields higher conversion, as in registrations, over just obtaining clicks. Relevance plays a key role in twitter as well as timing. Promoted tweets are powerful but you’re limited to your own Twitter community. A lower cost approach is targeting on keywords to increase your relevance. Using keywords based on the consumers who interact with other relevant content displays intent for a target industry or brand. This approach allows you to have lower bid amounts and more targeted control of your audience. Several people have talked about success with twitter promoted products and we agree with this strategy. We’ll discuss it in more detail in our next update.

4. Social Ads – Agile Marketing
This is a very exciting approach to display media where real-time content meets rich media.  Agile marketing with Hypercuration™ is real and allows marketers to be more responsive.  Using display media to target consumers and redirecting them back to say Facebook is a proven way to gain traction while further increasing organic reach. Creating greater relevancy in those ads based on media consumption is the crux of agile marketing. Being responsive, and leveraging trends in display ads, further amplifies relevance while enabling real-time content changes that prompts greater ad engagement. This is a radical change from the static rich media you’ve seen. If you know what media is being consumed you are able to target specific publications based on their social behaviors which will increase your relevance even further. Depending on the cost per thousand (CPC) network charges we have obtained $0.12 - $0.35 per engagement for highly targeted audiences.    Flite/InfiniGraph Webinar on intelligence SocialAds with Hypercuration™

5. Blog Groups / Ad Networks
The Paid media meets Earned media approach is a great way to increase engagement. Many brands have embraced it (SocialMoms, MomCentral, BlogFrog, and GlamMedia) and many more established blog networks are using it for producing original content as part of a central call to action.

At the same time, these premium networks run display media that is often linked to the content marketing campaigns across the network’s relevant audience. These sites have trending content that can be leveraged as a collective source to enhance and expand their brand posts with the above methodology.

Conclusion
Scaling social engagement is highly achievable with good content. Taking advantage of trends as they happen, being responsive while utilizing agile marketing, and optimizing on consumer behavior’s all work in complete harmony to achieve measurable Social ROI. Driving greater engagement is now possible with intelligent Social Ads that leverage behavior based, precise interests and keywords. Both Facebook and Twitter are amazing engagement platforms, coupled with Hypercuration™, to give any marketer the competitive advantage of knowing what to target on and when the content is right.

@chasemcmichael

@InfiniGraph

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