Tips To Achieve Meaningful Social Media Engagement

October 24, 2013

Does your brand have meaningful social media engagement taking place?

Are you curious to know what you can do across social media marketing to help create an engaging presence across social and mobile for your customers?

This week on the Social Media Social Hour I’m joined by Joseph Pigato of Sparked.com and we talk all about what you need to do to achieve meaningful engagement across social media and mobile. Our weekly feature, Tyler’s Tech Tool of The Week returns this week as well and I share with you my absolute favorite tool to use to manage Twitter – Tweetbot!

About this show:

Social Media Social Hour PodcastThe Social Media Social Hour is a podcast for marketers and entrepreneurs looking to get on the social media fast track. The podcast is an interview format, where each week I get up close and personal with top brands and influencers to talk social media, tech and online marketing. Each week I also share tools that I personally use to help me with social media management, sales, marketing, account management and productivity.

In this episode, here’s what we’ll cover:

  • Tech tool of the week: Tweetbot for managing twitter accounts. Among many great features, it has the ability to enable and disable retweets from certain users as well as options to mute users, hashtags, etc.
  • Joseph Pigato talks about his involvement with web based ventures for 15+ years.
  • Joseph talks about Sparked as a company working to connect customers with the brands they love and help them get further involved. The customer involvement helps brands get input and feedback.
  • He talks about participation and interaction as the key factors that make social campaigns successful.
  • Brands need to ask questions of their consumers that call them to respond and be involved.
  • Brands need to make sure they take the next step with consumers so they feel listened to.
  • Consumers want the sense that they are a part of the brand and their participation on social media matters.
  • Joseph advises brands to stay close to a number of fans and create a dialogue with them to build relationships.
  • Joseph emphasizes the need to ask important questions before you post to social media. You must think of how you yourself would respond to the brand post and whether or not you would share it, along with why or why not. If it is a post that is similar to one you have seen by another brand previously, ask yourself why you may or may not have responded to it before.
  • Posts that are the most successfully sharable are quality photos that don’t necessarily have your brand in them.
  • A great photo that gets shares will be credited back to you.
  • Joseph comments that shares are the most important reaction you can have on Facebook posts because they mean the most.
  • He cautions against asking for likes because you end up having a lot people who don’t care about your brand. He says to ignore the idea that it is better to have a great volume of likes than not have as many likes because in the big picture you won’t find good engagement or a positive ROI.
  • Joseph says that with engagement there are numbers in terms of things such as likes and then there are values with reviews and comments that give the brand great feedback.
  • The best brands have sustained engagement across posts that demonstrate loyal and passionate brand followers.
  • Joseph talks about Warby Parker as a great example of a company with a strong social media following. Warby Parker is an eyeglasses company that allows you to try on glasses online. Users share their photos on Facebook and the page gets great shares, input, and responses. They do a great job engaging on twitter as well.
  • Joseph talks about meaningful engagement on twitter through the use of creative hashtags. He emphasizes the importance of getting creative with calls to action on twitter. He gives the example of a weather station getting retweets to create a tornado in their station office.
  • On Twitter, the favorite button has become similar to the like button on Facebook and has become a shortcut to simple engagement that does not hold a lot of weight.
  • Joseph says tweets are hard to share in a meaningful way. He says you only really retweet or like something if it reflects well on you or gives utility to your friends.
  • Joseph says Instagram doesn’t really carry a lot of weight with engagement in general.
  • He says that mobile can be the most intrusive thing in to your consumers’ lives and it is important not to overstep your boundaries. People are not looking for quantity. They want involvement, not information, on mobile meaning brands cannot be simply making announcements.
  • Engagement on mobile can be with an app or with text messages and email. Texts must be few and far between and emails have a short window of time with consumers.
  • Consumer response on mobile is extremely limited.
  • Brands need to find ways to drive to messages to an interesting customer experience that gets them involved in a different way that brings a positive mobile experience.
  • Joseph talks about consumer engagement as being wrapped up in advertising.
  • Joseph’s final advice is to “think long.” He says it is important to know that consumers want to feel involved and acknowledged. They want to be thanked, involved, entertained and they want clear and simple responses. Brands must think about what would create a good relationship on a basic human level.

Joseph Pigato’s Social Media Six Pack:

  1. Preferred social network of choice for your personal use: Instagram
  2. A social network you could do without: Instagram
  3. Last app you downloaded for you smartphone: Timbuktu Pizza
  4. Smartphone of choice: iPhone
  5. Apple or PC: Apple
  6. Do you own a stock in Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon, or any of the social platforms? Not in social.

Items mentioned in the episode:

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