How does it feel when users like, share or comment on your social media post?
Obviously, it feels great.
Like, share or comment is a form of engagement that is usually a plus sign that shows that people are taking interest in your posts. And being a digital marketer, it is important to respond to these interactions.
But at the same time, engaging with your social media followers can be time-consuming. If you are a social media marketer, or running a digital marketing agency, you know you don’t have enough time to engage with your social media followers throughout the day.
So how can you increase engagement with your followers and still look authentic and real at the same time.
Here, I have come up with some amazing tactics and useful tools that brands, and social media managers can use to engage with their userbase quickly and authentically.
Let’s explore.
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Use Creative Replies
If you reply to comments and mentions with a thank you note, that’s simply great. But there are many ways you can use to make your replies interesting and represent your brand personality, and delight your followers.
- Ask Questions
Instead of sending a boring thank you, you can engage with your followers and continue the conversation. An effective method is to ask their opinions on the specific topic.
Let’s say, if users commented on your social media post that links to a blog post, you can ask these questions:
- Do you agree with the points mentioned in the post?
- What do you think, what is the best part of the post?
- Have you tried any of the tools or tips mentioned in the post?
If users reply to your questions, that is simply great. You can continue the discussion and develop a good relationship with them.
- Use Emojis
The simplest and easiest way to make your replies interesting and fun is emojis. As emojis are an important part of social media language, many social media users include emojis in their
posts and comments.
It is an awesome way to convey the tone and emotions in your replies. As it’s quite difficult to convey the tone and emotions in a text reply, but using emojis can set the tone.
- Use Images
The fastest and easiest way to explain your idea on social media is to use images. Many digital marketers and established brands use images to give more value to their posts. There are many useful tools such as CloudApp, Nimbus and Droplr that allow you to add annotations to your images to make the description clearer.
- Add GIFs
Using GIFS is indeed the most engaging and fun way to say thanks to your audience who shared, liked or commented on you post. With the new GIF options present on Facebook and Twitter, you can easily find the relevant GIF and add into your replies.
- Use Videos
In 2015, Medium launched a campaign named #AskMedium in which they replied to every question using videos. And the campaign was very successful.
Though it takes a few more seconds to make a video and reply, those extra seconds means a lot. It is more engaging, visual and personal. And in this digital age, visual is considered as an effective way to create engagement than a text reply.
Remember, recording a video reply takes a lot of effort, but it shows your brand really cares about its audience.
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Craft Common Replies
You can create templates of some common replies. For this, you need to figure the comments you get more often. Preparing the answers to those common comments and questions can help you reply faster as you don’t have to think every time to reply a comment.
It is advised to create a few variations so that you are not always send the same reply. For example, instead of replying “Thanks for reading the post!”, you can create these variations.
- Thanks for checking our post!
- Thanks for reading this! (Emoji or GIF)
- You rock for reading the blog post!
- Our pleasure! Have you tried any of the tips before?
- So glad to hear that! How it went for you!
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Create a List of GIFs and Emojis
In addition to searching for GIFs on Twitter and Facebook, it is advised to create a list of your favorite GIFS and emojis for different types of replies. This will make it easier to grab and use them without wasting your time.
You can download your favorite GIFs and save them and use them quickly whenever you are replying to comments on your social media post. You can use GIPHY and find the one that perfectly fits to your reply.
You can also create a folder of commonly used images, screenshots, videos and emojis for easy and quick access.
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Use Social Media Engagement Tools
It is perhaps the most effective tip that help brands to engage with their userbase. Using a social media tool can help you enhance social media engagement.
Rather than logging into each and every social media platform or check every single notification, you can smartly reply to comments and mentions using one single platform. Buffer, HootSuite,
Hubspot, MeetEdgar, IFTTT, Zapier, Sprout Social and Facebook’s unified inbox are a few effective social media management tools that help social media marketers to have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram conversations in a single inbox.
These tools help your digital marketing agency to respond to conversations quickly and together.
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Use Social Media Automation Tools to Save Time
While engaging with your followers is important for your brand, social media managers also have other important tasks to do, such as creating content, planning, or creating a strategy for your business.
Many marketers who have to deal with multiple tasks can’t reply to a comment quickly and it might affect their productivity, unless you don’t have a social media team which main role is to reply and help customers on social media.
So, marketers can manage their social media profiles by scheduling posts to respond and engage with your audience. For this, social media automation tools can play a great role and can respond to social media conversation as quickly as someone mentions your brand or comment on your post.
Social media automation tools can filter out spam comments and automated tweets, move Instagram and Facebook comments into a different folder. Move tweets with brand-oriented hashtags into a different folder so that your brand advocates can reply to them quickly.
Over to You
Engaging with your followers has snow become important for your brand’s online presence. While the process seems time-consuming, the tips and tools mentioned can help you minimize the time and efforts it takes you to engage with your followers and build a strong relationship with your followers while staying real.
Author Bio:
Mohammad Ali is an experienced digital marketer and a search engine marketing specialist who is currently associated with Branex, as senior digital marketer and brand strategy agency.
