Social Media Engagement has many levels of optimization. Engaging your customer is not only a highly effective process but it helps the company to better understand its customer base. Each company approaches social media engagement in a unique manner determined by the company’s environmental conditions.  Regulatory challenges for industries like pharmaceuticals and alcohol increase the social media engagement hurdles to overcome.  Most successful companies, including our Mojo Creator team, spend a lot of time discussing social media engagement and its characteristics.  Social media engagement should be thought of as a two way street that encourages interaction, while all0wing companies to better understand their customer.

A Company’s Vision for Social Media Engagement

Very few marketers or brands successfully analyze their Social Media Engagement  categories, proving social media engagement and inbound marketing are not easy tasks.  Make no mistake, the causal link between social media engagement and financial performance exists and is growing at a strong pace.

Companies need to plan their social media engagement and assign a special team to cater to this interaction.  This is necessary because the Web 2.0 communities, tools and technologies that form the  foundation of social media engagement continue to evolve.  Social media engagement is an art, and skill that can consist of layer upon layer of strategy.  There are different types of engagement categories that companies must understand to be successful.  These different types of categories are as follows:

1. Internal Engagement

   Utilization of internal blogs or wikis to help connect the different departments together within the company. This will give the company the ability to set guidelines and allow department heads to contribute to these guidelines. These guidelines could include the usage of social media applications, restrictions on leaving comments on blogs and forums or limiting the use of external social media websites like Facebook, LinkedIn or You Tube.

2. Social Media Monitoring

   The collection and monitoring of social media analytics for all social media networks is important for social media engagement. This stage is mostly focused on the collection of social media data as well as the overall sentiment for each social media account. There are many applications that let you manage the vast array of social media websites while collecting that data and sentiment from each.

3. Information Provision and Broadcasting

   Social media Engagement can be a great place to leverage your current assets into a marketing campaign. Once you understand your particular social media networks you will be able to distribute viral videos or make quirky status updates that grab the attention of your followers, thus increasing your social media engagement. You will then be able to track how your campaign was “liked”, “shared”, “+’d” or “favorited”. This gives the company the ability to manage and track their campaigns and make any necessary tweaks to future campaigns.

4. Viral Ads and Filter Forwarding

   Coming up with a globally viral video is not as easy as it looks but it is possible to build a targeted video for your customer base that can become popular within your own network.  Understanding your social media networks like LinkedIn and Facebook versus Google Ads can greatly enhance your marketing campaign. While both LinkedIn and Facebook offer graphics with your ads Google Adwords does not. Knowing more about your campaign is very important when trying to build a viral campaign.

5. Social Media Campaigns

   Building a campaign on a social media network takes time as well as detailed planning. It is important to research your demographic as well as the best method to target that demographic. It is also very important to setup response templates for the social media campaign. For example, you would need a “Evangelist Template” for those that praise your product or campaign and you would also need a “Crisis Management Template” that will prepare you for a social media negative sentiment remark. These templates are very important when conducting your social media engagement platform. Social Media Campaigns can be very successful but it is important that you prepare for all the “ifs” when in the planning stage.

6.  Collaborative Community

   Using teaming as well as collaborative community projects can help the brand exposure while increasing a team environment with your customers. At the same time, the company will add value to their social media engagement campaign by communicating with each of their customers. A good example is asking your customers to help design your new logo or to produce a video about one of your products. This inspires your customer base while increasing the exposure of your service or product. A company could also leverage online social media networks like Ning to help build your own social media network that the company can engagement with on a daily basis.

7. People Powered Community

   When building a people powered community it is important to understand the function of your product or service in the social media grid. A great example of bringing together designers is Etsy. Etsy provides a community that is centered around the SOHO designer and allows customers to post reviews as well as comments about the designer. These communities are very stable and offer a great way to leverage user submitted content for your website. A people powered community increases the success of your social media engagement plan.

Social Media Engagement: Marketing Strategy

When social media engagement is discussed it’s often from a marketing communications perspective.  You may love the look of your website, social media pages, and marketing materials.  Undoubtedly these are important factors, but only one part of the equation; engagement of clients is critical for a business’ social media marketing efforts .  Achieving the best social media marketing strategy for your company is reliant on many factors surrounding your business and industry.

The key to any marketing strategy is found in the word strategy.  Many companies have yet to learn how to include social media engagement in their own marketing strategy and make the most of it.  No matter if you call it blogger relations, social participation, or conversation marketing, the engagement aspect of marketing strategy can not be under estimated.