How can you balance brand promotion with social media engagement?

Goals are very important to align on with whoever the major decision maker is. Before setting any final goals, make sure that they also align with YOUR personal goals as well. This way you and your company are both gaining from the relationship and when the job gets tough you both have each others backs!

Setting clear and measurable goals before embarking on your social media journey is paramount for success. It's the compass that guides your actions and ensures you stay on course. Consider the objective of increasing sales. A company like Amazon, for instance, meticulously aligns its social media strategy with its sales objectives. They feature products, provide enticing offers, and make the buying process seamless, all to drive conversions and boost their bottom line. For businesses aiming to boost their reputation, credibility is the name of the game. Elon Musk effectively utilizes Twitter to enhance the reputation of his companies by sharing insights into his vision, groundbreaking achievements, and innovations.

Las redes sociales fortalecen tu comunidad. El contenido genera interés. Se requieren experiencias cálidas y memorables con interacción. Usando el metaverso, moviéndose de lo digital a lo físico. Impactando sus vida e integrar la marca a su estilo de vida.

To excel on social media, begin with clear objectives: - Define specific, measurable goals for your social media efforts. - Goals guide content strategy and facilitate tracking. - Adapt tactics as needed to achieve your objectives.

A lot of the time I see a company’s social media and website designed from a general marketing perspective with generic sentencing and quotes. Authenticity is key and will be the difference between you and your competition. Your teams’ values and mission must align with your brand, and by taking time out at the start to focus on this, could be the determining factor for your future success. Hiring talent that share the same perspective, can then create passionate advocates. So, if you’re a start-up, or a SME, get your founding or management team around to explore each other’s values to then consolidate them into the brand or company’s values and mission statements.

Getting to know your audience can start without even talking to anyone at first. When I'm getting to know my audience, I sit and build little characters on a sheet of paper. Each character represents a "segment" of my audience. These are called "personas". They make the research process more human! You list out their hobbies. Where they hang out. When they check their phones. What social media they like. Then you start thinking about their pains. What bothers them on a frequent enough basis that they would pay for a product? Once you build a few personas, you can send out polls to test and gain insights on each of those personas.

Douglas B. Holt, a leading expert on cultural approaches to branding strategies points out how important it is to fully understand the culture of the audience, their way of thinking, and perceptions of things. We need to learn about the audience constantly because they are evolving. Society changes them and they want other things. "Conventional strategy models ignore historical disruptions, and so they simply can’t help businesses navigate the future".

I think knowing your audience is key to maintaining social media engagement. The tone of your brand needs to match that of your target audience. You need to attract the right audience that aligns with your brand and they'll promote your brand! You can experiment with different types of posts and keep track of the response, drill down to find out what worked and what did not, and make adjustments to get better responses.

Accurately knowing the audience helps you to have correct and attainable goals and to use appropriate methods in social media.

Understanding your target audience's preferences empowers you to create tailored content that resonates, ultimately boosting your social media marketing success. For instance, if you're a fitness brand, conducting surveys might reveal that your audience is predominantly interested in home workouts due to their busy schedules. To cater to their needs, you can create content showcasing quick, effective home workout routines. Moreover, consider a local restaurant. By analyzing analytics, you might find that your audience engages most with posts about weekend specials. Understanding this preference, you can consistently share enticing visuals and descriptions of your weekend menu items to keep your audience engaged.

Lead with your UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION. Too many marketers are still putting mission and vision out front. But there is tons of data to show that consumers do not give much credit to those self-assigned descriptors. Your UVP is what sets you apart.

A strong value proposition sets you apart from competitors and resonates with your audience. In the realm of tech, consider Apple's value proposition: "Innovative technology for a seamless life." This succinctly captures their commitment to user-friendly, cutting-edge products. Similarly, a local coffee shop might emphasize "Crafting artisanal brews with a side of community." This highlights their unique blend of high-quality coffee and a welcoming atmosphere. In all cases, your value proposition should be a beacon guiding your content strategy, ensuring consistent delivery of value to your followers.

In today's world, anyone can post content. The difference between a hobbyist and a pro is value. If you provide value to your audience, you can't go wrong. But what is value? Why do you go online? For inspiration, education, and entertainment mainly! So inspire your audience with a success story of a client! Teach them a new method of managing their money! Or entertain them with the most incredible feat you can think of! When you leave your viewer feeling any emotion (besides hate for your content), you've done your job!

Here's my take: if someone is learning about your brand and getting to know you through social media, they're probably not making a totally rational decision of picking the best product or service from a sea of competitors. Social is a channel where you can build affinity with potential customers by showing not just the value of your products/services, but the VALUES you hold as a company, and build connections with potential customers on that emotional level. Also - your team members, the people making the product/service happen, are a core part of your unique value. That's why highlighting your team members on social can be so effective.

You should even have different Value Proposition in each channel. So you are creating the reason why they should follow you somewhere else as well. So providing product insights on Facebook, connecting followers on Instagram and sharing employer back-stage stories on LinkedIn!

Find the ratio that works for you, but "4-1-1" is a general rule for content posting. Post 4 pieces of valuable content, 1 promotional post, & 1 post that encourages engagement. Create a balanced mix of content that is informative, engaging, and promotional. Avoid overwhelming your audience with too much promotional content. Here is an example of how to use the 4-1-1 rule for content posting on social media: 4 valuable content posts: Articles, blog posts, videos, or infographics that are relevant to your audience's interests. 1 promotional post: About your product or service, a special offer, or a contest. 1 engagement post: A question, a poll, or a behind-the-scenes photo.

When it comes to content mix, nobody KNOWS the right ratio. What works for one channel, doesn't work for every channel. Communities are living beings, who notice very quickly when they're being served ads. And they're also very smart now, so you can't sneak them in. That would also be mean. In today's world, it's about 2 way communication. Basically, when you post content you want to take in the comments. And not just read them, but RESPOND. Ask people for clarification. Learn why they love a certain piece or hate an ad! They'll be happy to tell you what they want. Then you go and talk to the promo content department to get creative!

Achieving the right content mix is key. Consider these principles: 80/20 Rule: Aim for 80% educational, entertaining, or inspirational content, and 20% promotional. Trust and Engagement: This balance helps build trust, loyalty, and engagement without overwhelming sales. By following this rule, you create a more valuable and engaging social media presence.

Balancing promotional and non-promotional content is indeed a key dilemma in social media marketing. For instance, consider a fitness brand. They can share workout tips, nutrition advice (80%) to inspire and educate their audience, and occasionally promote their products (20%) with compelling success stories. Similarly, a travel agency can post stunning destination photos, travel hacks (80%), and intermittently showcase special offers (20%) to entice travelers. This approach keeps the audience engaged and informed. Even a tech company can share industry insights, tech trends (80%), while sparingly promoting their latest gadgets (20%). This strategy positions them as experts in the field rather than just sales-driven.

Balancing your content mix is crucial in social media marketing. Beyond the 80/20 rule, it's also essential to consider the timing and context of your posts. Understanding when your audience is most active and tailoring your content to current events or trends can significantly boost engagement. Additionally, experimenting with different types of non-promotional content, such as user-generated content, interactive polls, and storytelling, can help keep your social media presence fresh and engaging. The key is to create a dynamic and authentic online community that adds value to your audience's lives, making them more receptive to your promotional content when it comes around.

Tactics is such a gross word. If you create thought provoking content, people will talk. You don't need to come up with gimmicks to get engagement rolling. Start with the viewer and work backwards. You should know your audience well enough by now to know what gets them interested. Is it memes? Hype montages? Man on the street interviews? Focus on providing your viewers with a platform to voice their opinions (AKA the comments section) and forget about "tactics".

And unfortunately (or not) you have to SPEND money on post promotion. Highlighting the organically best performing post to reach and engage more people.

Evoke FOMO with Exclusive Engagement. ?? Instead of bombarding your audience with constant promotions, create a sense of exclusivity and anticipation around your brand on social media. Offer limited-time, exclusive opportunities, content, or events that make followers feel like they're part of an inner circle. ? By leveraging FOMO, you'll not only boost engagement but also organically promote your brand as followers eagerly share their unique experiences with their networks. This approach humanizes your brand, fostering a genuine connection with your audience, which, in turn, fuels long-term loyalty and advocacy. ??

It’s also important not to panic if that engagement doesn’t come right away. Remember, with the majority of channels you need to cultivate your audience and also nurture your algorithm so that the network is showing you to people. Usually it takes one great post which catalyses your engagement but don’t panic if that doesn’t come right away. Instead, use the time to learn about your audience, test types of posts - a low engagement also means low risk so try things. I’d also warn against panicking and going after paid. Paid is often intrusive, we all fast forward ads on TV when we can and people skip paid posts for the same reasons. Especially on X, if your content is good enough it’ll get attention natively without paid promotion.

Giveaway contests are a quick way to engage your audience, with a brand's Facebook giveaways usually generating 1,000% more interactions than their other posts. However, through my experiences, I have realised that the massive followers gained from the giveaways are usually outside the company's target niche and many unfollow soon after the giveaway. Thus, brands should seek more meaningful ways to engage with their audience which comes from a deeper understanding of their audience and their value proposition. Building a community through behind-the-scenes content, user-generated content, and personalisation can be a few ways in which brands can better engage with their audience.

Content is not king. Relationships are. And social media, used wisely, is a place to use content to foster relationships! What an opportunity! Consider looking past the "vanity metrics" associated with traditional social media KPIs (followers, likes, comments, etc) and even past the traditional marketing metrics (click-through rate, conversions, cost per lead, etc). Those metrics focus on the "media" and advertising elements of social media instead of the lesser-emphasized "social" elements of social media. The best social media managers are working closely with marketing, communications, biz dev, growth, and sales teams. Consider developing content collaboratively with your ideal clients or partners: "content-based networking!"

If your social media shares skew to the promotional too often, you will see a decrease in engagement and interaction. While we all have sales and profitability in our end game, overly promotional messaging and heavy sales tactics don't work in most social media communities. While you want to be top of mind when your prospects and current customers are looking to buy or upgrade, there's a subtlety necessary that must balance staying on brand without slathering your posts with sales pleas and requests. Your shares need to create a connection and trust. Trust that you share helpful information. Trust that you're in the conversation for reasons beyond making a buck. The idea is to steer toward a sale, not slap someone across the face.

What I find interesting lately is how there is a surge of content creators who are great at what they do (entertain and engage their audience) while seamlessly tying it with a brand collaboration. But as THE brand itself, if you're wondering how to promote yourself and increase engagement, the way to go about it is to incorporate storytelling into your posts. That way you are able to hit two birds with one stone. It is also important to note that engagement comes from creative ideas executed in a post. A great example of this is how Canva creates its content on Instagram.

Audiences are increasingly desensitised to promotional material, so it pays dividends to get creative. People spot an ad a mile off, so make it an enjoyable experience where possible. A meme? Or a fun caption? If you can promote and brighten someone's day simultaneously, then everyone's a winner.

Another crucial point is storytelling! When you share authentic and compelling stories about your brand, products, or services, people relate more to your brand and become familiar with it. It taps into our innate human instinct to connect with narratives, making it a valuable approach for communication and engagement.

Too much brand promotion can come across as self-serving and insincere. This is where engagement comes in. Engaging with your audience demonstrates authenticity and a genuine interest in their needs and opinions. This trust and credibility are essential for maintaining a positive brand image.