The truth is out: Seven out of every ten Americans use social media to either share news and information or to stay entertained. And we’ve proven time and time again that social media is a great way to engage with customers. Take it from us, driving engagement is a continuous (and sometimes complex) journey that requires creativity and consistency — and metric tracking.

From likes, retweets, shares, follows, comments, and click-throughs, it’s crucial to understand where to focus your efforts. To help, we’ve assembled the essential steps to grow your customer engagement.

Develop Your Engagement Playbook

Imagine if the Disney Parks treated you like the workers at a local fair. While the fair may have some fun rides and attractions, the way that Disney creates a full 360-degree experience for you from the moment you arrive is a marvel. Think about engaging your fans with the same sort of white glove, fully immersed brand presentation.

Time to really think about what your brand makes customers feel, and how to build a consistent, careful approach. Build a playbook with a brand tone/voice. Articulate what sort of humor can be used and when it can be applied. Decide how gifs, emojis, and memes fit into your experience (if at all). Determine the general sentiment you want your customers to feel as they navigate away from your social media.

Engaging your customers in social media should not simply be “support.” Define the horizons of engagement: celebration, acknowledgement, reward, entertainment, and authenticity. Define guidelines and guardrails to find consistency. Identify what “good” engagement looks like, what “outstanding” engagement looks like, and what “nope, nada” engagement looks like. Allow your tone to evolve as time passes.

Pay Close Attention to Your Analytics

Data! Data! Data! If you’re trying to ramp up engagement, you need to understand where you stand. Analytics provide insights into the posts that create the most engagement on your platform and the type of audience engagement with each post. Why do you need this information? Twitter analytics, for instance, shows how an increase or decrease of tweets affects your tweet impressions and profile visits. After taking a close look at your monthly analytics, you may discover that tweeting more leads to higher engagement.

You can also identify your top follower for the month. If your most active follower has 1,000 or more followers, it makes sense to engage them in a creative tweet and entice their followers to engage with you as well. Have you ever considered an ambassador group, or campaigns to invigorate your most loyal and active customers? Data will show you the way.

Use your analytics tools to compare different apps and how they perform against one other, and also to determine what type of content brings the most engagement to your account. If video content has more shares than blogs, it makes sense to focus on creating more videos as stand-alone content and as part of blogs.

Time Your Social Posts Carefully

At the end of the day, we’re all human with individual habits, preferences, and behaviors. Our traits determine why some of us prefer to connect in the morning while others are night owls. Understanding human behavior, especially in your audience, helps you determine when to share a post.

A study by Sprout Social found the following:

• Social media users are most active in the middle of the week on Wednesday, especially between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. The trend seems to follow a typical work week, where most activity peaks midweek and tapers off during the weekend.
• However, the engagement levels may vary depending on the information shared. For example, if you post educational content for students on Facebook, you’re likely to see high engagement between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. from Monday to Friday.
• Instagram engagement peaks between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. every day. Media engagement is generally best on Fridays at 9 a.m., while posts for selling products do well on Wednesdays around 3 p.m.
• Twitter activity peaks on Wednesday and Friday, especially at 9 a.m. However, peak activity depends on the content. For example, consumer goods posts do well on Sundays at around 11 a.m. For tech, Twitter activity is highest on Tuesday and Wednesdays.

Pay attention to your followers, know when they’re most active, and recognize their various behaviors; make it easy for them to interact with you on social media.

In the second part of this article, we’ll discuss two other tools you’re probably already using on your social platforms — but are you doing it effectively? Find out later this week in the Mod Blog.

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