You may be missing valuable opportunities for engagement on social media, without even realising it.
I have talked about the importance of “clicking through” before. Don't just blindly post on Social Media – get to know who the people are behind the tweets, posts, comments and likes.
This post looks at 3 Simple Ways you can start engaging better, opening up the possibility of connections and opportunities with potential brand advocates.
If you don't start reaching out and “clicking” to get to know people, you may as well close your laptop, head out and do something you love. You are just wasting your time. Because Marketing has changed.
There are 3 things we need to succeed at to get results in buisiness on social media:
- Help People. No matter which way you look at it, it always comes back to helping people. Unless your content is doing this, unless your content is helping people, you need to go away and have a big think about how you can start answering their questions, solving their problems and providing them with useful information. How can you help people? Jay Baer has produced a brilliant book on this called YouTility. Read it.
- Help People to Engage With You. This is the one that I want to talk about today. How can you help people to engage with you, and in turn find out more about them, help them, and help them to do #3.
- Help People to Do Your Marketing For You. This is all about User Generated Content. UGC is a big big big big thing at the moment. I know that I talk about User Generated Content a lot, in terms of encouraging others to share visual content such as images, photos and video. I presented on it two weeks ago at the Social Media Tourism Symposium. But this goes across all types of marketing. From the conversations that your brand advocates have at the corner coffee shop, to their comments on personal facebook pages, to “checking in” via Facebook, or willingly sharing photos of your business or local destination – the principles of Word of Mouth have not changed. How you can help them to do your marketing for you? This is the biggest question you should be asking yourself.
See how the 3 are intertwined? One does not work without the other. And unless you can start engaging with people on a level that matters you have no hope of them seeing your helpful content or becoming a brand advocate that does your marketing for you. So let's start with engagement:
How to Help People to Engage With You
There are 3 things you can do now to get this started – 3 simple clicks that you can make to help boost your engagement with others:
#1 Click on Websites:
Don't just follow and tweet and pin and share blindly. Get a little context! Find out the website of the person you are connecting with and click on the darn thing. It only takes a second…but believe me, the person you might need to be talking to, could be the person who just posted on your Facebook Page. If you only see them as their “personal profile picture” how can you know that they matter?
- Click on their Facebook Profile and (if they have set their profile up correctly) their place of business/business page and website – do this from LinkedIn too! Find out who they are, what they do, and if possible, what matters to them.
- Go to their Twitter profile and click on their website (I refer to #2 below).
- If someone comments on your blog, click through to their website. This is super important. If people bother to comment on your blog, wouldn't you want to see if they have a blog that you can check out, join their community and reciprocate? Find out more about how to build a blog community here. It just takes one click.
Click on the profile of anyone that shares your blog post and talk to them. Thank them… especially if they reference your blog in their post. And don't forget to Tweet out about their post too.
#2 Click on Twitter Profiles
I wrote about this here and the post really resonated with a lot of people. Basically I suggested that if you receive an @mention, RT or “follow”, then you should make the effort to thank the person in a simple Tweet. But….
…first…Click on their profile. Read their profile description. Notice who they are. Notice where they work. Notice what they are tweeting about.
Yes, it's stalking.
But in a good way.
As I mentioned in this post, look at the hashtags, check out their personal interests”¦.These people have put the best of their personal info on their profile to start a conversation with you for a reason. Take the time to read it and connect with them. Then you can thank them….but with the background information that you need to thank them with a personal touch.
Want to see some examples of this working really well? Check it out here – I have met some great people and had fabulous opportunities both personally and in business….all from a single tweet (and by using a little background information to help me!).
#3 Click on G+ Profiles
If you are a GMail user, this one is great. Don't just blindly let people subscribe to your list and leave it at that. Find out about them.
I use Gmail for my email system and integrate a social plugin called Rapportive. Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox. So when I recieve a subscriber notification I can see if they are on G+ and I can immediately add them to a Circle.
One Click.
I may not have a chance to email everyone individually, but by doing this, I can give a small acknowledgement, just by following them/adding them to a circle. For me, that's a nice touch. Not everyone is hooked up to G+ and that's fine, but a small gesture, one click, can make a connection. And yes, I have started some interesting conversations with subscribers based on this.
Phew. That's enough from me. You have plenty to go away and click on! Before you go, leave a comment below and tell me if you have ever had a great connection come from “clicking” through to find out more about somebody. And be sure to share your favourite profile….the one where you like to hang out, so we can come over and say hi!
Donna Moritz
