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Engagement-Strategy

How to Establish an Engagement Strategy

June 24, 2021
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Social Media, Strategy, Twitter

What is Social Media Engagement?

Think about social media engagement as all of the interactions you have with your followers, across all platforms. It’s LinkedIn and Facebook shares, Instagram likes and Twitter retweets all rolled into one.

Any chance you have to engage with your followers — a reply, a share or a like is a potential interaction that you can increase trust and grow your brand.

Consumers who trust you and your content will eventually become customers. 

Customers like to share recommendations to others — so they’ll eventually become ambassadors for your brand. 

This kind of organic sharing is the best possible scenario for social media engagement.

How to Engage on Social Media

Like most technology, approaches to social media are cyclical and they change rapidly. 

Today, bots are out.

Many social networks have set parameters around engagement, which limits possible bot actions. Social networks can now close your account if you’re caught using bots.

Authentic engagement is in.

You need to spend the time to like, comment and share other content. Or, if you’re not doing it yourself, you need to hire a social media agency to do it. No matter what social media platform(s) best fit your business, you need to be responsive.

Our top three recommendations to clients are: 

  • Build relationships
  • Be casual 
  • And be friendly.

If you need help establishing a voice on a social media platform, let us know. 

What’s included in a social media engagement strategy

Mapping out how your business will engage on social media is crucial to the success of reaching your target customers online. A social media engagement strategy will outline who and how you plan to interact. 

A few important sections we include in our engagement strategies are:

  1. Accounts of industry leaders
  2. Accounts with the same or similar target audiences 
  3. Industry-related hashtags
  4. Predetermined responses for different scenarios

 

At Smith Social, we always start with a social media strategy to plan how to reach your target customer. An engagement strategy is just one section of the plan. 

If you’re looking to increase your reach on social media, it might be time to consider implementing an engagement strategy. Don’t have time? Ask our team to help! Get started today by reaching out to us.

 

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Twitter-Business

5 Twitter Stats All B2B Marketers Should Know in 2021

March 21, 2021
Social Media, Strategy, Twitter

We love Twitter at Smith Social. For some B2B marketers, Twitter can be hard to figure out. With character count limits. Short life spans on timelines. Twitter marketing can seem overwhelming if you aren’t familiar with the network. However, Twitter is an effective B2B platform when you spend time to align the power of the platform with your marketing and sales goals.

Here are five stats B2B marketers should be aware of when thinking about their Twitter strategy.

  1. There are 192 million daily active users on Twitter.
  2. Leading countries based on the number of Twitter users are: United States, Japan, and India.
  3. 52% of American Twitter users access the platform daily.
  4. The age group of 35-49-year-olds is the largest age group of Twitter users worldwide. 
  5. 82% of B2B content marketers used Twitter for organic content marketing in the last 12 months.

 

Twitter is a great platform for sharing industry-related content, spreading the word about your business offerings, and sharing company news.

Interested in seeing how your Twitter stack ups? Request our free B2B audit or contact us to see how you can benefit from a robust Twitter Strategy. 

Free B2B Social Media Audit

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Is your Twitter Strategy missing this?

Is your Twitter Strategy missing this?

June 26, 2020
Social Media, Strategy, Twitter

Crafting the perfect tweet consists of obtaining a sweet graphic or video from your designer, writing a creative 280 character description, having a Call-to-Action (CTA) link that is begging to be clicked on, and scheduling the tweet out on Twitter during an optimized time.

Each tweet takes time, and for your business, that’s company time and resources. Which is why it’s natural to hope for the best results from each tweet. However, if you’re looking at the analytics a day after a tweet is posted and you’re disappointed in the singular results of one tweet, then your Twitter strategy is missing something.

Your tweet didn’t fall short because of its content, but from Twitter’s algorithm not ranking your tweets high enough. Here’s what you need to know about Twitter’s algorithm, and the one change you can make to increase your tweets’ ranking.


The Twitter Algorithm

Twitter has been known for its reverse chronological order for years, however, in 2017 Twitter introduced its first feed algorithm with “while you were away” and “in case you missed it.” Twitter’s “new” algorithm was to help users see relevant content they missed when they were offline. 

Twitter’s algorithm brings a mix of real-time content and content shown based on the algorithms’s ranking of past tweets to your Home feed (unless you turn off the Twitter algorithm on your account).

Twitter’s algorithm is constantly evolving, but when first released, Twitter publicly stated three characteristics the algorithm considers when ranking tweets. They are…

  1. The Tweet: recency, media usage, and interactions received
  2. The Author: past interaction with author, strength of connection, origin of relationship
  3. You: tweets you found engaging in the past, how often and heavily you use Twitter

 

Twitter Reposting Schedule

Every time you open your Twitter app or refresh your feed, Twitter is scoring every tweet from the people you follow to determine what tweets will be shown at the top of your Home feed. Changing the feed every second, in real time.

This is the same for your target audience’s Twitter. So when you post your tweet once, you leave too much up to the “fate” of Twitter’s algorithm. If you want your content in front of your followers regularly, you need to be repeating your tweets on a consistent basis.

At Katie L Smith & Company, we use a simple reposting schedule that sends out the exact same tweet, not once, but up to seven times during a 12 month period. This reposting strategy guarantees an increase in the reach of a single social media post.

For example:

Post #1 receives 40 impressions

Repeat Post #1 receives 30 impressions

= 70 impressions total


The reposting schedule we recommend for Twitter:
   

 

A Quick Note: When following the above reposting schedule, remember to consider the shelf-life of your content. Consider how far into the future the post will remain relevant to your target audience. Will it still be relevant in 24 hours? Next week? Next month?, etc. Once the content reaches its relevancy expiration date, remove it from your reposting schedule.

A reposting schedule is just one piece to a well-rounded Twitter strategy that touches on only a portion of the Twitter algorithm characteristics. If you are interested in learning how you can obtain a well-rounded Twitter strategy and have your tweets rank higher and get seen by your target audience, fill out the contact form below, and our social media strategist will be in touch with you!

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Two Types of Hashtags You Should Be Using

Two types of hashtags you should be using on your social media posts

August 18, 2018
Instagram, Social Media, Strategy, Twitter

Hashtags have now been around for over a decade. The first hashtag was used by Chris Messina in August of 2007 on Twitter. Chris had the idea to use a hashtag to categorize a group’s discussion or an online conversation on Twitter. Over Benny Pointingthe years hashtags have spread from Twitter across multiple online platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, as well as entering into our text and verbal communications.

Hashtags were originally meant for discussing certain events or topics of conversation. While this is still the case on many social networks, hashtags are becoming exceedingly popular being used to further describe the subject of a post or to create a humorous bit. Many of these hashtags become one-off hashtags that aren’t found on multiple social media posts. While this is creative and fun on a casual communication level, they don’t add value to your business’ social media posts. These hashtags won’t get your content seen.

However, there are two types of hashtags your business should be using to help increase the reach of your content.

 

1. Common use hashtags

A common use hashtag is a hashtag that has the highest count of usage across a particular social media network. Common use hashtags can have thousands or even millions of posts that contain a specific hashtag in the post description. Sometimes these can be popular words or phrases to categorize a certain subject; for example: #bunnies, #rabbit #bunnylove

To determine what the common use hashtags are for your business, start with listing out possible hashtags for your industry. Next research how many posts are currently using each hashtag on a particular social network. For example, on Instagram you can type the hashtag into the search bar and Instagram will give you the current number of posts that contain the searched hashtag. Add this number next to the hashtag name. Creating a small chart like the pictured example will create a visual representation of which hashtags are the most popular in your industry.

Common Use Hashtags

* Note: If you are using Instagram and Twitter in your social media strategy, make sure to research your hashtags for Twitter and Instagram separately. Hashtags that are popular on Instagram are not always popular on Twitter.

 

2. High growth hashtags

High growth hashtags are hashtags that don’t necessarily have the highest count of posts but are growing at a faster rate than other hashtags. High growth hashtags are a good indication for where a current conversation or trend is taking place. If you can identify high growth hashtags for your industry, you will have the opportunity to join an active online conversation and greatly increase the reach of your content.

To determine which hashtags from your common use hashtag list are also high growth hashtags, add two more columns to your chart. Wait 24 hours and recheck the post count for each hashtag. Add this number in the next column. After inserting all the numbers into the chart, you can then calculate the growth rate percentage with the formula below:

Growth Rate Percentage = (New Post Count – Original Post Count/Original Post Count) * 100

Calculate the growth rate percentage for each hashtag and insert into the last column of the chart. Identify which percentages are the highest. Identify which hashtags have the highest use count and which hashtags have the highest growth rate. Are they the same hashtags?

High Growth Hashtags

*Note: It is best practice to calculate high growth hashtags for your industry once a quarter to make sure you are still using the fastest growing hashtags.

 

Benny Sitting

Calculating common use and high growth hashtags will give you a solid plan for utilizing hashtags on your social media posts and working towards increasing your content reach. Using a combination of each type of hashtag is best practice. If you have any questions about setting up a hashtag strategy, contact us for a free consultation.

 

 

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