The Doors Of Engagement
This isn’t a blog about taking the marriage plunge, or about Jim Morrison’s band. We’ll leave that to the marriage and rock ’n roll history experts. But it is about doors of engagement and the tools to create them. More specifically, it’s about creating the biggest, most inviting doors to invite your followers to walk through.
There are a ton of ways to boost engagement with your online audience. You can tailor your posts well with interesting images, write a very clear point, or better yet post a video that gives more glamour to your good content. These are all ways to maintain your image online. But what about instant gratification? How can you benefit your audience in the midst of advertising yourself? How can you strike a deeper chord with your audience and let them know that your page and brand is the place to be?
5 Doors Of Engagement To Open For Your Online Audience
Door #1) Contests
Contests are a great way to build a buzz. It provides a way to connect
with followers while providing reward at the same time. Tools like Rafflecopter allow you to provide giveaways of products. You’re accomplishing something similar to writing a blog about a product, except with the flair of offering something free and building anticipation for the results of the competition. This provides a door for your audience to feel involved, and provides you with free social media evangelists, as contestants can be required to share about your product to be eligible for the contest. Setting a deadline for the end of the competition builds anticipation and sense of urgency for more contestants to get involved, and thus engaged.
Door #2) Surveys
“What is your favorite color? Favorite band? Favorite beverage? Your greatest talent?”
If you’re like most people (me), something in you is excited to answer at least one of those questions, and then tell someone else those answers. People love to talk about their interests and opinions, and compare their likes and dislikes with others. Now that I think about it, that sentence pretty much defines social media. You can utilize a tool like SurveyMonkey, which allows you to create questions and form a survey to increase engagement. This tool can double as a valuable feedback tool, since you can taylor the questions to give you answers that educate you about what gets your audience fired up. Everyone likes to have fun, so feel free to include some humorous questions to humanize the survey.
Door #3) Questions
This point is a pretty close friend of the previous point, and basically emphasizes the same idea: asking questions is a vital tool in getting a response. If you stick to simply talking about your brand in front of people, they’ll observe but might be less motivated to engage. If you ask a question, they’ll probably lean more toward responding. Balance out how much you tout your brand on status updates with a good dose of questions aimed at engaging your audience.
Door #4) Blogs
You can curate and create great content on Facebook and other platforms, but you build additional credibility and open new doors of engagement by linking to your own blog. Your blog doesn’t need to market your services explicitly, but a blog you write about your industry or just something you find interesting suggests that you are engaged and a diversified expert in your field. WordPress is a great tool to create a blog that you can easily edit and customize.
Door #5) Email Lists
Remember email? It’s that thing that came after the written letter, but before Facebook messaging and texting? You can use it to connect on an additional level with your followers. Use a tool like MailChimp and provide the option for people to sign up for your mailing list. It’s great to have followers on social media, but you can be even more specific in your targeting to people that are interested enough in your service to sign up by email.
It’s nigh impossible to make an exhaustive list of doors through which to invite engagement, but this list should get you started on opening some correct ones. Feel free to comment if you have used other specific tools to build engagement, would love to hear your ideas.
Social Media No To The Quo
