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Automate, Engage, Analyse, Repeat! – Social Media Tactics

One of the hurdles for brands on social media is staying fresh and relevant. If you havenโ€™t been building the traction you have had been hoping for, fret not. This article will show you the tactics that will breathe life back into your social media campaign.

It is as simple as AUTOMATE-ENGAGE-ANALYSE-REPEAT!

Automate, Engage, Analyse, Repeat! – Social Media Tactics

Automate

In order for your campaign to work, you need to be creating the type of content that your audience wants to see. A good content is that which resonates with the audience- through both words and visuals.

Pre-creation requisites

Before you start creating your content, you need to ask yourself a few questions:

  1. What is the objective of your social media campaign?
  2. What stories will be relevant to the audience?
  3. What is the current state of the market? Which type of content works for your competitors?

Alternatively, using Quora to look for the most viewed and up-voted questions are the ones that will do well with your social media campaign. Look for common themes in the questions.

Creating Stories

People respond better to content that is able to tell stories. Such content is better at building loyal followers, as story-based content resonates with them, rather than being just another impersonal marketing content.

People view story based content as positive and meaningful. Such posts have a higher chance of popping in your followersโ€™ feeds, as recent algorithm changes in social websites declass promotion-heavy content.

Automate, Engage, Analyse, Repeat! - Social Media Tactics

Scheduling Content

Create a social media calendar. It will help you hit important dates. It will also ensure that you do not end up scrambling posts together.

Social media calendar keeps a track of when and where you are publishing your content. It saves time and resources- providing ample time for research and creation which also assures quality.

Having a consistent posting routine is also vital. A consistent posting routine will help your audience learn when to expect new content which builds engagements.

Posting at the Right Time

Reaching your audience at the right time is a challenge. Trial and error will help find the best times that receive the most audience engagement in your specific niche. Pay attention to the content and timings of your competitors; itโ€™ll help you learn faster.

The optimum frequency of posts across different networks varies. Knowing the number of posts per day that brings the most audience engagement will determine how you fill up your social media calendar.

You can try posting on:

  • Facebook twice a day between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.
  • Instagram twice a day between 5 a.m. and 4 p.m.
  • LinkedIn once a day outside working hours
  • Twitter up to 15 times a day between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m.

However, these timings may or may not work for your specific audience in your niche. You need to keep experimenting and learning from your colleagues.

Social Media Tools

As new features are added on social networks, marketers scramble to find the best ways to successfully promote their message through them. It can at often times be time-consuming. Curating for different features and posting them at different times can be hectic.

With social media tools, you can spend less time on managing campaigns and focus more on developing effective content.

With free and paid options to choose from, there are a plethora of tools that you can use that suit your budget and preference. With these tools, you can schedule posts on any platform. You can tailor them so that they post according to your posting schedules. Some also come equipped with analytics that allows you to gauge the performance and engagement of your posts.

Engage

A comment on your social media post is a sign that people like your content. It is vital that you respond to such an interaction. It will help build a personal relationship between the audience and your brand.

Creation of an authentic response from your end is the first step to creating trust with the audience. It shows your audience that you are not just another impersonal brand.

Replying with a simple thank-you to comments or mentions is a good first step. But always using a few generic replies can indicate inauthenticity. Spicing up your replies, thus, will show your brandโ€™s personality.

Discussions

Engaging with the audience by asking for their opinion will help drive discussions. If someone responds to your social media post that links to a blog post, you can drive a discussion by asking questions like their favorite part of the blog post, or if they agree with the opinions expressed or their takeaway from the blog post.

If they reply to the questions, youโ€™re off to a good start on creating a good relationship with them.

Responding through emojis, GIFs, and images

Emoji is a fun way to spice up your replies. As it has become a part of the social media language, people are used to seeing them in their social media postsโ€™ comments. Using emojis is an efficient way to convey your emotion in your replies. It might not be easy to pick up your tone over a simple line of text. But including, say, a laughing emoji, will let them easily know instantly that you are really happy.

Using images is the fastest way to explain something on social media, especially on platforms that have limited characters for posting, like Twitter. Support questions where you have to point something, are best responded to through images.


GIFs are perfect for brands that want that perfect snack for the small attention span of the consumers. They are easily shareable and show that you are paying attention to trends. Replying to the audience through GIFs you will come across as fun, approachable, and positive.

Creating trust with the audience

The audience, when they receive a response to their questions, make them feel that the brand is aware of its people and that they care about them. It helps build the necessary trust that will ensure loyalty over a long time.

Engagement with your audience allows you to share your brand with a larger group of people. By responding positively to your audience, you increase the chance of them recommending you or your brand to other people that they may know.

Engage with the audience when they mention you through hashtags. User-generated content allows you to showcase user expectations about the brands.

A handy list of must-dos

These tactics will help you engage with the audience by minimizing the time taken and remaining authentic:

  • Craft replies to most asked questions in advance.
  • Have a list of GIFs, images, and emojis that you think are relevant to your brand and will convey a positive message
  • Use an automation tool which is generally inclusive of features that will make your life a little easier.
  • Schedule a fixed time of the day regularly to engage with your audience

Analyse

Now that you know the kind content you need to push out and how to engage with the audience, the next step is to analyse if the methods that you implemented actually work or not. Tracking hashtags, posts, and engagement metrics- comments will show how well your marketing campaign has performed.

Finding key performance indicators

It is difficult to know if you are making the right decisions unless you measure the performance through social media key performance indicators (KPI).

Understanding your KPI will help you adapt the campaign to suit the overall goal of your campaign. Find your core KPIs to measure your reach with the audience, engagement, and the response time of the audience.

Knowing your least and most important metrics

You should know your end goal to decipher whatโ€™s most important for you. If your end goal is user growth, you should look into post reach, new likes, and engagement rate. Knowing what to fine-tune and what to ignore will save you time and effort.

Tracking the metrics natively from each platform

Popular social networks are equipped with analytic tools natively. The tools are a quick way of knowing how well a particular network performs with your content.

Mashable recommends social media campaigns to be set up in three stages- launch, management, optimization. Through this, you will be able to decipher which metrics affects at which stage.

Facebook Insights

The most important Facebook metrics include:

  • Engagement- The number of posts, likes, comments, shares within the last seven days
  • Impressions- The number of times your page is displayed
  • Page likes- Total number of page likes including weekly data comparisons
  • Organic likes- Likes coming from outside and ad campaign
  • Post reach- Number of people that have seen the content
  • Unlike- Number of people that have unliked your page

Twitter Analytics

The most important Twitter metrics include:

  • Engagement rate- Link clicks, retweets, replies, and favorites
  • Followers- Total number of followers
  • Mentions- Number of time you were mentioned by other users
  • Link clicks- Number of times brand hashtags and links clicked

Google Analytics

The most important Twitter metrics include:

  • Session duration- The average time your audience spends on your posts
  • Bounce rate- Percentage of users that leave your site after just one pageview
  • Sessions- Total time when users are active
  • Page views- Number of times your page was loaded in browsers

Automate, Engage, Analyse, Repeat! - Social Media Tactics

Form a hypothesis from your findings

Now that you have enough data from your KPI measuring your performance, you can make deductions about why and when your audience engaged and why only certain types of content performed well.

You can repeat the format of the content that worked well and measures its performance. If it works well, then your audience responds positively to such posts. You can also experiment posting at different times, a variety of content in different ways to see which posts receive maximum engagement and when.

Having analytical data in hand will help you recalibrate your strategy and tune it so that it resonates with the audience.

End Note

By following the above-mentioned automate-engage-automate rule you can build a strong social media presence.

The general thumb rule is to understand what your audience needs and test it to see if that works for you as well.

Keep automating, engaging, analysing, repeating and experimenting until you come up with a core strategy that you know works for you! You may have to alter it every now and then due to new updates or events, etc. but you will have better understanding of your audience to adjust successfully to all the external forces.

Your audience can be the game changers that will drive traffic to your brand.

About the author:ย 

Automate, Engage, Analyse, Repeat! - Social Media TacticsNaveen Singh is the Marketing Manager at Social Aider. He gets a kick out of networking and learning about everything social media. When not working or learning, Naveen loves watching cricket matches and exploring new places to eat!

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About Lilach Bullock


Hi, Iโ€™m Lilach, a serial entrepreneur! Iโ€™ve spent the last 2 decades starting, building, running, and selling businesses in a range of niches. Iโ€™ve also used all that knowledge to help hundreds of business owners level up and scale their businesses beyond their beliefs and expectations.

Iโ€™ve written content for authority publications like Forbes, Huffington Post, Inc, Twitter, Social Media Examiner and 100โ€™s other publications and my proudest achievement, won a Global Women Champions Award for outstanding contributions and leadership in business.

My biggest passion is sharing knowledge and actionable information with other business owners. I created this website to share my favorite tools, resources, events, tips, and tricks with entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small business owners, and startups. Digital marketing knowledge should be accessible to all, so browse through and feel free to get in touch if you canโ€™t find what youโ€™re looking for!

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