Social Media Engagement Strategy
Social media channels are essential digital marketing channels, part of your digital marketing flywheel.
It’s easy to say most companies, real estate agents, software companies and travel agencies aren’t getting social media right. In their defense, it is challenging far beyond the common posts, chatter and scheduling. It can be fun but time-wasting and frustrating too. It’s the strategy (and its elements below) that can help us avoid the pitfalls.
How can we describe it to get us both on the same page?
Definition: Social media engagement is about building an emotional connection with your audience through interactions such as views/impressions, likes, comments, shares and clicks, to turn casual followers into loyal customers by sparking interest, trust, and conversation around your brand. It’s about chatting with followers, brand fans, customers, curious visitors, and others to expose your brand, value proposition and irresistible offer, casually, through topics they are interested in. It’s about a panache for saying the right thing at the right time to make people feel good
There’s so much to know, such that learning and adapting are a big part of it.
Goals and Objectives
You’ll Begin with Your Social Media Engagement Goal, which is to grow a large base of relevant connections and begin interacting with them. This is a social thing. We make an emotional impact on them, lead them into the awareness phase and then onto product consideration. Of course, that likely will move them over to your website (travel product catalog) and customer service reps or travel agents.
If it’s all too complex and granular for you, you’ll enjoy having me manage it. The nice thing with a digital marketing freelancer, is you’re getting one reliable, central point of contact to manage everything including working with: a web designer, graphics designer, travel product manager, travel agents, brand consultant, and others as needed.
And this comprehensive service is as affordable as it gets.
Overall, Your Social Media Objectives might be:
- grow reach and visibility
- grow content shares (likes don’t achieve much anymore)
- generate more live, active connections (channels limit your reach to those you actively engage with)
- increase content/post views (brand impressions that draw them closer)
- sales revenue (engagement that creates new customers and sales)
- referrals through to your website (motion into your marketing flywheel)
- persistent engagement with them (building familiarity, comfort and promise of value)
In this post on social media engagement strategy, we cover the topics that contribute to what your campaign will look like.
Sections in This Guide
- Power Up Your Social Media Engagement Process
- Create Value to be Communicated
- Engaging Means getting them Emotionally Involved
- Posting Regularly Isn’t Enough at All
- Key to Any Engagement Campaign: Trust & Respect
- It’s More the Tone and Spirit They Want to be a Part of
- Crafting your Working Narrative
- Learning the Talents of Social Media Influencers
- What is It About your Product or Service That’s So Compelling?
- Persistence Presence is Important in Social Media
- Goals That Make Sense
- Social Media Workflow
- Hootsuite’s Social Media Strategy Tips
- Social Media Metrics
- 3 Main Social Media Goals
- Social Media Posting Tips
1. Power Up Your Social Media Engagement Process
Your strategy needs a plan and process. From connection building, to meaningful narratives, to value presentation and brand messaging, to personal engagement with customers and brand ambassadors. Review the social media marketing plan document (message me via social media channels Facebook or Linkedin) and I can send you a copy of a working social media marketing plan document).
Here’s a formula for social media engagement strategy to orient you to the rest of the strategy discussed below:
Value Narrative + Connections + Authentic, Impactful Messages + Persistence = Potential Customers
2. Create Value to be Communicated
If you’ve been active on social media, you know many people post awful stuff with no productive point. Often they’re showing off or venting anger and frustration. They aren’t delivering anything of value and the exchange is weak or a pointless dead end. And when they do that, they build an image of a frivolous time waster — a poor brand image to deliver.
Instead, the first thing you need when communicating is understand what your end goal is. It could be a download, demo, price quote, phone call, product spec sheet, views of key web pages such as your contact page or homes for sale listings, a podcast or Facebook event, establish authority or credibility, or to get them to share your posts.
From that end point, we can work back to fill in the social engagement process.
To get something, you have to give something from a compliment to a fun video, insights, to a contest, download, gift, or free service. And it’s more the spirit of sincere generosity than the thing you offer that makes an impact.
We can strategize and develop what your UVP and irresistible offer should be. The offer not only should create value, but also get them emotionally engaged with your company. It needs to be unique and compelling, something they can’t get anywhere else. Because our communications goal is that your company is the only one they will ever want and need. We need to get that communicated well on social media pages.
3. Engaging Means Getting them Emotionally Involved
Whatever way you choose to leverage social media’s incredible flexibility, range and power, you’ll eventually come to the conclusion that you have to engage your connections in relevant topics, ideas, events, and present value to them in a voice they like. And we should be as sympatico with our audience as possible.
Authenticity & Emotional Significance: Deepen your engagement with your Connections
Emotional Engagement
Engaging them emotionally is a complex topic so we should save that for another post.
They want to chat with people they like and respect, or from “significant providers” who really understand their quest for satisfaction (e.g., travel insights, dreams, trips and destinations, products, experiences).
Posting Regularly Isn’t Enough at All
Regular scheduling and timing of posts isn’t the goal. In fact, the social channels are blocking posting via social media publishing apps such as Hootsuite or Buffer. They see it as spam. It’s hard to argue that since you’re not really there to engage responsively. They believe they get better advertising revenue with live interaction.
I’ve found first hand, that topic relevance and saying the right things is really important. And if people don’t really know you, they will be unwilling to like or share or comment on your posting. Successful influencers know to get known and familiar. They likely have a lot of customers and connections and build on that. Because it’s your brand fans that are willing to promote you on social media.
You need to be socially adept with social intelligence to get on the same frequency as connections. Saying unpopular things seems okay, e.g., “Donald Trump will boost the travel market,” yet some people have deep prejudices and attitudes and they may block you or disconnect for politics or lifestyle issues. Being with the zeitgeist is very important. Watching how influencers post and interact creates lots of insights for being a popular person.
Of course, just presenting value in a friendly, credible way is good for creating authenticity and friendship. Avoiding “unpopular” comments, material, and frequency is important too.
It is important to look like you’re in the club, that you belong and car about what they believe and feel and show your support. Celebrating their travel and life wins is a big part of it. There’s lots of opportunity since many travelers have few celebrants to share with and we can befriend them.
Nick Smith, author of the book Successful Social Media Marketing says social media is about building relationships and sustaining them, and not about selling them right away.
The Key to Any Engagement Campaign: Trust & Respect
Your content should be engaging in a way that makes you credible, trustworthy, authoritative, relevant, relatable, authentic, significant and in tune with viewer’s beliefs and dreams. It must make your audience feel good and want to interact with you and your company.
Your shared content expresses your personal and brand values and that’s the real message. It’s not always what you say, but how you say it on social. The topic or content shared might be complete garbage/drivel, and yet it almost goes viral because of how you expressed yourself.
Once you build some success with valuable, helpful and entertaining posts, you become more confident of your relationship with your connections.
It’s More the Tone and Spirit They Want to be a Part of
Sure we need to be credible, successful looking and personable. That’s part of the tone of our communications and this is what people connect with. Social is about spirit too. The theme of their social beliefs that come through, so we to build connections with customers who are sympatico with your business theme, whether in real estate, technology or travel as examples.
It could be just the tone or perspective of what you say that gets your material read and shared. If you can get 100 people to read and comment on it, great, but if you can 5000 people to share it, wow, now you’re doing great. That’s where boosting successful posts comes in handy. Most organizations use Facebook/Instagram ads heavily to leverage their AI systems ability to reach relevant audiences.
Crafting a Workable Narrative
A major goal or objective is to draw your followers and connections into a working narrative. That’s a theme or value proposition that makes engaging worthwhile. It makes the posting and responding make sense.
For instance, your travel narrative could be designed to support USA travel — something they might believe in. So the narrative theme would be USA travel is the best travel experience. Then all your posts pivot on and support this thesis. Your readers might or be willing to agree with this so now everything you say is credible to them. If they feel that USA travel is the trend or right choice for 2025 (your content will prove that), you can draw them into your narrative.
Even if your travel brand is weak, they still feel your narrative theme is relevant to them. They’ll follow you.
Learning the Talents of Social Media Influencers
Influencers and social media pros are very good at this narrative building. Every post message and content piece agrees with the overall, relatable narrative which alludes gentrly to the value customers are seeking. It takes skill and imagination, and this might need to be developed. That’s one of the reasons, companies hire influencers to represent them, or to even have them run their social strategy. Leading social influencers, not cheap pretenders, have a cool panache in how they draw people into the topic narratives and themes. Readers feel compelled to jump into it too.
Think about this, that if you’re not resonant with the themes they believe in, it doesn’t matter what you say. You have to be resonant with a narrative they believe.
That’s why we say, it’s more in how you say and what you’re talking about that creates engagement. You might have something great to offer, but if you can’t draw people into the narrative theme, they just won’t have the urge to join in with you.
What is It About your Product or Service That’s So Compelling?
In the end, your social interaction is about your brand, UVP, or irresistible offer. If you don’t have one, people can see that fast. Then they exclude you because you’re not relevant or significant – you look like you’re wasting their time, so your posts are irrelevant. The biggest social media failure then is a weak value offer. You can’t sell zero value. You don’t hit their pain points as a customer. Why would they bother with you?
Your business social media marketing plan and strategy extends from your brand UVP — its significance, value, and attractiveness to them.
Persistence Presenct is Important in Social Media
Your social media engagement goal is to continuously, persistently build trust and relevance until they happily agree to share your content or to become your customers. Either outcome is nice.
After you’ve established crystal clear what your value offer is and what the narrative must be, then you know what your social engagement’s real goal is. That makes choosing topics/messaging and relevant graphic images effective.
Goals That Make Sense
Be clear about goals not sales numbers. Goals are connections, reach, shares, engagement time, responses, and what messages need to be made. Because your social campaign can work really well, expert level with substantial performance, you sales conversion and brand may result in poor sales and revenue. And learning comes before sales.
Learning might be the number one priority in your social media engagement strategy.
- Get certain about what your message will be. It’s your brand uvp and irresistible offer.
- Choose a brand tone of voice. Create a voice that’s pleasing to your target customer persona.
- Messages should respond to their main pain points, so they catch their attention and lead them to why your product/solution is right for them right now. This is engagement.
- Goals should be measurable. Hire a freelance analytics pro or use great analytics software to track campaigns. Review all of your analytics to find the touchpoint metrics and visualize the customer journey via social media. You moved your audience, but where did you move them too? Develop some content to find out where they are in their buying journey.
- KPIs to monitor: click-throughs, content engagement, click-throughs to website, travel package flyer downloads, content shares, blog posts inspired with backlinks to your website, connection growth, prospect contacts, videos viewed, total engagement time, service pages read, email inquiries, etc.
What works for others may not work for you and for that reason you may not want to copy their tactics and topics. Be prepared to learn and improve, over and over again. Your analytics will tell you if you’re on the right track.
Social Media Workflow
This infographic reveals what you’ll be doing on a daily basis from content creation to curation to engaging in conversations to strategy planning to assessing analytics. Lots to do and it’s important to respect the amount of time you’ll need to invest and how to keep this as efficient and effective as possible. In the end, effectiveness in results is the real KPI. From plan to workflow, we want to find a process you can afford and implement.
Hootsuite’s Social Media Strategy Tips
Hootsuite is a significant presence in the realm of social media publishing and they offer many data-driven insights for their users. You might choose to post using Hootsuite’s platform or other ones such as Agorapulse or Hubspot. Each one has their strengths and limitations. When you step up to the social media software tools, you’re able to work more efficiently and get more more value from your social media marketing plan.
Your objectives should be:
- specific
- measurable
- attainable
- relevant
- time-bound
A free pdf or ebook, contest, giveaway, or an event signup on a specific date are excellent vehicles for measuring results. Set a stretch goal of 100 downloads or recipients/attendees and power up your activity to achieve it. The goal forces you to adjust and improve so you get the effectiveness you must have.
You’re training your plan to achieve effectiveness. Your skill in presenting value to move people is what you’re creating.
Social Media Metrics
Too many campaigns measure vanity metrics. We need to be more hardnosed and track conversion metrics well.
We should answer simple questions such as post engagement and shares, but also content engagement as clues to whether they respect and like your brand and your value offer. This is where tracking click-throughs to your landing page and offer pages is so important. This is the test of metal about whether your offer is the real issue. You got them there, but did they convert to sales?
If not, it’s a branding/compelling offer issue, not your social engagement activity. Let’s say you moved them to click through to one of your travel vacation packages on your travel agency site. Your social post worked! It’s up to your landing page or travel package page to generate a phone call to an agent or a direct booking. Look for bookmarked page, and we ask them to bookmark the page (with tracking code). If they do, then your page is compelling to them.
Try 3 Main Social Media Goals
- post on very relevant topics or popular topics to let your connections react, then you can do social listening to learn more about how prospects feel about a topic and what their pain points are
- to discover an incentive that will help drive engagement such as a contest, giveaway, or free download
- create sharable content, distribute it, and gauge its success in being mentioned or shared
Social Media Posting Tips
- keep your brand and irresistible offer in mind always and only post material that is specifically relevant to the value your customers want to receive
- take interesting, creative photos and videos – visuals are important
- share a few funny viral types pics and videos – short funny videos are popular shares
- focus on women – more women use Facebook and they have different sentiments than guys and they like to share
- use only tasteful humor such as jokes and funny cartoons
- add a social media sharing bar on your website so visitors can show they like your content and brand
- post key posts at specific times each day where your followers are active
- try a different topic or theme for all your social media for each day
- test your post headlines for effectiveness
- tag your posts using specific meaningful hashtags so you can which topics perform best
- use a subtle call to action when necessary to give your audience purpose and direction
- use tweets, blog posts, FB posts, linkedin posts in your blog content to introduce them to your social accounts
- track your competitors, see what their followers are sharing and liking
- offer discounts on purchases and run a relevant contest to boost responses
- find a popular person, a social media influencer you like and retweet their posts and start a conversation with them
- use your SEO keywords in your posts, because it tempers the meaning of all the things that get shared and what will give your website a ranking boost
- revise your blog posts with new important info then repost on social media
- don’t be so conservative and timid that everyone ignores you
- avoid spamming by posting relevant topics and using headings that indicate who the post is for
- feature your happy customer’s pics and posts (user-generated content)
- retweet high quality posts or tweets related to your industry
- tweet/post the latest news – visitors want to know what you’re up to
- post some roundups of news, events and personalities
Check out more tips at Talkwalker.com for further insights.
Social Media Resources, Templates, Guides
Social Media Today – https://www.socialmediatoday.com/
Gord Collins – https://gordcollins.com/social-media/social-media-engagement-strategy/
Gord Collins –
Social Media Examiner – https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/essential-elements-social-media-marketing-strategy/
Convince and Convert – https://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-strategy/social-media-strategy-in-8-steps/
Sprout Social – https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-marketing-strategy/
Wishpond – https://blog.wishpond.com/post/115675437098/social-media-marketing-plan
See more on creating your social media marketing plan.
Contact me Gord at: 416 998 6246 for unbeatable, affordable digital marketing services for travel companies.
