4 Steps to Building an Engaging Presence on Social Media

#1: Build a Targeted Community

The first step is to build a community of people who care about what your brand has to offer.

It doesn’t matter if you have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ page or all of the above. As long as you have a starting point, you can start building your audience on social media.

Haphazardly trying to build a large community won’t be very helpful. Your best bet will be to build a targeted community. How do you build targeted communities? Generally speaking, there are two ways.

Organic Community-Building

To build a community through organic means, you must provide share-worthy and useful content that’s relevant specifically to the audience you want to reach. The more your content (on any social network) gets shared, the more eyes see it.

Whole Foods shares recipes that its food-based community will enjoy and then share with others.

If you consistently produce enough great content, people naturally gravitate toward your brand. Be sure to leverage hashtags when appropriate so your content is categorized correctly and easy to find.

While it might sound cliché, content aimed at your specific intended audience will help lay the groundwork for organically building a loyal community.

Paid Community-Building 

Paid community-building is traditionally much faster than its organic counterpart.

By leveraging the paid advertising options of social media channels, you cansupercharge the growth of your community by hyper-targeting the people who are most likely to want to connect with you.

While most of the major social networks currently offer paid advertising options, I highly recommend leveraging Facebook ads to help build a targeted community.

Use targeting to put your paid social ads in front of the right people.

Facebook ads can be extremely useful when you’re trying to get in front of a particular group of people. The targeting options within Facebook ads are so granular that you can target users by interest, age, gender, language, education level and location.

If you’re an insurance company looking to build an audience, you should consider targeting people with interests relating to insurance, risk management, financial services and other interests that might be in the same arena.

With the right strategy, it’s entirely possible to acquire hyper-targeted fans for as little as $0.25 per fan. It doesn’t take a huge budget to make a big impact.

No matter what interest is related to your brand, there’s an audience for it on Facebook.

If you decide another social media network is a better fit for your brand, Twitter,LinkedIn and Google+ all offer opportunities for paid social ads.

#2: Leverage Unused Brand Assets

The next step is to perform a complete audit of your brand assets to identify unused or underutilized content. This process may be time-consuming; however, you can discover valuable pieces of content that have been previously overlooked.

Content Inventory

There are a few ways to do an audit of your brand assets. I recommend you start by asking a series of questions:

• What is your mission statement?
• What idea or concept created the brand originally?
• How many blogs do you have?
• How many images?
• What content are you not using for promotion?

These questions are meant to make you think less about what you are doing and more about what you aren’t doing.

Many brands have an extremely compelling story to tell and they don’t even realize it.

You know that feeling when you look under the bed to find that long-lost favorite t-shirt? That’s exactly the goal of searching for unused brand assets. You never know what you’ll find unless you look!

#3: Identify Indirect Content Opportunities

Now that you’ve rediscovered valuable brand assets, it’s time to map out your content strategy.

To draft a social media content plan, brands usually rely on concepts that are directly related to what they sell or do. This is a tad shortsighted, in my opinion. There are many other opportunities available when you take a step back and identify all of the concepts that are indirectly related to your brand.

For instance, if you are a real estate company, your social channels are probably filled with listings, employee information and maybe even home-buying blogs. Why not mix in some home decorating tips or famous homes from movies? This type of content will spark engagement and support your future “normal” content.

TOMS retweeted content from another brand that shares its values and will appeal to its followers.

Everything you post doesn’t have to be about what you offer, nor do you want to publish content that has nothing at all to do with your brand. Find a middle ground where you leverage content that isn’t exactly about your product or service, but is related to it.

Coca-Cola does a great job here leveraging National Pi Day.

Pi has nothing to do with Coke; however, people drink Coke while eating pie… and pie sounds likePi so this works.

#4: Listen to Your Community

The last part of this puzzle is to utilize content that comes from your social community. User-generated content (UGC) is the holy grail in social media. Everyone is looking for it! However, sometimes UGC isn’t as obvious as you’d think it would be. Most of the time, the good stuff is right in front of you and you don’t even see it.

When users reply to content on social sites, they’re basically telling you what they want. Pay special attention to the Comments section. This is where you’ll find ideas that you can turn into solid content campaigns.

We all know that listening is a huge part of social media; however, we have to know how to listen and what to listen for. It’s not just simply monitoring the conversation to make sure your community is happy. Truly listening to what they have to say can produce amazing content that you might not come up with on your own!

Warsteiner USA posted a plain text update asking a question about Thanksgiving recipes and received a reply that would make a great graphic or video.

Look to your comments and replies to find great content ideas from your community.

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7 Benefits of Monitoring Social Engagement on Google Plus

One of the lesser known but major benefits of Google Plus is that you can track the social engagement with any web article, whether it is your own blog post or a competitor's article. 

Big deal, you may say, as you can typically see on how many times an article has been tweeted or how many plus ones it has received (as you can at the top of this article). However, the number of shares is a very crude metric. To get a more in-depth picture of engagement on your own content you may use Google Social Analytics or specific software to track interaction on say Twitter.

With Google Plus it is very easy to monitor engagement with your own content or with other content such as:

• who shares it
• who reshares their share
• who gives it a plus one
• who comments 
• who the key influencers are 

How to track social engagement on Google Plus

Tracking social engagement on Google Plus is very straightforward. Let me demonstrate with an example.

In Google Plus you can do this easily by simply typing the url of the article into the G+ search box. This will show you every Google Plus post with this link. This will return you a page along the lines below.

Note: the search will not find shortened links. So if someone shares with a shortened link, as they often do on Twitter, you will need to search again for the shortened link. One benefit of Google Plus though is there is no character restriction so there is less need to use shortened urls. You can also revert to a standard keyword search if you want to find more posts that don't reference the url.

In this case my search has returned over 50 Google Plus public posts. I can now browse these posts to see who is sharing and quickly scan to see whose posts are generating a lot of plus ones and comments.

When I find a post I am interested in, for example because it has a lot of plus ones, I can click on the people images in the bottom right of the post. This will show me all the activity on the post, as shown here on the right. I can see who has commented, who has reshared and who has just given the post a plus one.

If I find a post with a lot of comments I can also click show comments and see what people are saying and discussing. I can then engage in the discussion by commenting myself. Though if the post was made in a community of which I am not a member I will need to join that community.

7 benefits of tracking social engagement

Tracking social engagement on Google Plus will take a little longer than just looking at the number of shares a blog post receives. However, the benefits are:

1. You can get a very good picture of who is sharing and resharing content on Google Plus.

2. You can see who the key influencers are by the level of engagement with their post.

If you search for the url of one of my previous articles on Google Plus and SEO you will find the following post by Charise Stranberg. Charise's post received 473 plus ones, was shared 204 times and generated 79 comments. Charise is clearly a key influencer in this area.

3. You can circle and follow people who are key influencers and people who actively engage.

4. You can find the Google communities where the content is actively shared and discussed.

5. You can begin to see and understand key relationships and networks.

6. You can see the discussions taking place around the content you are interested in.

7. You can engage with others in discussing the post or article.

These benefits are potentially very valuable and can help you improve your own social engagement strategy.

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