I do a lot of social media, and I will assure you that engagement is the key to social media. But, how you achieve engagement is multi-faceted. If you cater to a niche market and know what they want to read about, that really helps. However, getting to know your audience personally is even more critical. Since I own a few websites and our customers interact with us, in a sense we are very engaged. The catch is that our personal engagement does not normally initiate on social media. Customers often initially find us on social media, but the personal engagement starts when they email us with questions about advertising or industry specific questions.
Stage 1
They initiate the engagement in our case, but the beginning of the chain of events happens when they first see our blog or Facebook.
Stage 2
Then it develops to the next stage when they become regular readers.
Stage 3
It is not until stage three after they have been reading our materials for a while that they actually contact us. This article is more about enhancing good results for stage two which is getting a regular reader to your blog.
Maintaining the buzz
Maintaining the buzz is critical for any social media platform or blog. If you publish interesting contents in January, and then bore everyone in February, you might lose your regular browsers. Other blogs publish a ton in one month and then have a period of silence for a few months. You lose your engagement right away with irregularity. You need to publish regularly on social media. I suggest blogging every 12 to 36 hours as a matter of practice. That way your followers will never be bored. Using Twitter and Facebook should be daily or nearly daily as well if possible. It is possible to waste too much time on social media. My suggestion is to use analytics to find out what is popular and post the popular content regularly and skip the rest altogether! That way the time you invest will work for you.
Reshare, but only reshare the right stuff!
If you publish other people’s content, that can really help your social media. I regularly post up to two dozen interesting posts that are relevant to the interests of my followers on Twitter each day. I delete the ones that didn’t get reshared from my account. I keep a list of posts that regularly get shared at least twice when I post them again and again. Twitter rewards accounts that publish popular content — so, I research how to do it effectively.
Mastering online interaction
Twitter rewards people for successful online interaction. Unfortunately this is hard, and a separate art to master. If you want to develop buzz on your Twitter account, interact with others who also enjoy interacting. That way you can develop conversations. Twitter will reward you by introducing more followers to you if you have multiple-post conversations, and those you converse with are more likely to regularly share your content!