Get raving fans for your online business with engagement
One of the things that I want you to understand as you decide to grow your business, or as you decide to start your business, is that while using social media is a great tool for you to build your brand and your visibility, there is so much more to it than just starting an online business, building your Facebook, Instagram or your LinkedIn.
A big part of creating visibility, ensuring that you connect with your ideal clients, and getting raving fans for your business is your online engagement. I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs just start their pages, and then walk away. Or start social pages and only focus on ensuring they have a content plan to post and do absolutely nothing else. Now, if you’re spending a lot of money running ads, it may be a little different for you. But if you’re at the stage where you don’t have a lot of money to spend on ads, and you are doing a lot of your brand building, organically, part of that building is building relationships and engaging with people. That is one of the key things that a lot of entrepreneurs fail to realize.
WHAT TO DO ONCE YOU HAVE FOUND YOUR IDEAL CLIENT
Building engagement is a big part of your marketing strategy. So yes, your marketing strategy is about putting out great valuable content that is going to be engaging to your audience and get them excited, motivated, inspired, and educated. That is the first step in building the relationship. The second step in building the relationship is ensuring that you are engaging with them.
What does that engagement look like?
It could be as simple as responding to them when they post under your content, making sure you respond to as many people as possible. If you have a piece of content that went viral, and you have thousands of people responding, I know it may be hard for you to respond to everybody. But you want to also put aside time to respond to people who leave some type of comments or interactions with the content that you have shared. You also want to ensure that the people that you’re following who I’m assuming are your ideal clients, are
- people you want to network with,
- people you want to collaborate with,
- people that you are learning from.
Your 100 greatest people, that you are engaging with.
I want you to understand that just building a social media presence by starting a LinkedIn or Facebook page is not enough. As you start to create your strategy, you also want to start to think about how you are going to put aside time to engage with your audience as well.
20 persons a day
One of the things that I teach my clients to do is to put aside time to engage with at least 20 people per day. And I know that may sound daunting for many of you but if you look at your social media pages, I am sure that you’re following more than 20 people. And it doesn’t have to occur on one platform alone, you can mix it up if you want.
What I tend to do is engage with
- five people in the morning,
- five people at lunchtime,
- five people in the afternoon, maybe about three, or four o’clock, and then
- five people, maybe about seven, or eight o’clock
That allows me to engage with at least 20 people per day. And you can mix it up. As I said, you can do
By doing that, I start conversations. I’m not just building my Facebook or LinkedIn page, hoping that people find me. Because the truth is, people are so bombarded by all the information that can be found on social media. How fast that information flows on social media, sometimes even if you post something that is engaging. All the people that you want to see it may not get to see it unless they are specifically looking for your brand or your business.
In addition to posting regularly, (not every single hour, guys, you don’t have to spend your whole life on social media to build a successful business). Posting content that is valuable to educate, motivate your audience. You want to spend time engaging, liking other people’s comments, sharing what other people may be posting. If you know that information is valuable to your audience, and you know that your audience is going to get something out of this or if it’s in alignment with your message as well. That is part of the engagement.
When you engage with people it encourages them to also engage with you. When they engage with you, their followers, who may be your ideal clients will also see that engagement and will be encouraged to come and look at your pages as well. Because think about it when somebody posts something great. And they have 10-15-20 people commenting underneath their posts and you scroll down. See all the names of the different people who are commenting on their posts, of course, you’re going to get curious. Who is this person? Is this another marketer? Or is this other person making creams? Who are these clients? Who are these people? You may want to visit their pages as well. It’s just human curiosity. We’re always curious about what other people are doing, or saying and how other people are building their brands. So it works the same way.
If you are commenting on other people’s posts, sharing your perspective, congratulating them, or asking questions, other people who visit those posts are going to see your brand. And they will be encouraged to visit your pages. So I’m saying, as you focus on building your content plan for the next 90 days, also focus on engaging with your audience
