With all the festivities around at this time of the year here in India, my participation on Social Media had been kind of lean. Though that wouldn’t mean that I wasn’t reading :). One of the most important point that I have learnt over the year is that to be a good blogger, it is essential that you keep on reading. Reading is a great way to get perspective of other writers and that it turn helps you while writing. And social media has enabled one more channel to it – ‘engagement‘. You get a chance to either engage directly with the author or even share your thoughts with other like-minded individuals.
In fact, engagement is the basis of the first great post I came across this week…
5 Great post talking about Social Media Engagement
- The first that I got to talk about is of a person who I admire a lot. Mack Collier, who runs the popular #BlogChat did an interesting post on – A ‘Like’ Is Not ‘Engagement’ On Facebook. We have often seen brands resort to some mediocre way of engaging on social media platforms. In all agreement with Mack, I would say that unless some comments are not exchanged, you’ve no engagement at all. In that case, the brands would have missed the entire concept of ‘social’ media. And to stir the pot further, we see the same happening on other platforms too, haven’t you read the report on Twitter which says that most of the retweet are not read and just clicked.
- This post at 12Most underlines the same principles of engagement for bloggers. It lists down 12 potent powers for blogger and point #4 talks about how you can be creative in your engagement on social media by tying it to popular culture. Indeed a great way to engage!!
- Sometimes it would also make sense that you learn from the brands who are quite good at engaging. This post highlights few of the brands who have got it right with engagement on social media and analyses what went right for those brands. See if you can use few of them for your brand/clients.
- While I was trying for find strategies for better engagement on social media platforms, one of my colleague raised an interesting point about the importance of Facebook vs Twitter. This post did make sense that Facebook still is one of the most popular platform to drive engagement. Though as the report mentions, 74% of brands messages are sent out on Twitter vs 24% on Facebook, the conversion in terms of engagement is very higher – 95% on Facebook. while this is interesting, I would like to go back to #1 an see if these are real engagement or just likes/reshares.
- And this post couldn’t end without the mention of this article by Mars Dorian where he tells us what brands SHOULD NOT do in order to engage. The post very succinctly tell you to not have a tight control over the branding efforts. He nicely puts that having less control will induce people to discuss about the brands & induce engagement. Must read!!
That’s been with my week!!
Your Turn
What are your views about engagement by brands? Do you agree with Mack Collier’s views or with Mars Dorian’s views? Using the comments below, do share with your views with me.
Photo Credit: DonnaGrayson via photopin cc
