If you’re feeling frustrated with your personal social feed at the moment, you’re not alone. It appears that many businesses out there have gotten a bit lost when it comes to using social channels to communicate with consumers. Social disengagement is not a new or uncommon term but I believe that it’s not taken seriously enough for some businesses to worry about. I just wanted to share my thoughts on how you might be able to limit the risk of this to your business.
So what is social disengagement? Like all marketing channels, when people stop getting what they want out of a particular service / channel, they start to move away from it. Some people will take a break just for a short time while others will simply delete their accounts and move on. There are many reasons for this however, with social channels, people mainly get disengaged if they are no longer receiving satisfaction from the types of posts or information that they are receiving. People join social channels to stay engaged with friends, family, organisations and businesses that they want to have involved in their lives. Since these channels have become open for targeted advertising, which you can’t switch off, many people are finding that their newsfeeds are becoming overwhelmed with annoying advertising from businesses and groups.
Targeted advertising is extremely appealing for businesses as it means that you are reaching people that have a higher propensity to engage with you and / or your products. Sounds like the perfect solution – the only problem is that you are amongst probably a million businesses globally who are doing the same, and with the removal of geographic borders, ads are taking over feeds at a rate of knots!
As a consumer, the ability to opt out is futile. As soon as you remove ads from one advertiser, another one takes over and there are many businesses out there that have multiple arms pushing the same products so you literally see the same promotion under a different banner. This is a big cause of social disengagement – if you spend most of your time just blocking ads you’re not able to see the posts from people / businesses that you want to engage with.
In knowing this, how then can you, as a business, ensure that you are not becoming one of those blocked and deleted ads and can continue to engage with customers and potential customers within your preferred channels?
Here’s some tips to help limit your businesses potential impact.
Remember what your audience likes
Continuing to remind yourself about what your customer is wanting from you is so important. If they want to learn from you, teach them, if they want to know more about you, inform them. Don’t just do posts every day about the weather – we’ve all experienced the “So how’s the weather today?” conversation filler (note – it never goes well).
Don’t post every day
It’s important to stay front of mind with your customers but if you start posting too much, your content might become irrelevant over time and you find that people start to drop away. Based on your type of business, work out the number of posts that you need per day / per week to keep present and relevant and stick to it. Don’t keep talking for the sake of talking.
Don’t just sell!
The excitement in being able to drive sales is too high for some businesses and they fail to realise that constantly just selling products isn’t going to maintain relevance, or friends (remember back to when telemarketers used to always call at dinnertime just because they knew someone would like be home – it’s a similar fondness here). Consider your audience and what they want from you and do a mix of communications including education, information, sales and updates. Change with the seasons and other factors that influence your business and build content that customers want to hear about, learn about and engage with. This way, when you do offer a sales or promotion they are more likely to pay attention at the time as they don’t feel used.
Use relevant imagery and videos
Make sure that you use relevant and appealing images and videos to help support the message that you are trying to get across. Ensure that you aren’t going to offend and that the creative is relevant to the message that you are trying to get through, not just something that you thought was nice.
Follow businesses and people that appeal to you
In marketing we see copying as a form of flattery. If there is a business or person that appeals to you and you feel that lead by example, follow them. There’s nothing wrong with learning from the best. A day without learning, is a day not lived!
These are just some basic tips that you can follow to help you minimise social disengagement for your business and maximise your social marketing effectiveness. There are so many more that you can consider but these are a great place to start and ones that can help to have a positive (or negative if not) impact for your social marketing performance.
Good Luck and take care.
The Marketing Elf
©April 2022
The Marketing Elf 