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Tag: thank you

Three Weeks to Ideal Engagement on Any Social Media Platform – Week 3

After a week of training the algorithm to serve the right content, you spent another week reacting with context and commenting with gratitude to the content you appreciate that falls within “The Five.”

If this all sounds foreign or crazy to you, go back to Week 1 of this series and start there.

Adding Valuable Comments

You’ve likely “liked,” reacted with context, and commented with gratitude on several thousand posts by now. These are the baby steps to get you ready for the best way to grow awareness around you, your business, and what you do through engaging with others.

There is a subset of users who choose to never read the comments on social media, due to the frustration that many posts generate. Generally, these are casual users of social media who aren’t trying to build a community, so they don’t realize the value of comments.

We are now social media power users, and the next step is to actively engage in the comments of posts we find value in.

This is the time to actively participate in the conversation that is social media. As you are no longer simply a consumer and broadcaster of social media, you engage with the creators that you consume. Their content starts a conversation, and you are responsible to offer relevant, contextual, and valuable comments in response. Your conversations will create a community for engagement and growth, so long as you offer value and they respond in kind, just like real-life conversations.

For Twitter, use replies in the same manner, as they serve as the platform’s de facto comment system.

Share Others’ Content You Find Valuable

Aside from Instagram and YouTube, social platforms natively build re-sharing content into their interface. During Week 2, you commented with gratitude on the content you found value in for the platforms without built-in reactions as you worked on the context of each post.

Week 3 changes that slightly, altering the focus from commenting with gratitude to re-sharing that valuable content with your community, using what you would have commented as your commentary for the re-share.

Here’s how this would work for the various platforms:

  • Twitter – “Retweet” it with what you would have commented, to share with your community what you found value in.
  • Facebook – Share their post directly on your Facebook Page with what you found valuable. If you are already scheduling posts, you’ll need to share the valuable post’s link on your page in Publishing Tools.
  • LinkedIn – Use the built-in functionality to share a valuable post with your community, adding what you received from it.
  • TikTok – React to the video that offered you value with your own video that outlines your take-aways.

Integrating these sharing activities will help you to share more content from “The Five” without having to create as much of it yourself.

Something you’ve probably noticed throughout this 3-week practice is that we didn’t mention creating content.

Here’s why: We wanted to completely overhaul how you interact on social media.

  • In Week 1, we focused on overhauling your feed to serve you valuable content that you can engage with. This set up the platform to work for you, instead of continuing to serve the same stuff that wasn’t helpful.
  • In Week 2, we continued training that algorithm and added the contextual reactions and gratitude. By focusing on context, you not only prepare for better interactions, but you also consider how it fits into your content strategy and which platform would be best to showcase it.
  • Finally, in Week 3, we started sharing others’ valuable content that fit into “The Five,” so that you include it in your content creation and engagement going forward.

All of them combine to help you create and share more relevant content with your community, building engagement into your online activity, and re-align your future content creation. With this new mindset and activity, you now have a new path for content creation, as well as an engagement plan for any platform you use.

Three Weeks to Ideal Engagement on Any Social Media Platform – Week Two

After a full week of overhauling the way this social media platform serves content, we have trained the algorithm to provide you the most valuable content from our recently scrubbed community. In Week 2, we need to amplify our preferences beyond likes, while beginning a habit of quality interaction with that growing community.

Continue Training the Algorithm

In Week 1, we set up our “New Feed, New You” content service, and we liked thousands of posts from that content that brought us value. Most, if not all, of the “liked” content added value for us in “The Five.”

As we progress into Week 2 and beyond, continue to seek out that content as outlined in Week 1. By maintaining this practice, you ensure that the platform serves you and your needs. Your continued use of relevant hashtags to serve useful content and looking for connections among your favorite relevant creators should also never cease. It is the backbone of your growth and helping find new content to explore and appreciate, as well as a bevy of new connections to engage. These activities should always be a part of your experience on the various social media platforms going forward.

Slightly Change Your Behavior

Instead of simply “liking” posts from the creators you receive value from, choose to react with context, where applicable, or comment with gratitude. We started with liking posts to help train the algorithm to serve you the content you want to see and rid yourself of the content that isn’t adding value. We took off the chains that were holding you back from reaching your potential as an active and engaged participant in the right conversations for your community conversation.

You aren’t done letting your community know the content that adds value to you. We’re just altering how you share with them your appreciation by adding context.

React with Context

If you’ve read much of our work, you already know that content is a very important part of your digital strategy. What may be more important is to understand and create context around that content.

As you continue the efforts of Week 1, add the practice of reacting with context on the platforms that offer the option. So, when using Facebook and LinkedIn, choose the appropriate reaction to the post you appreciate seeing in your feed. This active contextual examination helps you identify why you appreciated their content. For example, when someone shares a career update on LinkedIn, you should opt to “Celebrate” rather than just give it a thumbs up. Being able to point to why you appreciate their content will help you add value in later engagement. By moving beyond the very passive “like” only training we undertook in Week 1, we are setting the stage for active engagement with this simple change.

Comment With Gratitude

You’re probably asking how you should go beyond “liking” posts to train the algorithm for the platforms that don’t support multiple reactions on the platform.

For the social media outlets that simply have a “like” or “favorite” option (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube), continue to like or favorite the post. Then, take a moment to offer a brief comment or reply that offers the creator context around WHY you appreciated it. Simply saying something like “Thank you for explaining how that tool works” would be an appropriate comment on Instagram for a video. These comments should be simple and focused solely on the context of your appreciation. This will let the creators know what about their content you appreciated while also getting you in the habit of sharing contextual comments and replies.

Ready for Week 3?

Are You Making Time To Listen and Respond?

“Yep”

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“Uh huh”

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“Wow. Really?”

You’ve said those things when you’re trapped in a conversation with someone who only talks about themselves and their interests, right? You never get a chance to offer a real response, adding the things above when they pause to breathe. You really are trapped in that conversation, but you aren’t sure if they would even notice if you left, no matter how rudely you made your exit.

Listening to What They Need

Remember when we talked about the guy who sold refrigerators at the party like a psycho? We discussed the need to listen in order not to be “that guy.” Real listening. Actual, active listening. Not what we do most of the time, which is to be so busy thinking about what we will say next that we don’t actually hear what was said to us. 

On social, that means consuming a lot of content by those in our community. It results in reading, listening, and watching what those who follow you, and your competitors, share. You have to know them, their likes, and their dislikes, to fully engage with them and include them in the community you build. 

This consumption isn’t just of the posts they create though. You also need to read the comments and replies they make as well. There is even more truth about who they are and how they feel in the reactions they have to what others create. 

Your effort can’t stop here though. You are posting to your accounts, reading/watching/listening to the people who matter to you and your brand, and then there’s the most important piece of advice for engaging your community. 

Respond With Care and Thought

You have to respond to them thoughtfully. You have to comment, reply, or react to their content in a relevant way that shows that you’re listening and that you care. The easiest way to do this is to be grateful, both inside and out, about every interaction you have online. When you respond to every comment, even if it’s just with a simple “thank you,” you build your relationship with that person. When you go beyond that thanks with a heartfelt, honest reply, you are building a lifelong relationship, instead of a transactional one with that person. 

Early in your digital marketing journey, it’s easy to broadcast what you want to say and say that you’re too busy for anything else. This is actually the best time to build the habit of listening actively and responding thoughtfully. When you make it part of your routine early on, it will remain a part of your routine throughout the rest of your digital life. It will follow you from platform to platform, no matter which one gets the attention you crave and allows you to interact best with the community you serve. Take advantage of the early days by making this a part of your activities online.