Originally published February 19, 2018.
You carefully create content. You put it out to the world. Your audience reacts.
"Love your event! We had so much fun watching the shows!"
"That was the best funnel cake I'd ever had!"
"I had someone be rude to me. I don't think I'll come back to your event."
Then, nothing.
Are you guilty of this? I bet many of you are.
There are some fundamental differences between the various platforms and there are some major similarities. If we're being technical, Twitter is really the only "social" media platform. It's designed to be conversational. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc are designed to be content push-out systems.
But be careful. You can be conversational on all the major platforms. In fact, you must plan to be.
Your customers are engaging with you there. When they leave messages, comments, reviews like they did above, you need to respond. I understand some brands are getting hundreds or thousands of comments per day. Obviously you're not going to get to all of them. But you need to engage back with them.
Look back at those examples above. If a customer came into you business and gave you a compliment or criticism like that, would you ignore them and walk away?
Of course not. But that's exactly what you're doing when you don't engage with your audience on social media.
You can actively engage your audience on Instagram in a handful of ways.
REPOST
You can use the REPOST APP to find THEIR content and repost it to your Instagram. When you find something really exceptional, repost it and be sure to tag them and thank them for their great photo.
HASHTAG SEARCH
Using the search box, search the primary hashtag for your event. (Ex: #NewMexicoStateFair). Click on each photo, click like, and leave a meaningful comment. I'd even follow them.
This particular method works beautifully as the conversational nature of Instagram is in the comment section. Plus when people are using hashtags, they're doing so in order to share their content with that hashtag's community. So it's just an opportunity for your business which is literally begging to be utilized.
COMMENT REPLIES
This is the easiest and yet easily the most often neglected. If your audience is leaving comments on your content, you need to be leaving a mix of standard and meaningful replies. Again. If a customer came into your office and paid you a compliment, you wouldn't walk away and ignore them. So make sure you take this opportunity to engage with your audience.
There is so much white space out there for brands. The digital land grab is on. Go get it.