By Richard Kunzmann

Let’s talk about engagement. It’s such a clichéd term but in fact it lies at the heart of every effective social media strategy. If you can’t get that right, nothing else will work.

A common misconception is that engagement is something you ‘do’ to other people. Not so. The idea is to create an online environment where people can step inside, take a look around and be given every possible opportunity to connect with you and your business, to discover its reasons for being, its principles and aspirations.

Think of it as a behaviour, not a process or a project. There isn’t a five step plan to achieving mass engagement. It’s more cerebral and organic than that. It’s about developing, or emulating, your company culture online and throwing the doors open wide for feedback, likes and dislikes, retweets, recommendations or whatever the consumer wants to say or do with the information.

The beauty of true engagement is that it encourages the consumer to make an effort, however small or discreet, to perform an action that in the end contributes to your business: they may become brand ambassadors and drive traffic by sharing information about you; they may share extra information about themselves that you didn’t have before thereby contributing to your better understanding of consumers; or they might make the first of many purchases.

Whether you’re launching a co-design or insights community, a YouTube channel to share expertise and build your brand, or if you simply want to hear what consumers are saying about your product and why they’re saying it, it is absolutely essential that this is done in an engaging way.

It’s an easy concept to understand but not to implement. This is because a lot of organisations implement what they think their users need, rather than what users actually need. It is very difficult to make something engaging unless you know exactly what your target audience wants in terms of content, usability, participation and community, as well as incentive.

Content

If the site or campaign does not include the information that consumers need and want, why would they engage with it or return to it? Facebook is littered with company pages that have a few dozen members, all of them likely employees who were drafted in to ‘like’ it. Spend money upfront to determine what the message should be - chances are you’ll see a return on investment. Nothing is riskier and potentially more costly than launching a project blind.

Usability

The leading technology activist Stewart Brand said: “Information wants to be free”. The easier you make it for people to share information, interact with it, add to it and make it their own, the more likely it is that they will use it. So if you’re going to launch a social media campaign or run an online community, it has to be simple and easy for people to use and share.

Participation and community

Websites, information and campaigns that are easy and fun, and can feed into our behaviour as social (not necessarily rational) animals, will increase a project’s chance of success. Too often organisations focus on dated and boring ways of communicating with people – there’s a good chance you know of someone who simply copies and pastes a press release that’s emailed to journalists onto a company blog because it’s easy to do and it’s approved text. This is not social media engagement. Social media content has to be a community tool, it needs to excite people and drive them into conversation with each other. Successful viral campaigns reward people with social recognition amongst their peers for an activity.

Incentive

Consumers know their own commercial value to a company. They value their brands but not enough that they’ll do something entirely for free. Understand what incentives they need to participate in online market research or campaigns. Groupon is a great case study of a company that innovatively combined social behaviour with financial rewards.

So if you want to engage your clients it’s worth doing it right. But with careful planning, background research and a bit of help from the specialists you’ll soon be on your way.

About the author

Richard Kunzmann is a Lead Research Manager at Freshminds with over six years experience in social and market research. Aside from his work on social media monitoring projects at FreshMinds, he spent two years working for the South African office of the German communication strategy consultancy Media Tenor, advising various blue-chip clients ranging from De Beers to Virgin Mobile on strategic and tactical decisions to support reputation management.

About FreshMinds Research

FreshMinds Research is an award-winning, full-service research consultancy that helps clients design and execute insight programmes that solve business problems, accelerate decision-making and create the impetus for growth.

www.freshminds.co.uk/research