7 Steps to Take If Your Social Following Is Inactive
By: Jayson Demers
Tags: Marketing, Content Marketing, Social Media Strategy, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Photo by Merakist on Unsplash

In social media marketing, bigger isn’t necessarily better. It’s certainly tempting to chase after fluff metrics like follower counts — and who wouldn’t want a million followers? — but this rarely leads to meaningful results, such as increased site traffic, more conversions, and a more substantive brand reputation.

Instead, you can measure your true effectiveness in terms of the engagement of your social media followers. How often are these people commenting on your posts? How often do they ask you questions, engage you in conversation, or mention your brand in their own posts?

If your social media following is inactive — even if it’s large in size — you’ll need to take action to keep seeing a positive ROI. These seven steps should take you in the right direction:

1. Research the competition. Before you do anything else, research your competitors on social media. Note what they’re doing the same, what they’re doing differently, and how much engagement they see on a regular basis. You might find that a difference in tactics is responsible for an increase or decrease in social engagement. For example, do they use a different platform than you do? Do they rely on more images and videos? Do they have a sharper, more identifiable tone? Do they have longer, more detailed posts? Take note of anything interesting here, and apply it to other areas as you see fit.

2. Identify any perceivable patterns and adjust. Take a look at some of your past engagement metrics, and see if there are any perceivable patterns on which you can base your adjustments. For example, track down the most popular post you can find on your social media accounts. What is it about this post that led to such an outlying course of popularity? Does this post feature especially detailed content? Visual content? Or is it the nature of the topic that stands apart from the rest. Similarly, you can look to your least popular posts to try and track down qualities that are especially unpopular. Then, adjust your editorial calendar to add or remove those qualities, respectively.

3. Respond more consistently. Someday, we might have suitably advanced AI to respond on behalf of your brand automatically (and in a way that passes the Turing test), but until then, you’re responsible for responding to your audience personally. In a personal conversation, if one person stops responding to the other’s comments, the other person will eventually grow bored and leave — the same principle holds true on social media. If you never respond to your followers or acknowledge their comments, they aren’t going to keep engaging with you. Make an effort to respond to every poster you can, and do so in a friendly, accessible way. You’ll be amazed at the difference this one addition could make.

4. Post more often. It could be that you aren’t giving your audience enough “meat” to elicit a reaction. One way around this is to develop more content for them. Though each platform has different standards when it comes to posting frequency, as a general rule, you’ll want to make at least one new post every day. Just don’t use this as an excuse to allow the quality of your content to slip — even though you’ll be posting more frequently, it’s still vital to maintain the level of detail, insight, practicality, and uniqueness that your audience has grown used to (or increase that level to new heights).

5. Invite participation. Maybe your followers aren’t participating because you haven’t given them a reason to — after all, nobody dances without a dance floor. Encourage your followers to participate with different kinds of content that naturally invite responses. For example, you could ask an open question to your users or start a debate or discussion. You could also use a contest or competition that demands some form of response to bribe your users into taking more action.

6. Experiment with new content. It’s free to post content on your brand’s page, so post as much of it as you’d like. If your audience isn’t biting with your usual lineup of posts, consider trying an alternative angle. There are dozens of different formats and mediums to tinker with; for example, you could start an interview series or podcast, you could create new infographics, or you could use whiteboard drawings in an engaging video series. There’s nothing right or wrong here, so try as many different angles as you can to get a big data set and find out what works best.

7. Build and use personal brands. People are far more likely to trust and engage with human beings than they are with corporate brands. That’s why personal brands are such a strong tactic for engagement. Use leaders within your company (or even other employees) to circulate your corporate branded posts and engage with users directly — you’ll see far higher levels of engagement almost immediately.

Every brand is different, and your target audience won’t respond to these tactics in the same way that someone else’s audience might. Accordingly, you’ll need to temper your expectations and treat all of these steps as small experiments; if they work, increase your efforts in that area. If they don’t, move onto a new strategy. Between these steps, you should find at least one tactic that works to improve your brand engagement; if you don’t, it may be time to seek professional counsel.