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Consumer Brand Engagement on Social Media: What’s Missing?

Are you finding that your social media marketing strategy misses the mark when it comes to brand engagement? Kinnect2 the brand-consumer engagement social networking site Well, it seems you are not the only one.

3 Ways Social Media Marketing Misses on Consumer Brand Engagement

Discover the three different ways in which common and popular social media marketing practices are missing the point when it comes to consumer engagement.

1. Brands Talk, But Don’t Effectively Listen

There’s a saying: we have two ears and one mouth for a reason. It’s claimed that listening is an even more essential skill than persuading and talking, when it comes to sales and marketing. But can the same be said for social media marketing?

It seems that when it comes to brand engagement, businesses are missing an opportunity to listen - and it really matters. Writing for Hootsuite, Sebastien Wiertz claims that social media monitoring is one of the biggest missed opportunities for businesses today.

This makes a lot of sense, when you really think about it. Your prospective customers aren’t logging on to Facebook or Twitter to find out about your products or brands. In fact, they don’t really care what you have to say, unless you have a fanatic following. Instead, social media users want to find out what’s going on in their world, or they want to discover trending topics in order to find out what everyone is talking about.

If brands truly want to engage with their audience, they have to join, rather than interrupt, the conversation already happening on social media. To do that, you have to know what people are already talking about, which first requires listening.

What is your talking-to-listening ratio? Are you joining or interrupting the conversation?

2. Technology Isn’t Keeping Up for Scalability

One of the major challenges for businesses is how to efficiently scale their content and social media marketing efforts. The challenge is to create consistent content frequently, whilst also maintaining quality. As a business’ social media following grows, their content marketing needs to increase. There are many tools available on the market for social media automation. However, Kapost report that 44% of B2B marketers state that current technologies used for social media marketing are insufficient in order to scale their content marketing needs over the next 1-3 years. The problem often lies in the social media profiles themselves. Instagram, for example, has traditionally rejected the idea of enabling automation to their social media network. What’s more, in order to achieve their marketing goals on social media and achieve brand engagement, most platforms require that businesses post and engage frequently.

What’s your scalability strategy?

3. It’s Not All About Facebook and Twitter

Perhaps because of the shortfalls for businesses marketing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, marketers are starting to look for alternative options. As Paul Chaney writes for Clickz, smaller, niche social media networks are becoming more and more popular. Other social media networks are also appearing which offer unique solutions to these problems for businesses. Niche marketing is, in many ways, a more effective solution for businesses marketing to their specific target audience. The current challenge for these new networks is to attract the same level of recurrent users as Facebook and Twitter: Facebook currently has 1.49 billion monthly active users, according to Statista, whilst Twitter attracts 304 million monthly active users.

Have you explored new social media networks that serve your interest?

Are you relying too much on Facebook or Twitter, and missing potential brand engagement opportunities elsewhere?

Brand Engagement Is Possible When You Think Outside the Box

Many businesses allow Twitter and Facebook to guide their social media marketing, without considering what may be missing. Businesses can engage meaningfully with their online users when they think creatively.

Brand engagement has seen a new social networking site launch this year which promises to bring about consumer-brand engagement that will change the way brands interact with consumers on social media (Kinnect2). The new platform if pulls off what it claims may be the next game changer in social media. The platform has launched a web version on the 7th of September 2015 and expects to launch its apps in January 2016.