Speaker 1: Welcome to Loomly. In this video, you will learn how to best engage with your audience on social media. In our always-on hyper-connected and global world, this is more important than ever, as it offers social proof to your business, expands your marketing reach, and helps boost brand awareness among prospective customers. The four essential building blocks of audience engagement are defining your ideal audience, setting your brand's tone, developing an ongoing conversation with your audience, measuring and improving engagement success. Let's dive in. Define your audience. Do you know what your ideal audience on social media looks like? That question cannot be answered without looking into social media personas to paint an accurate picture of the individuals you're trying to engage with. Social media personas allow you to better identify and reach those who are the best fit for your brand, taking into account factors such as demographics, SOO, interests and behaviors. When you get to learn your audience, any pattern you identify helps you understand how they may engage with your post in the future. If your audience likes using social media to keep up with the news, sharing relevant articles will establish you as a reliable source. If your audience is more interested in using how you're engaging with your media tooling, such as when you create a newsletter, If you're interested in using social media for inspiration, giving priority to captivating content will give you an edge. Once you know what content best resonates with your audience or part of your audience, you can go one step further and leverage social media targeting options to deliver an even more relevant message. Loomly's Organic Audience Targeting features on Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to accomplish just this. Organic Audience Targeting is ideal for brands with a large community or those who need to target a specific subset of their audience. For example, if you're promoting a specific event in Dallas, Texas, it may make sense to target fans and followers living in that area, rather than people located across the entire state or country. While Organic Targeting, which allows you to focus on your existing audience, is free, you can also expand your reach by boosting posts with Loomly Post Sponsoring or creating ads for your own content. Once you have defined your audience, it's time to set your brand's tone. To stand out in the crowd and catch your audience's attention, setting your brand's tone is a key success factor. First, pick an angle. How do you want to approach the subject you cover? You could choose an educational, informative, or entertaining angle, to name a few. Second, choose a voice. Who is speaking in your posts? In other words, who is virtually your audience? Who is virtually or literally signing your posts? Third, pick an actual tone. How will you address your audience? For instance, you can opt for assertiveness, pedagogy, or complicity. Once your brand's tone is set, Loomly can help you distill it through your posts to engage with your audience. As a rule of thumb, when publishing the same post to multiple platforms, you want to optimize it for each one, confirming to their respective technical limitations, community best practices, and audience expectations. For instance, if you publish the same post to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you may want to have a base version of your post for Facebook, a shorter version for Twitter, sprinkle in hashtags for Instagram, and make it a bit more formal on LinkedIn. This is why when you create a post in Loomly, you can define some generic concepts. You can create content that will be applied by default to all channels, and then customize that generic content for each platform. In addition, by using emojis in your captions, updates, and comments, you can catch more attention and increase engagement. Thanks to Loomly's built-in emoji keyboard, this process is a breeze. Finally, you can utilize hashtags to develop consistent branding across your posts, facilitate discovery of your brand by prospective customers, and encourage user-generated content. This is why Loomly offers hashtag suggestions in PostBuilder. Hashtag suggestions is available both in the generic and fine-tuning panels of PostBuilder, from the hashtag icon below the copy field. When you click on the hashtag icon, you can also access and manage your hashtag collections, which saves you time when you frequently use the same hashtags in your posts, as you don't need to manually type them every single time. Once you're up and running with a robust content production and publishing process, you want to focus on monitoring and responding to your audience's reactions. In other words, you need to develop an ongoing conversation with your audience. Social media communication is a two-way street. It is as much, if not more, about listening and responding as it is about speaking in the first place. 84% of consumers expect a response on social media within 24 hours, and 48% of users are prompted to purchase a product when a brand is responsive. Needless to say, it's crucial to remain engaged and communicative with your audience. Your responses do not need to be over-the-top or very long. They can come in the form of a quick acknowledgement, a simple like, or a helpful link. Using Loomly's interactions feature will help you stay up-to-date on all conversations happening, on your social accounts. Loomly interactions can be accessed from each calendar's toolbar and supports. Facebook comments, mentions, and messenger. Twitter comments, mentions, and messenger. Instagram tags and comments. LinkedIn comments. Loomly shows unread comments highlighted in gray, so you always know which interactions need a response. You can organize conversations within Loomly by individually marking them as relevant, read, unread, closed, or open, at the interaction level, or collectively updating them all at the section level. In addition, you can effectively manage interactions with your team thanks to Loomly's signature assignment, state, and filter options. Last but not least, you can respond to fans and customers faster by creating, editing, and using saved replies, available across all channels within each calendar. Once you have a conversation going on with your audience, your final and most important goal is to measure and improve engagement success. As you refine how well you understand your audience, you can fuel each new content production cycle with actionable insights. Tracking performance metrics helps you identify what went well or not so well with every post and incorporate that knowledge into new posts moving forward. As a starting point, you will want to monitor the following key performance indicators. Impressions and reach are solid indicators of brand visibility, showing you respectively how many times and by how many people a post has been seen. Likes, reactions, comments, clicks, and shares are absolute measures of engagement which tell you how and how many times users have interacted with a piece of content. Engagement rate is the king of metrics, defined as the ratio of engagements, reach, or, in specific cases, as engagements' impressions, providing you with a strong foundation to normalize and compare post performances accurately. Keeping track of the above metrics at the end of each publishing cycle, weekly, monthly, or otherwise, will give you pointers about where to post. Are there social networks where your content performs significantly better than others? When to post? Is there a pattern in terms of days of the week and times of the day when posts significantly perform better than others? What to post about? Are there topics, themes, subjects that your audience visibly enjoys and engage with more than others? How to post? Does your audience tend to interact more with certain types of content, such as photos, videos, slideshows, or links? Who to post for? Looking at your audience's demographics, are you able to identify patterns between fans and followers who consistently engage more with your posts? Loomly Advanced Analytic will be your best ally in this quest, empowering you to Get a report of loom.ly URL click counts, sources, and locations. Dive into account-level statistics, such as total number of page likes on Facebook and followers on Instagram. Get into details with post metrics, which includes all the analytics you need to evaluate your posts. Filter and compare by date ranges to evaluate growth and get a better understanding of your success. Last but not least, export all your analytics as PDF or CSV and share them offline with your team. Bonus. Advanced Analytics allows you to access analytics data for all your posts, even those which were not published by a Loomly. Bottom line? Keep tabs of what your audience literally likes and leverage those takeaways when creating new posts. Wrapping up. It's important to remember that engaging your audience is a crucial aspect of social media management. It's not only about speaking your voice through your content, but also listening to your audience's responses and engaging accordingly. By defining your audience, identifying your brand's tone, developing an ongoing conversation, and measuring your success, you can remain in touch with your community and increase engagement, which in turn will lead you close to achieving your business goals. And that's it. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact our team, either through our chat or over email at contact at loomly dot com. Thanks for watching this video.