On social media, you have to grab audience attention in order to acquire a measurable return on investment. Your audience needs to see your activity among a large crowd of social content. On Twitter, you only have a few minutes for your tweet to be seen unless optimized or paid for in advertising. Facebook and Instagram run a little slower, but you can still see your content getting lost in the mass swarm of activity.

To win the war for social media audience attention, you need to have strategies that’ll help you get to that point of success.

There are at least three social media strategies that can help you, and I have gone into detail about the top three here. To apply these tactics, I recommend adding them to your overall social media strategy for proper implementation and measurement.

Social Media Audience Attention Quote

1) Engage

Social media engagement has been promoted and recommended over and over. It’s an approach to social media marketing that you can no longer ignore. Many times, businesses and organizations have trouble with social media engagement for one reason or another, but that shouldn’t stop you from putting in the effort and resources.

These are just a few of the ways you can use social media engagement to your advantage:

  • Start conversations just as much if not more than responding.
  • Invest in offering 24/7/365 customer service capabilities.
  • Pay attention to how long it takes for you to respond to interactions, and continuously work to improve it.
  • Customize your interactions per user and topic instead of keeping it generic.
  • Ask a question when sending thanks for engagement to keep the conversation going.
  • Express gratitude as often as you can.
  • Engage with industry influencers to increase reach / exposure.

You can learn more about audience engagement in my more detailed article on the subject:

Audience Engagement: The Why, When, Where and How

2) Be on the right platforms

Some people say you should be everywhere on social because your audience is everywhere. That’s unrealistic. To better manage and succeed at social media marketing, you need to be smart about where you spend your time and resources. You need to be on the right platforms to be able to get your target audience’s attention. If you spread yourself too thin, you won’t be able to dedicate enough effort to each platform and its audience.

To find the right social media platforms for your needs, you need to consider a few things:

  • Customize your existing buyer personas for social media purposes, marking which platforms they’re likely to be active on.
  • Research each platform for its opportunities and likely audience.
  • Check what your competitors are doing on social, and track where they’re having the most success.
  • Platform research is not a one-and-done task. You need to keep measuring where your audience is and where they may be migrating to that’s new and different for you.

 

3) Allow time for experimentation

Social media marketing is all about adaptation and experimentation. It’s constantly changing, so you need to know what to do to keep up. Those who stick with the status quo fall behind and are forgotten, or they’re the brand that makes a major slip up on social because they didn’t know any better. If you want to stay top-of-mind with your target audience, you need to be up-to-date.

You have many options for how to adapt with the rapid changes in social media. Most are free but time consuming. Others have a small expense but make your efforts easier. These are just some of the techniques you can use for experimenting and learning over time.

If you want to keep things free, try these techniques for keeping audience attention on social:

  • Pay attention to which hashtags your audience is using at this very moment. You can do this research with paid tools, or take the manual approach. This means using each platform’s search feature to determine the most popular hashtags for your niche.
  • Keep yourself informed of new social media platform features, such as Facebook’s chat bots and Twitter’s Moments. Platforms are constantly changing to try to stay or get ahead of their competition. If you want to do social better than your competition, you’ll want to take advantage of these updates before they do. That’ll get you the attention because very few others will be doing what you’re doing with these new features.
  • With time comes more social media platforms, and although many don’t get very far, you’ll greatly benefit from them if you use them wisely. If you’re ahead of your competition on a platform that you know your audience is on, you’ll win the war for their attention. You’ll know if they’re on the platform if you’ve done the proper research.
  • There’s simply too much activity on social for you to get your activity seen by everyone you’re targeting. Thankfully, you have two options: you can advertise, or you can experiment with your timing. At a baseline level, use the research that others have already done on this. There have been several studies on social media timing that can give you a decent place to start. After that, move your schedule around to see what works best for your specific audience.

In the end, it’s all about giving yourself the wiggle room to see what works and what doesn’t for your unique goals. Social media is never static, so you shouldn’t stay firm in how you use it. Adapt, and you’ll stay ahead. Stay ahead, and you’ll get the attention from your target audience.

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Let’s quickly recap what you can do to win this war for audience attention on social media.

  1. Social media engagement is a requirement to get your activity in front of people, and you’ll never be seen if you only broadcast.
  2. There are constantly new social media platforms to research and potentially join, and you’ll get the attention if you’re an early adopter on them.
  3. To take full advantage of social media’s capabilities for bringing you a high ROI, always leave room for researching and experimenting with their offerings.

Do you know of any other social media strategies that can get brand activity in front of their audience? How do you get and keep audience attention for your brand? Share your experience with everyone by leaving a comment below.

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