Engage and Reward your audience

In the first post in our Best Practices series for Optimizing your Social Media Publishing, number 5 states:

Engage & reward you audience: Interactions, contests, quizzes and conversation are all great ways to engage and reward your audience in Social Media. Use a content management and publishing applications like Engage121 to help you effectively and efficiently reach your community and prospects.

We all talk about engagement but how is it defined? How is it measured?

We define engagement as starting or promoting interaction around content or the brand. The interactions are measured in the number of clicks, replies, shares, likes and comments.

Simple Rules of Engagement

1. Do ask questions that revolve around relevant subject matter.
You know that this will help you build the right fan base who is interested in your area of business.

2. Don’t continuously blast a marketing message.
It’s not polite to speak at people at a party and only talk about yourself, why do it on social networks.

3. Do try to keep the conversation going.
If someone comments with a question or simply states an opinion, respond positively. Not only is it helpful to keep the conversation going, it’s a reward for the fan to hear from you. These days, it’s downright expected.

How do I Reward my audience? What is a reward in social media?

Any positive reinforcement for participation, something that makes the follower or fan feel good for interacting with the brand and promotes future interaction from them.

Examples of Effective Rewards
1. As you respond to fans, consistently engaging them, you will build loyal fans. When they are consistently engaging, one way to reward them is to give them an exclusive offer – something only they can receive. Ask them to DM you for a special discount code, gift card, or exclusive opportunity of some sort.

2. Do try to promote them as much as they promote your brand by engaging with you. Give a #FF shout out or mention them on Facebook, letting others know you value this individual will make them feel good (you should give them a heads up).

3. Don’t always give things away to your fans on Facebook by having them post, like, comment or share something on your wall, which is against Facebook’s terms of service. You’re always giving away free things and your number of likes is increasing, so you only post new content once a month. Your fans are only coming back to your page to get free stuff, not to consume and repurpose your content, but you don’t care because you have 5,000 likes for you page.

4. Do use all the tools available to you to. Create contests on Facebook to reward your community administered through a custom app, and get some promotion for yourself since apps now have like, and tweet buttons.

You know that rewarding your fans isn’t enough; you must give them something of value (exclusive content, a chance to display their own talents to your audience, information they can use) which will insure that you have a valuable community built around people who are interested in your industry, so you blog once a week and share it on your networks.

There are many unique ways a company or brand can engage with and reward their audience.

How have you done this effectively?