How to have engaging conversations on Social Media?

Social media is an exciting intersection of public and private. Like everything else in today’s world, social media is closely modelled on the human psyche. Since the brilliant exposition of Kahneman on behavioural economics, every venture and enterprise has moved away from accommodating just the intellectual to embracing the emotional. Social media is perhaps the prime example of this evolutionary – technology amalgam. Most marketers today understand and use the concepts of FOMO and other such behavioural traits ingrained in humans. Understanding these principles helps us create engaging conversations on social media, thereby maximising whatever the end goal you strive to achieve.

Keep it human

Even the divine had to be wrapped in human to sneak in the message, be it Jesus or Krishna. Enterprises and businesses today must take lessons from the greatest epics ever. Each business has to decide on a persona, an avatar if you like. One has to consciously decide the gender, tone and personality of the brand. Every brand today has to approach social media with the warmth and liveliness of a character. Like a human, the brands too can exhibit some variance on the Briggs-Meyer Personality Types.

Once the premise is set, keeping consistent with it in all messages and posts is essential to create a loyal fan base and having engaging conversations. Starbucks keeps it lively; Wendy’s is zazzy, Dunzo is playful and bro-like, Paperboat is sweet and nostalgic. If you follow these brilliant feeds, you will notice that each of them has a personality, gender and tone. They stay consistent with it no matter the subject under discussion.

Keep it trendy

Dive into conversations that are already trending, bringing your brand’s unique flavour to it. Keep it lively, even argumentative, but always fun and respectful. Make your point without being too preachy about it. Keeping it conversational, not just through the post and caption but a healthy bit of commenting and responding, helps build rapport with your target audience. Cross usage of memes, marrying two different trends is something that few get right, but when you do, the pay-offs are large.

Eavesdrop the right way

Employ social listening as the most critical part of reputation management. Even if you do not respond to each and every comment or mentions, tracking those gaining traction is an excellent way to get on top of situations before they snowball into something bigger than you wanted. When it comes to social media, the yesteryear dictum of any publicity is good publicity falls flat. Controlling the narrative is vital. Social media allows that to be done at a personal level, even for large businesses. Loyalists having a say and visibility helps your battles too.

A very forgiving world

As long as you come across as all too human and vulnerable, you could use your social media even to run A/B testing! Creating the right narrative or human story with perhaps names and faces, tagging the teams or people responsible for competing designs, products among others, you could do a very public A/B testing with your true customers with the added benefit that even in the worst-case scenario of a 50-50 verdict, half of them are assuredly feeling good that their voice was heard. Added to that, the good karma you earn from engaging your audience goes a long way in building trust and loyalty.

For whom the bell tolls

Another essential thing to keep in mind at the time of posting is the time itself! Posts have a very short shelf life. Without proper research and planning on the timing of the post, your efforts might go wasted. Instagram provides analytics of the most active time for your followers. A few third-party scheduler and analytics tools go beyond the coarse-grained reporting of Instagram and provide a detailed breakdown with the correlation of various parameters, including age, demographics and their active times, for different days of the week. We cannot stress enough the importance of a proper scheduling tool. Impromptu discussions apart, scheduled posts could also start an engaging conversation, particularly about your product or services, which is the most relevant topic for you.

The doorkeeper

Autoresponders are an excellent way to ensure a quick turnaround time for comments. Some tools help set up auto-responses relevant to the comment by taking cue words and analysing them through AI. That said, one has to keep a close eye on the communication and not grow lax about responding to your audience. Although we all love well-intentioned, even faltering autoresponders every once in a while, we prefer and even crave actual human interaction. So, do have a contingency in place to respond to a few of the most pertinent and relevant comments and questions yourself.

About the author:

Pooja Nataraj, Founder, PNJXN