The one thing you can do to keep your audience engaged
on social media

Here at BFBS Creative, we work hard to develop effective and successful communication campaigns for our clients. We know what it takes to get your message across and the best ways in which to do it as well as how to build an online community that thrives. Want to know the secret? We keep the audience engaged.

In a digital age where we have the world at our fingertips, our audiences can get distracted QUICKLY. They are distracted by TikTok challenges, emails, Facebook, text messages, and DMs. All it takes is one notification to pop up on our iPhone, and the attention has immediately shifted.

Just so we are clear, social media engagement is much more than the measurement of comments, likes, and shares. Social media engagement can be measured by a range of metrics that could include the following:

• Followers and audience growth
• Click-throughs
• Mentions (either tagged or untagged)
• Using branded hashtags

There are some really useful tools out there that can track all of your social media platforms’ analytics and data for you. Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer are just a few that could help.

Imagine you threw a dinner party and loads of people showed up, but they all just sat there in silence. No small talk, no dancing, no conversations. Was the party really a success? The RSVP list looks good, sure, but did your guests have fun?

Both the activity and the subsequent engagement are crucial for every social platform to build a positive brand experience and develop meaningful relationships with new and potential audiences. You wouldn’t ignore a guest at your dinner party when they spoke to you, so why wouldn’t you respond to a comment online? If you don’t already have a Community Manager in your communications team, get in touch. (We specialise in embedded support to communications teams and can help generate online conversations and keep them flowing.) 

But exceptional content is not the finish line. It’s the starting line. It captures attention, it might even get a like, but it must be truly extraordinary to entice a follow. Even if you did get a follow, you then need to produce a constant stream of equally exceptional content for the rest of time to keep them on board – and that’s great if you have the product/time/opportunity/editing skills/money etc to do that. But if you don’t… then this blog is for you.

Think “conversation” not “broadcast”. It’s great that you can create such wonderful content (and you should be proud of that), but it’s going to be useless if it’s not what your audience wants to see, learn about, or is remotely interested in.

Not everyone can create exceptional content, but we are pretty good at it! Our creative content team produce award-winning video, animation, audio, and podcast content; everything from recruitment videos to animations outlining a charity’s purpose.

It’s hard to get people engaged if you don’t actually know who you’re talking to.

The sort of language and resources that resonate are likely going to be different for a skateboarding company versus a garden centre (except for all the rad sk8r grannies out there, in which case there’s a market for that).

Many businesses make the mistake of trying to reach everyone. If you speak to everybody, you will speak to nobody. Understanding and organising your audience can help you send the right message to the right people which, in turn, will help you to reach your communication goals more effectively.  

Your audience needs to be at the forefront of your thinking when creating a communications strategy. There are hundreds of ways you could divide your audience, such as considering where they live or how they get their news stories. This is called building an audience profile. 

An audience profile details important information related to a character that represents who you want to talk to with your campaign. Doing this will help you create a campaign with more impact.

You can never know too much about your audience. The more you know, the more you can talk to them, and the more they will talk to/about you in return. 

Here’s one I made earlier (Using myself as the target audience):

Need help on where to start?

BFBS run tailor-made training courses and workshops that can help your team get to know your audience. We can even write, run, and deliver Strat comms for you: from communication strategies for military charities to campaigns for one-off sporting events, we know how to organise success.