What Is The Best Way To Create Customer Engagement With Your Social Media Posts?

So nowadays advertising your live music event through social media is a no brainer and creating engaging posts needs to be a staple of any promoter's repertoire. When I spoke to Mr Jonathan David Dunn (promoter and founder of parallel lines promotions) he said that he often spends up to 60-70% of his marketing budget on targeted advertising in social media posts alone.

Now a lot of people think that the key to successful promotion on social media is by posting regularly about your event, but trust me when I say this, if you keep pushing it in people's faces they are soon going to get sick and tired of hearing about it. In 2007, a market research firm called Yankelovich found that the average person is exposed to over 5,000 adds per day and that was over 12 years years ago! (Story, 2007).

With people being exposed to this amount of marketing you don't want to become just another statistic in the daily lives of the average consumer, you want to give them more than just pitches and facts about your event, you want to be the stealthy marketer. Now obviously you want to gradually increase the amount of content you are posting as it gets closer to the time of your event, but not all of this has to be information and not all of it has to be just text.

Below I have listed 4 ways in which you can increase social media engagement and make your posts more interesting for customers...

Photos:

On social platforms, visual media has been found to perform much better than text so sharing images could be a great way to get more interaction with your posts. These could be photos from previous events, promotional materials or even just funny memes related to the genre or type of event your hosting. Images are so powerful because they transmit information so quickly. In a study by webdam it was found that posts that include images receive 650% higher engagement than text-only posts (Carlson, 2017) and visuals with colour increase people's willingness to read a piece of content by 80% according to Saurage Research (Saurage Marketing Research, 2015). So before you decide to post another boring status update just remember that as they say “a picture tells a thousand words”.

Video:

According to Tubular’s new sponsored social video intelligence product, DealMaker, views on branded video content have increased 258% on Facebook and 99% on YouTube as of June 2017 and the company SMB Marketers plan to spend 45% of their marketing budget on promoting Facebook video content in 2017 (Brouwer, 2017). This shows that video is on the rise and should be one of the key features that you utilise when sharing posts around your live event. The video doesn't necessarily have to be a promo video, even if it's just a short funny clip that gets a few views and makes people check out who posted it, you're sure to get much higher engagement from these sort of posts than plain text.

Competitions:

Contests are a fantastic way to spread awareness and expand your brand’s reach, as 35% of Facebook fans like a page so they can participate in contests (Griffiths, 2019), so offer an incentive for fans to get involved in your profile. This is a great tool to not only increase post engagement but encourage people to interact and do thinks like share and like your posts. It shouldn't take a lot of effort on your part as the prize could simply be a couple of tickets to your event or an item of merchandise, and the return off of this could far outweigh the cost of giving the prize away for free, so give it a go!

Live Streams:

Livestream and New York Magazine conducted a survey that found that 82% of consumers prefer brands using live video over any other medium in their social strategies (Turner, 2019). This statistic is predicted to carry on increasing and the reason that people watch live streams more than other content is the fact that it is only temporary and if they don't watch it there and then they wont get to see it later on. Live streaming updates of your event and even on the night can create loads of traffic on your social media accounts and if you film your event in the right way, it can mean that people who missed out the first time will be eager to attend the next event you host!

...So before you deiced to bombard your potential customers with another bland texted based social media post, why not give some of these ideas a try, it might just keep your friends from disowning you!

References

Brouwer, B. (2017). Facebook Video: Views of Sponsored Video Content Jump 258% Since 2016. [online] Tubular Insights. Available at: https://tubularinsights.com/sponsored-content-q2-2017-report/ [Accessed 3 Apr. 2019].

Carlson, A. (2017). 32 stats & facts that prove infographics aren't dead. [online] Lucidpress Blog. Available at: https://www.lucidpress.com/blog/32-infographic-stats-facts [Accessed 3 Apr. 2019].

Griffiths, B. (2019). 6 Content Types That Boost Engagement On Social Media. [online] Bowler Hat. Available at: https://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/content-boost-engagement-social-media [Accessed 3 Apr. 2019].

Saurage Marketing Research. (2015). Visualizing with Video and Infographics. [online] Available at: http://www.saurageresearch.com/visualizing-video-infographics/ [Accessed 2 Apr. 2019].

Story, L. (2007). Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/media/15everywhere.html [Accessed 3 Apr. 2019].

Turner, J. (2019). 3 Social Media Trends to Pay Attention to in 2019. [online] Inc.com. Available at: https://www.inc.com/young-entrepreneur-council/3-social-media-trends-to-pay-attention-to-in-2019.html [Accessed 3 Apr. 2019].