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How To Increase Audience Engagement? 2024 Guide

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How To Increase Audience Engagement?

To increase audience engagement, it is important to use effective engagement strategies, leverage social media for boosting interaction, and track engagement metrics. Specific tactics and tools can help manage and enhance these efforts significantly.

What Are The Most Effective Engagement Strategies?

A few highly effective engagement strategies include:

  1. Posting Relevant Content: Share content that resonates with your audience. Focus on their interests and needs to keep them engaged.
  2. Interactive Elements: Use polls, quizzes, and ask a question features to encourage more interaction.
  3. Regular Updates: Maintaining a consistent posting schedule helps retain interest. Knowing the best time to post can maximize visibility.
  4. Encourage Feedback: Prompt followers to share their thoughts and experiences. This can be done through comments, mentions, and replies to posts.
  5. Call to Action (CTA): Include clear and inviting CTAs in your posts such as “comment below,” or “share this post.”

How Can Social Media Boost Audience Interaction?

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok can significantly enhance audience engagement.

  1. Facebook: Use Facebook groups and live sessions to create a community feel and promote facebook engagement through real-time interaction and updates.
  2. Instagram: Utilize Instagram Stories, Reels, and the algorithm to boost interaction. Encourage instagram engagement by sharing visually appealing content and engaging followers with questions and polls.
  3. Twitter: Engage with followers through replies and retweets. Twitter chats can also be a great way to involve the audience in discussions around specific topics.
  4. LinkedIn: For professional audiences, share industry insights and prompt conversations around trending topics. This helps to increase your credibility and visibility on the platform.

Making use of these platforms effectively can lead to increased follower interaction, likes, and shares, broadening your reach.

What Tools Can Be Used To Track Engagement Metrics?

Tracking engagement metrics is key to understanding what works and what doesn’t in your engagement strategies.

  1. Analytics Tools: Platforms like Sprout Social provide comprehensive analytics to track comments, likes, shares, and more on various social media platforms.
  2. Built-in Platform Analytics: Most social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, offer built-in analytics tools to monitor engagement.
  3. Google Analytics: This can track engagement on your website, measuring how visitors interact with your content.
  4. Dashboard Tools: Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer allow you to manage multiple social media accounts and track performance from a single dashboard.

Using these tools ensures you can adjust your strategies based on concrete data, leading to better audience engagement.

Why Is Audience Engagement Important?

Audience engagement plays a crucial role in enhancing connections with customers, boosting brand loyalty, and driving sales and conversions. Engaged audiences often show a stronger relationship with the brand, leading to better business outcomes.

How Does Engagement Impact Sales?

Engaged audiences are more likely to convert into paying customers. When users interact with content, they develop a stronger connection to the brand. This bond often translates to increased trust, making them more likely to purchase products or services.

For instance, tracking metrics can help in adjusting strategies to elevate audience engagement, as Sprout Social mentions. If visitors spend more time on a website or frequently share content, these behaviors signal higher potential for conversions. Therefore, by focusing on engagement, businesses can see a direct impact on their sales figures.

What Is The Connection Between Engagement And Brand Loyalty?

Audience engagement fosters brand loyalty, which is essential for long-term success. When consumers feel connected to a brand, they are more likely to return for future purchases and recommend it to others. This continuous cycle of engagement and loyalty can significantly boost a brand’s presence and credibility.

For example, using visuals and interactive elements can enhance memory retention and interest, as discussed by The Sketch Effect. When audiences remember and value the content, they develop a deeper relationship with the brand, which in turn nurtures loyalty. Thus, a high level of audience engagement can lead to more loyal customers who advocate for the brand.

What Are Key Metrics To Track For Audience Engagement?

To effectively increase audience engagement, it’s important to monitor specific metrics that provide insights into how your content resonates with your audience. Tracking these metrics can guide your strategy and help improve your overall performance.

How Can You Measure Social Media Interactions?

Engagement Rate: This is a vital metric that shows how actively your audience interacts with your content. It includes likes, shares, comments, and other actions that indicate interest. A higher engagement rate means your content is more compelling.

Impressions: This metric showcases the number of times your content is displayed. While impressions don’t guarantee engagement, they are important for brand visibility.

Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR measures how often people click on a link in your content, such as a call-to-action or a product link. It is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of your promotions.

Conversion Rate: This tracks how many actions (like sign-ups or purchases) result from your social media efforts. It helps in assessing the ROI of your campaigns.

For more detailed insights, tools like Sprout Social’s social media metrics provide robust analytics for better decision-making.

What Analytics Tools Are Recommended?

Hootsuite Analytics: This tool offers a comprehensive suite of features to monitor multiple social media channels. It includes tracking metrics like engagement rate, impressions, and more. Hootsuite also provides industry benchmarks to help you understand how you compare to your competitors.

Google Analytics: It’s essential for tracking website engagement metrics such as page views, session duration, and bounce rate. These metrics are crucial for understanding visitor behavior on your site.

Social Listening Tools: Tools like Brandwatch and Mention help track conversations about your brand across social media platforms. This can give you insights into how your audience perceives your brand and identify areas for improvement.

Video Views: For platforms focused on video content, tools like YouTube Analytics can provide detailed metrics on video performance, including watch time and viewer retention.

For more robust social media monitoring, Hootsuite Analytics is highly recommended.

How To Personalize Content For Better Engagement?

Personalized content can effectively boost engagement when it is tailored to the audience’s needs and preferences. To achieve this, it’s crucial to follow best practices and leverage user data.

What Are The Best Practices For Personalization?

One of the best practices for personalizing content is to clearly define the target audience. By understanding their demographics, interests, and values, content creators can make the content more relatable. Tools like analytics platforms provide insights that help in crafting audience-specific content.

Another approach is to use personalized visuals. For example, incorporating authentic images and photos relevant to the audience can enhance engagement. This not only captures attention but also builds credibility.

Competitor analysis is another key practice. Observing what competitors are doing can provide valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t. This helps in creating unique content that stands apart. Personalization should align with the brand’s mission and values—keeping the content authentic is vital.

How Can User Data Be Used To Customize Content?

User data is essential in crafting personalized content. Through data analysis, companies can identify user preferences, behavior, and interaction patterns. This data-driven approach enables content creators to deliver highly relevant content to users.

For instance, user segmentation allows for creating customized messages for different audience segments. By tracking user activity, such as pages visited and items clicked, companies can send tailored recommendations.

Leveraging user data can also be beneficial for reducing bounce rates and increasing dwell time. According to LinkedIn’s advice on engagement, personalized calls-to-action can significantly improve conversion rates. A simple example is sending personalized email campaigns based on past purchase history, which encourages users to return and re-purchase.

Data privacy should be respected at all times. Transparency about data usage helps in maintaining the audience’s trust.

How Does UX/UI Influence Audience Engagement?

Effective UX/UI design can significantly boost how users interact with digital platforms. Key factors include intuitive navigation, appealing design, and user-centric features that enhance user satisfaction and drive higher engagement rates.

What UX/UI Elements Encourage User Interaction?

Quality user research shapes effective UX/UI elements by aligning them with users’ needs and preferences. This involves creating intuitive navigation, which makes it easy for users to find what they need quickly.

Visual Hierarchy helps users to scan content efficiently. Using font sizes, colors, and layout to emphasize important information can guide users’ actions effectively. Additionally, interactive elements like buttons and forms encourage users to engage more.

Clear calls-to-action (CTAs) are crucial. They should stand out visually and use compelling language to prompt users to take desired actions.

Using micro-interactions can also enhance user experience. These are small animations or design features that provide feedback or guide users through their tasks. For instance, a button changing color when clicked confirms the action to the user.

How To Optimize Website Design For Better Engagement?

Designing for mobile devices is essential. A responsive design ensures that a website functions well across various devices, which can significantly improve user engagement.

Fast loading times are critical. Studies show that slow pages can cause users to leave, so optimizing images and scripts to enhance speed is vital.

Incorporating clear and simple navigation structures improves user experience. This includes well-labeled menus, a search function, and easy-to-find contact information.

Moreover, leveraging live chat experiences can boost engagement by allowing users to interact in real-time, addressing their queries instantly.

Using consistent branding helps users feel confident in a site’s reliability. This means consistent colors, fonts, and logo placements.

Lastly, high-quality content that is target audience focused attracts and retains users’ attention, driving engagement levels up.

What Role Does Content Quality Play In Engagement?

Content quality directly impacts how audiences interact with a brand. High-quality content resonates with readers, entertains, and encourages them to take action, like sharing or commenting.

How To Produce High-Quality Content?

High-quality content starts with a well-planned content strategy. It should be relevant to the target audience and provide valuable information or entertainment. Regularly updating and refining content based on audience feedback is key.

Including a mix of informative articles, entertaining videos, and user-generated content can keep readers engaged. Reviews and behind-the-scenes content also add credibility.

Using humor and emotion in the content can create a memorable experience for the viewer. It’s crucial to make content visually appealing with good design and images. For more on producing high-quality content, check out audience engagement strategies.

What Content Formats Drive The Most Engagement?

Certain content formats tend to drive higher engagement. Videos are particularly effective due to their visual appeal and ability to convey a lot of information quickly.

Memes and shareable content also tend to perform well, especially if they entertain or inspire.

Behind-the-scenes content can humanize a brand, making it more relatable. Reviews and user-generated content build trust and credibility.

Utilizing different formats and tracking their performance can help refine what works best. Engaging formats not only capture attention but also encourage users to interact and share, increasing a brand’s reach. For more on content engagement, visit Small Business Trends.

What Are Common Mistakes In Audience Engagement Efforts?

To boost audience engagement, marketers must avoid common pitfalls and ineffective strategies in their plans. These mistakes can reduce the effectiveness of engagement efforts and result in lost opportunities.

How To Identify And Avoid Engagement Pitfalls?

A crucial misstep is failing to understand the target audience. Without knowing the audience’s preferences and behaviors, engagement efforts can miss the mark. Marketers should prioritize audience research, which includes studying demographics and interests.

Another mistake is neglecting to test and adjust strategies. Regular testing, such as A/B testing, can show what resonates with the audience and what doesn’t. Ignoring this step can lead to ineffective messaging and missed engagement chances.

Lastly, some brands make interactions too sales-focused. An overly aggressive sales pitch can turn off potential customers. Engagement should be about creating value and building relationships, not just pushing sales.

What Strategies Are Ineffective?

Using outdated methods like one-way communication can limit audience engagement. Today’s audiences expect interactive content and personalized experiences. Brands should use two-way communication, where users can comment, share, and interact with posts.

Ignoring feedback is another ineffective strategy. Brands often make the mistake of not listening to their audience. Feedback provides insights into what the audience likes and dislikes, helping to refine engagement strategies.

Lastly, having no clear call-to-action (CTA) can make efforts fall flat. CTAs guide the audience on the next steps, such as signing up for newsletters or visiting a landing page. Without clear instructions, engagement can drop, and the brand can lose potential customers.

By avoiding these common mistakes, marketers can improve their audience engagement strategies and foster better connections with their audience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Increased audience engagement can be achieved through various strategies during live events, on social media, and by using interactive content. Businesses can also measure and analyze engagement and tailor their approaches in marketing campaigns.

What are effective strategies for enhancing engagement during live events?

Creating interactive sessions such as Q&A and polls keeps audiences actively involved. Using engaging visual aids and storytelling during presentations helps maintain interest. Providing networking opportunities ensures participants interact not only with the content but also with each other.

What techniques can be used to boost involvement on social media platforms?

Posting consistently is key. Using questions and interactive posts like polls can boost engagement. Sharing user-generated content and responding promptly to comments also helps. Specific strategies can be found in lists of the best social media engagement questions and advice.

How can interactive content contribute to increased audience participation?

Interactive content such as quizzes, surveys, and live demonstrations engages users more effectively than static content. This participation not only keeps the audience entertained but also encourages them to share their experiences, leading to wider reach and engagement.

In what ways can audience engagement be measured and analyzed for improvement?

Metrics such as click-through rates, likes, shares, comments, and time spent on content are essential. Analyzing these metrics helps identify what works best and what needs tweaking. Tools and best practices for measuring engagement are discussed in detail in audience engagement strategies.

What role does storytelling play in engaging an audience during presentations?

Storytelling makes content relatable and memorable. It helps convey messages in an emotional and interesting manner, keeping the audience captivated. The use of real-life examples and clear narrative structures enhances overall engagement during presentations.

How can businesses tailor their audience engagement approaches in marketing campaigns?

Businesses should focus on understanding their audience’s preferences and behavior. Customizing content and engagement tactics based on audience insights can significantly enhance effectiveness. Strategies like these are elaborated in audience engagement strategies for event planners.

How To Track Audience Engagement Growth & Course Correct

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Audience engagement is the new essential goal that digital brands and publishers use. The reason is simple: highly engaged audiences are more likely to trust and share data about themselves. That means you can launch personalized campaigns that drive impressive results.

Build Your Audience Engagement Foundation

The path to audience engagement success starts with setting up the right foundation. The time and resources you invest will help you improve your audience engagement efforts in the long term.

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1) Get To Know Your Audience Deeply

What does your audience want, and how do those needs align with your company goals? That’s the essence of audience research. Most audience needs relate to a few core drives, such as solving problems, pursuing gain, or entertainment. Surveys are an invaluable tool for getting to know your audience better.

Use questions like the following on your survey:

  • What websites do you visit every week?
  • Which social media platforms do you use most often?
  • What type of content do you prefer the most (e.g., articles, videos, podcasts)?

If your last survey was 12 months ago (or longer), it’s time to update that information. Without these insights, your content and experiences may fail to connect with audience needs.

2) Align Engagement To Revenue Goals

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Understanding your audience’s needs and wants is the beginning. Finding ways to align your goals with the audience is crucial. 

For example, your audience may want to be the first to know important industry news to gain an advantage (or just brag about being the first to know!). That audience desire may align with a publisher’s goal to sell more paid subscriptions. To sell more subscriptions to this audience, look for ways to highlight how your best breaking news coverage is limited to paying subscribers.

For a brand selling products, connecting audience goals to your product is just as important. Without this connection, your content and offers will be seen as irrelevant. For example, a clothing brand might offer tips on building a wardrobe for each season.

3) Bring On Specialized Talent

Successful audience engagement is easier when you have the right talent. Start by looking at your employees. For publishers, your journalists, contributors, and on-air personalities should take a central role in building a connection with your audience. 

Content creation is essential, but you need other skills to build a thriving audience engagement program. Running a live online event with live chat is far less stressful when you have a dedicated support person to staff the chat room. In addition, it’s also helpful to assign responsibility for tracking and measuring audience engagement. We’ll cover measurement in greater detail below.

4) Take Smart Risks

The courage to experiment and take risks is front and center to building an engaged audience. If all of your content and online experiences are designed by a committee, standing out and keeping the audience’s attention is going to get tough.

So, what does it mean to take well-thought-out risks in audience building? It will look different in each organization. Here are a few examples to get you thinking:

Disagree with conventional wisdom

Every field has its best practices and standard ways to get things done. For example, most people recommend keeping online events to a maximum of 60 minutes. Consider going above that with a one-day virtual conference or even a “lightning” event with a few short presentations in less than 20 minutes.

Strike up unconventional partnerships

Another way to take risks in audience building is to get out of your comfort zone with who you partner with. For example, most of your competitors might work with US-based influencers. What if you contacted experts in Canada and Australia to offer a different perspective?

Invest in long term relationships and content

Risk-taking also sometimes means taking a long term view of content. Take Buffer, for example. They’ve built a relationship as a thought leader in remote work by publishing a detailed State of Remote Work survey since 2018. The brand has carved a reputation by revisiting the same theme for several years. 

5) Enhance your website with engagement in mind

Your website’s capabilities are also vital in shaping the growth of your audience. Social media platforms have set an expectation that websites offer a deeply engaging experience. The old best practice from the 2010s to build a social media following on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok carries problems today.

Social media platforms are increasingly susceptible to misinformation, hateful content, and other problems. There’s another reason to focus attention on building a community on your website: first-party data. The third-party cookie is going to be dead by 2024. To continue engaging your audience, you’ll need a direct connection.

An engaging website with live chat is a social experience that repeatedly draws people back. Over time, your audience may make friends with others who use your website, so your website will become a community destination. 

Arena Live Chat is one of the fastest and easiest ways to make engagement easy on your website. You can install it in a few minutes and run your first event within an hour. Live chat gives your audience a way to interact with each other and discover more about your brand.

Once you have your audience engagement strategies, it’s time to build your tracking process.

The Toolkit For Tracking Audience Engagement Effectively

Audience engagement strategies require experimentation, courage, and determination. That’s why it is important to consistently measure your efforts so that you can make course corrections as needed.

Tool 1: Choose Your 2-3 Key Metrics

Choosing the right mix of metrics is vital to determining if your audience engagement strategies are working. The following mix of metrics illustrates one way to balance audience measurement.

  • Website visitors over 30 seconds
  • Percentage of email list members who open 2 emails per month
  • Content sharing: track which content assets are shared by email and social media

These metrics are intentionally simple and accessible. If your audience growth data is tough to find, you’re less likely to use that data.

At a minimum, it is best to have both a volume and a quality metric. The volume metric could be something like the number of unique visitors to your website each month. The quality metric is a counterpoint to discourage tactics that might attract significant visitors irrelevant to your goals.

Tool 2: Review Your Analytics Tools For Accuracy & Integration

The next tool is critically evaluating and configuring your analytics tools. More likely than not, you have multiple marketing tools that gather analytics data. That variety of data means you have a greater chance of getting confused in the sheer volume of data.

To mitigate this threat, evaluating the data gathered by your tools like website analytics, email analytics, and other resources is helpful. For example, you might find that geographic data – typically generated by IP address – is accurate enough for your purpose, but demographic data may be less accurate. 

To simplify the work of organizing your data, use Arena Personas (Beta). Personas Beta) makes it easier to gather and organize all the data generated by an individual’s interactions with you. That means it is easier to produce data-driven marketing campaigns to grow audience engagement and move people toward conversion.

Tool 3: Course Correct Your Audience Engagement

The final tool is a process rather than an app. Audience engagement is an art and science. While you can leverage market research and your audience’s past behavior, there is always an element of uncertainty. 

In any given month or quarter, you might launch multiple audience engagement tactics. It’s smart to pause and assess your progress periodically. When you assess your audience engagement efforts, use the following self-assessment questions to guide your reflection:

  • Which content, event, or experience had the greatest positive impact on our top audience growth metrics?  
  • What qualitative feedback did we observe from our audience? (Start with direct feedback shared in live chat sessions and people using your website, and then look at social media)
  • What’s drawing our audience’s attention in the broader environment? (Keeping a finger on the pulse of your audience is vital, otherwise, you risk being perceived as out of touch).
  • What results can we celebrate this month? (Audience building often takes a marathon effort, so it’s wise to encourage your team regularly).
  • How did we grow our network for future growth this month? (Building connections with experts and influencers takes time. Asking this question will help to maintain attention on longer-term efforts that drive audience engagement growth).

Invite a colleague to discuss the questions and supporting data with you for the best results.

The Way To Build An Audience On Your Website

Growing an engaged audience through your website is critical. Third-party cookies are on the way out. Building a direct relationship with your audience means you can succeed even when there are problems on social media. Discover how to build your online community with Arena. 

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How To Boost Your Engagement With A Social Stream

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A social stream is a powerful way to leverage public posts to grow your audience and engagement. With a social media stream, you’ll regularly have new content to share and ease the burden on your editorial team to hit publish constantly.

How exactly does a social network stream or social media wall help you? Stay tuned because we’re going to cover that next.

What Is A Social Stream?

To explain the value of a social media stream, look at a breaking news example. Imagine your organization is covering a championship event or election. Every few seconds or minutes, new developments happen. It may be challenging for staff to cover these developments.

What if you could easily pull in a relevant Facebook post, a tweet, or other social content to enrich your coverage? Your staff would find it much easier to cover all of the angles of the event thanks to social content curated from a wide range of social media accounts. 

Who knows, you might even find some social media influencers to feature in upcoming marketing campaigns and virtual events!

Social Stream Coverage: How Does It Work In Practice?

Also known as a social media wall, this content technique highlights the amazing content created by your community. Including this community content in your website acts as social proof. Other people can see that your content and organization are attracting interest, and that makes it more appealing to participate in. When the rest of the visitors see that other people are excited about your brand, it makes your website and content more appealing.

Let’s say you are running a professional conference for your members like the Ontario Association of Veterinary Technicians (OAVT). The Association created a social feed on its website pulling in social media content using the hashtag #OAVT2022

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This approach encourages event participants to use the event hashtag when they post. A social stream is effective because it encourages your audience to share their insights and promote your event. Furthermore, this type of social media stream can also help you improve your event content further in the future. You’ll better understand the themes and topics that interest your audience.

How Does A Social Stream Work?

The easiest way to explain a social stream is to look at a simple example. Through your market research, you know that your audience loves to use Twitter. That’s good news because most Twitter content is public and easy to search.

Setting up your social stream involves searching for relevant social media posts to find user-generated content relevant to your purpose. Usually, the search process focuses on looking for keywords that use a few specific keywords, like a hashtag. All of these updates are then reposted on your social media stream. To avoid upsetting your audience, make sure that you use a platform with a content moderation feature. Without this feature, you might accidentally end up featuring profanity on your website! Such inappropriate content may distract your audience from converting at best or hurt your reputation at worst.

Take a sneak-peak on how Arena’s Social Stream feature works in the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxgRBLN5cGU

Using a social stream is an excellent way to augment your live blog and provide coverage for a breaking news event. Your social wall gathers content from multiple social accounts on several social networks through keyword searches and other means. That means your team can focus on interacting with your audience and bringing your content strategy to life. 

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Four Social Stream Benefits For Publishers And Brands

There are several reasons why curating relevant content from a social media feed supports your organization’s goals. 

1) Give Your Website A Social Experience 

Most of the top websites online today include a social dimension. Without a social component, it will be more difficult for your website. The good news is that you don’t have to build a social media network to gain these benefits. Instead, you can add a social media element by setting up social content aggregation (i.e., a social media wall) on your website.

When your audience sees that their thoughts and opinions are featured on your website, they’re more likely to return. Potential customers are more likely to trust your brand when they see others positively discussing your content.

2) Automate Content Curation

Tracking down relevant content for content curation can be a painfully time-consuming process. Social streams play a powerful role by automatically identifying and sharing social media content. There’s no coding required – you just set up relevant hashtags and keywords and watch the content flow into your website.

Once the content curation process is set up, it just takes periodic monitoring to ensure you are curating content relevant to your goals.

3) Increase Website Traffic and Engagement 

Regularly posting new content to your website signals to people and search engines that your business is active in the digital world. Regularly posting high-quality digital content is table stakes to compete online.

However, there are limits to how much your content team can produce. That’s one way where adding a social stream to your website helps. By regularly posting new content every few seconds or minutes, your website is always sharing something new. That sends powerful signals to search engines that they should keep paying attention to your website. Ultimately, your SEO campaigns will benefit and yield more traffic as a result.

When your social stream features positive interactions relating to your brand, it is far easier to trust your brand. As a result, website visitors are more likely to agree to join your email list and hear more about your offers. 

4) Improved virtual event and hybrid event performance

Organizing a successful virtual event takes significant planning and effort. Getting more positive attendee reviews, leads and audience loyalty make it easier for your audience to interact with your brand. Including a social stream on your website helps event performance because your audience can easily find what other people are saying about the event. 

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Is A Social Stream The Right Move For You?

While a thriving social stream can yield amazing performance, some prerequisites exist to make it work. Without these building blocks in place, connecting to the Facebook feed or seeking to optimize your social stream settings are unlikely to yield results. Discuss these four questions to decide if you are ready to launch a social stream.

How many social media followers do you have?

Generating buzz on social media is tough when you have few followers. A general rule of thumb is that a social stream produces better results when you have at least one thousand followers. If your organization has few followers, refocus your strategy to grow your social following.

With very few followers, it will be difficult to stream with ease because there are simply not enough people interacting with your content.

What level of engagement do you have with your followers?

Review your social media feed and look over the last few weeks. How often do your followers meaningfully engage with your content? That is a good signal if you see a steady increase in comments, content sharing, and other interactions. If engagement is low, find out why. Your content may not be connecting with your followers. In that case, running a social stream may not produce many results.

What’s in it for your social followers to talk about you?

Regularly answering the question “what’s in it for me?” is one of the most critical questions in marketing. People in your audience have countless other opportunities to discover information and community online – why should they pay attention to you? There are various ways to solve this question, like offering exclusive virtual events or classic incentives like discount codes for attending your event.

Are you giving your followers a good reason to interact at a point in time?

Social media walls are often run for a short period ranging from a few hours to a few days. Therefore, giving your followers a compelling reason to interact with you intensively while you run the social media wall is crucial. 

Organizing virtual events are one of the best ways to spark high levels of engagement. Planning an exciting virtual event or hybrid event is easier when you start with proven ideas. For additional inspiration, check out our post 8 Online Event Ideas for News and Media Publishers.

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How To Choose The Best Social Stream Tool

Selecting the best social stream platform for your website is easier when you know the right features and capabilities to look for. 

Simple Set-Up Process

Adding a social stream to your website should not take hours or days. At a minimum, the tool you provide should provide step-by-step setup instructions. These step-by-step setup guides may take the form of videos, screenshots, and other formats.

Track Record of Performance Improvements

Social media features and platforms are constantly evolving. For example, Instagram is changing in 2022 to better compete against TikTok. The social stream tool you select should be regularly updated to add support for new platforms, API changes, and other changes.

In addition to keeping up with changes, ask about new fantastic features in the pipeline that may make the app even more valuable to you. 

Customer Support

What if your social stream freezes or malfunctions during a significant event? In that case, you need access to technical support resources like a specialized social stream support team. In addition, find out how the support team works (e.g., email only, phone support, hours of support) so that you can plan appropriately.

Key Social Stream Product Features

With those points covered, there are specific advanced features to look for in a social stream tool. Arena currently offers all of these capabilities so that you can save time and grow your audience faster.

  • Auto-posting: Enable automatic posting on your website and have your live blogs run automatically with user-generated content. This means you don’t have to approve each new update manually.
  • Real-time stream and results: Allow content to flow to your stream and track results from social media in real-time. 
  • Content personalization: You have the choice to repost social content “as is” or add your commentary, analysis, and perspective. Periodically commenting on curated content is a smart way to add value to your audience. 
  • Hashtag and Keyword Support: Track hashtags or keywords on social media and have a unified social stream about specific topics or events.
  • Integrations: Create social streams for networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and personalized RSS feed types.
  • Social Stream Templates: Create and save social stream templates that can be reused multiple times.
  • Publishing Calendar Support: Your social stream tool should fit your schedule needs. Want to schedule content ahead of time for the holidays or weekends? With Arena, you can add specific content to your library for later publishing. This is a smart way to save up content for holiday periods so that your editorial team can take a break.
  • Embed content to your website: Embed a social wall with stream results directly into your website, constantly feeding your fresh audience content. Embedding a social stream widget on your website gives your audience another reason to stay on your website, which means more chances for conversions.
  • Branded Design: Design your stream according to your brand’s style guide to give your audience a consistent experience. Alternatively, you can use the default settings.
  • Use Content Moderation: Some social media content is unsuitable for your brand’s values and goals. Using filters and widgets, you can filter out profanity and other unsuitable content based on your chosen criteria.

To lift engagement even further, use Arena Live Chat to encourage your audience to share their thoughts and questions directly on your website.

How To See A Social Stream In Action 

Watching how other organizations use social media walls and social streams is a great starting point. However, there’s nothing like seeing this technology come to life in your organization. 

Try Arena’s social stream solution by signing up for a free 14-day full feature trial.

Real-time audience: everything you need to know for your business

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What do you know about real-time audiences? Here’s all about it and how to use this strategy to make your brand a reference online.

Did you know real-time audience monitoring is a must on marketing strategies? It’s basically a way to see what your public is doing and talking about your brand at the right moment the discussion is happening.

Certainly, everyone working in a marketing team knows the importance of controlling audience engagement. However, given the newness of this innovation, some professionals might not quite understand the significance of real-time audience tracking yet. Just a few years ago, marketing tools gave complete reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis about the brand’s audience.

Nowadays, some tools like the Customer Data Platform enable us to observe in actual time what are the company’s mentions throughout the internet. Because of this, a few things become viable, like improving customer segmentation, finding ways to have more engagement, and gathering more data on customer online behavior.

Since more data is available, that means better content and offers can be created for each consumer and segmentation group. Moreover, live content is also a new thing in the market. Although you might think of videos when you hear this term, blog posts, chats, and even more are a part of it too.

Experience dictates that consistency, frequency, and quality are what it takes to be successful in a digital marketing strategy. But now, that should be completed with real-time conversations that attract people’s attention and make them eager to have a conversation with the brand. 

In order for that to happen, the first thing you need is to understand the concept of real-time marketing and its benefits. Keep reading to see what we’re talking about.

Importance of knowing your audience

Communication is not easy work. Even when it comes to our families and close friends it’s common to get things wrong. And these are people who we spent most of our lives talking and getting to know each detail or their personalities. So, as a company trying to reach out to a customer, you can see how the conversation could be inaccurate if not done the right way.

That’s why it’s extremely important to work around the customer. Knowing who is your audience will help understand what they like and want out of your business. In order for that to happen, you need more than a name. That is, to gather information such as demographic and online behavior. From this type of data, it’s possible to be aware of how to deal with the brand’s public.

As a result, this is a crucial factor to provide better results. Some platforms even allow real-time data collection, which means the information will be stored from the first visit a person makes to your online page.

From this, new strategies based on real and accurate data can be planned, giving the customers what they want and the company better outcomes. Ultimately, there’s no point in having the best solution ever and the most perfectly designed products if you’re not getting the right people to see and try it out.

Real-time marketing benefits

Real-time audiences is not the only real-time strategy to work with. In fact, these days it’s possible to keep track of everything at the moment it is happening. Naturally, you need technology assistance for this purpose. It’s inconceivable to have a group of workers trying to handle all of the real-time data and its analysis hand-operated.

Still, with a CDP solution (for example), the company gets everything under control. The benefits of obtaining a real-time strategy include:

  • data collection from the first visit;
  • data analysis and storage;
  • real-time action and content;
  • customer segmentation;
  • personalized content;
  • increase in audience engagement.

First and foremost, real-time data collecting happens when a software,  like the CDP, starts gathering information about a visitor from the first moment they enter the company’s page. Even if they don’t interact or buy anything, their behavior is already being observed and stored in a database. 

Better yet, real-time action can be taken too. If you notice a visitor is acting in a way you can intervene and have them closer to taking action, that’s possible.

For example, someone clicked a product and added it to their cart, but gave up when they saw shipping costs were high. If the marketing team notices at the right time (a.k.a., real-time), they can work to create and send a real-time offer to that customer saying something like “hey, did you know you can get free shipping on purchases over $20?”.

Solutions like live blogging and Live Chats are also included under real-time marketing strategies. These attributes give your brand better outcomes by adding value to your product and content; increasing team productivity; improving customer experience, and building a follower base that’s more loyal to the brand.

More than that, all of the customer behavior will be kept in a database for future plans, such as knowing and finding new segmentation groups. Working with a system like a Customer Data Platform, the process, and the separation of single customer profiles into larger groups with similar interests will be automatized. So, not only you can work with a group segmentation, but also with personalized exclusive content and offers for each individual consumer.

Hence, this will assist in defining the target audience for each ad campaign the marketing crew has in mind. Real-time data collecting will also lead to an audience size increase while allowing the company to identify who are customers and who will be classified as leads — certainly, this will broaden the understanding of your audience.

Have you heard about liveblogging? Because real-time content should also be considered an advantage for a marketing group. It is the perfect way to share breaking news, talk about events that are currently happening, and even behind-the-scenes content. It doesn’t necessarily need to be planned ahead, it’s a kind of content that should be simple, spontaneous, and time-saving.

That’s exactly why it will catch people’s attention, it’ll make your brand more humanized with a language that’s closer to the audience’s day-to-day life. It’ll make them relate better and feel a part of your business — thus, increasing audience engagement. Besides, real-time content yields more audience insight, which will lead to learning what are the audience’s favorites, analyzing new data, and creating new compatible segmentations.

Of course, a balance between planned and previously written posts plus real-time content needs to exist. At the same time, you need to create a brand that’s first-hand connected with the audience, you should keep providing personalized and SEO optimized content. The combination of real-time data collection and real-time content will definitely improve your overall strategy.

How a CDP will support communication

To understand better how a Customer Data Platform will help in this case scenario we’re talking about, here is some important information about it.

By using a CDP solution, a company will have lots of valuable data. Yet, there’s even more to that: this software already processes data to analyze what is relevant and useful information and what is not. The type of data a CPD collects can include:

  • customer identity (name, age, demographic);
  • hobbies and interests;
  • online behavior;
  • how much time was spent on a page;
  • what products were bought;
  • what products were returned;
  • number of abandoned carts;
  • etc.

Much more information can be absorbed, but the important thing to keep in mind here is what you can do with all of that data. As a head of marketing, having the perfect image of a consumer makes a total difference in conversion rates. Of course, because that knowledge makes it possible to create the most accurate content for the brand’s audience.

Instead of waiting weeks to see monthly results and create new plans to improve a marketing strategy, real-time audiences and segmentation allow to act upon immediate results.

This not only gives the company equipment to work with but causes an impact on the audience with that real-time action speed. Live-blogging and live-chats features are also a part of what a CDP solution can offer your company.

Surely, there’s the need to see how your company can manage real-time marketing. Will the team be able to keep track of the information? Will they be able to act on immediate results? Will real-time audiences and segmentation bring better results? Once there are positive answers regarding these questions, you’ll know the Customer Data Platform is what your brand needs to reach new levels of audience engagement. 

How data can help create new approaches

Real-time data is a valuable resource for your brand’s marketing strategy. People notice it when a mark does their best to communicate efficiently with their customers. Using real-time information makes the company look active and on the spot, so people will pay attention to that.

When thinking about a solution to collect real-time data, it’s necessary to remember other details. For instance, is it important to work with real-time audiences? What about a Live Blog? What features does the software need to make a difference in your company? It’s important to recognize these factors since they’ll be decisive. 

A Customer Data Platform solution has all of that and more. From this type of system, you get a deeper understanding of the customers and are able to grow your follower base.

Optimize campaigns

The thing is, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before: by delivering the right content, to the right person, at the right time, and through the right channel, your conversion will most likely be a successful one. And how is that mission possible? With data usage.

When you have complete information about the people who are interacting with your brand, you not only get to know them better. You understand them so well that you can actually anticipate customer behavior and actions, something that is essential to optimize ad campaigns.

Promote better content sharing

Having enough data about your audience, it’s possible to show people that you care about them and you want them to have the best experience ever. You want to show them you’re not just another company trying to sell at any cost.

This is why it’s important to plan your content in a way to have more engaging materials than selling ones. However, this doesn’t mean real-time content should be left aside. Both varieties of content need to be a part of the brand’s approach.

Work with stages of awareness

Creating methods to be closer to the client and more assertive with content creation should be part of the main marketing strategy. As marketing professionals, some other things we worry about include increasing social media engagement, promoting events, and, more importantly, identifying who are the visitors prone to becoming new customers and which of those can become brand promoters.

That means analyzing real-time audiences to discern who is ready to make a purchase and who is just looking to learn more about your solutions — understanding the customers’ stages of awareness.

In addition, checking and connecting with who has already bought, approved your product, and is interacting with your brand online by giving good references, especially if those people are social media influencers.

These are just some ways a group can work with data collection. Realizing what is the best trajectory for the company will be the responsibility of the marketing manager. Whether it’s getting new followers, making people share more content, or simply optimizing ad campaigns.

Technology is essential to get the job done

Everything that has been said so far can be summed up in a few words: communication is more effective when you know your audience. Plus, technology is a must-have.

There’s no way you can get to know your public if all employees need to be constantly collecting and analyzing data by hand. Acquiring an automation tool is by far the best decision to enhance your whole marketing processes.

To clarify that fact, these are some of the things a marketing team will be able to achieve with software that gathers, analyzes, and stores data:

  • find the best approach for each customer or segmentation group;
  • know what type of content to create;
  • understand what kind of visual elements will work better;
  • learn the best language to use (slangs, formal, etc.);

As it was mentioned earlier, data collection implies knowing the audience. Because of that, a platform with this purpose will help recognize the best communication path to follow. Including every little detail from the tone of the company to the type of visual elements used. Creating a persona out of this material is ideal.

More than that, technology is necessary to get more tasks completed, such as monitoring social media posts. After all, that’s the communication channel where most of the engagement happens.

Having blog comments and forums supervised as well will permit you to see what the audience wants to know, what their questions are, and what are the gaps you can cover. It’s one of the best sources for inspiration content.

That means there should be constant monitoring of real-time audiences. This way the marketing team will always be precise and straight to the point with the public’s interests. They’ll be able to create content answering exactly what the audience wants to know. Even more, a real-time strategy will boost engagement with the brand.

Despite that, quality content doesn’t do the job by itself. It’s required to know SEO tactics that will improve reach — therefore, increasing shares as well.

Social media is the main channel to have real-time audiences interacting with your brand while making it more humanized. That’s something acknowledged brands are doing in the market, such as Coca-Cola and Airbnb. It’s a way to connect on a personal level with customers and prospects.

The streaming platform Netflix is a great example we can think of because of how they act online. Even though there are many people behind their strategy and social media control, their communication is flawless. 

Every post and every response they write to their fans, whether on Instagram or Twitter, has the same tone and exposes a strong personality — in spite of the company not having a face and body to show “behind the cameras”, you can practically see who Netflix is through their social media work.

Of course, the personality of your brand will depend on the type of service, and the target audience the company works with. For Netflix, that witty and fun characteristic works because it’s an entertainment business focusing on interacting with their young adult fan base.

Then again, this is the reason knowing your customers matters so much. The moment you get to know them, how they act, and how they talk, you have what it takes to transform them into brand advocates.

Are you ready to reinvigorate your marketing strategy? Arena has all we’ve talked about, from real-time audiences and segmentation to live-blogging solutions and more.