Social Scorecard: Radio’s top social posts this week, plus 10 ways to increase your social media engagement

Commanding an engaged audience on your social media is a great way to build a loyal community of fans for your station or show.

What is engagement? It’s the conversation you have with your listeners online. Your target audience has various ways to engage with you whether it’s via likes, shares, comments, tags, replies, retweets, mentions, follows – the list goes on.

The most important thing to remember is that you need to be engaged in conversation before you see your audience engage. Engaged listeners mean they not only like you, but they trust your brand.

Here’s my top 10 ways to increase your social media engagement.

1. Share videos

If your brain storming ideas for your next ‘viral’ video, keep these tips in mind:

• Entertainment, storytelling, interviews, behind-the-scenes, how-to and event promo are some of the topics that perform best.
• Keep your videos short and sweet. Facebook videos shouldn’t run longer than one minute, 30 seconds and for Twitter it’s about two minutes and 20 seconds.
• Smartphone content works better. Ensure you add captions to make sure people can watch, even if there isn’t any sound.
• Make sure your copy is punchy and sets up the video to drive people to watch it.

2. Schedule your content at times when traffic is at its peak

Your analytics are there to help, so take a look over them carefully. Schedule your content when you see a spike in traffic – you’ll be more likely to engage your fans.

3. Post memes, images and GIFS

Visuals with messages tend to always command far more engagement. Memes bring a little humour and stand out in a news feed.  Tweets with GIFs tend to get 167% more click-throughs than Tweets with static images.

4. Host a Twitter chat

If you ever wanted real-time engagement then this is the perfect tactic to engage your listeners in a convo.

• Keep it super simple and have a purpose.
• Create a hashtag for people to use when Tweeting questions and answers.
• Specific a time or even create a reoccurring session.
• Outline how long the session will be and space out the questions you may answer, leaving about a six minute gap between each question, allowing your audience to respond accordingly.
• Pick some relevant topics and break them down into questions.
• Promote the chat across your socials.

5. Run a Q&A session

Got a big star, station promotion or think listeners are curious about your talent? This is a great way to build a connection between your listeners and your brand as you are providing a direct line of communication to them that wouldn’t normally be available. You’ll be humanising your brand, making talent more relatable and creating brand awareness.

Create a social media campaign around it and get listeners to send in questions before you kick off the activation so that you can be prepared.

6. Social media competitions

Folks like free stuff. Run a competition where your audience judge the winner – you’ll be encouraging votes in the form of likes, shares and comments. Clearly define your objectives and instruct your listeners to participate.

7. Run Twitter and Facebook polls

Users love to share their opinions – you’ll not only be generating some fresh content but you will be building a conversation with your own little community. Your listeners will feel like it’s a two way street and you’ll get real-time engagement.

8. Respond to comments and messages ASAP

If someone was speaking to you and you simply ignored them and walked away – you wouldn’t exactly want to chat with them again would you? Picture that scenario and pretend that’s your listeners on social media. If you aren’t actively responding to messages, visitor posts and comments it shows you don’t care and it will kill your engagement. Set a tone that aligns with your show or network and have some fun with it.

9. Use emojis

Some networks take themselves WAY too seriously. Lighten up folks because using emojis can increase your likes by up to 57%. It demonstrates a cheeky side with a side of personality. You’ll boost your engagement, share and comment rate, and make people feel like they are actually chatting to a real person.

10. Drum up engagement by highlighting social issues

Social issues shouldn’t be shunned by your brand. Your listeners will relate to you if you take a stance and it will not only kick off engagement, but strengthen your brand.  With 84% of users sharing to demonstrate a way to support causes, you’d be silly in thinking that it was too controversial to join in.

So this week folks, I’ve decide to pick radio’s best social content around marriage equality.

My hat goes off to the Hit Network and KIIS FM’s The Thinker Girls for their content.

1. FOX FM: Facebook – ‘Haven’t enrolled to vote or updated your deets yet? (SCA)

When you’ve got Facebook’s director of policy for Australia, Mia Garlick, stating that marriage equality was “one of the most talked-about topics on Facebook” – it’s a little hard to ignore. The video was very savvy, using captions so that it could be seen without sound and slang that resonates with their target audience. It’s a light hearted stance on an issue that will ensure engagement, particularly comments and views.

2. 2DAY FM: Facebook – ‘We Say Yes To Love’ (SCA)

Snaps for 2DAY! (‘Legally Blonde’ reference.) You may remember my piece on Facebook Cover videos. This is a perfect example of one executed well – It’s got colour, a beating heart and a call to action button which commands users attention and sparks an emotional connection with the copy they used.

3. KIIS FM’s The Thinker Girls: Facebook – ‘Enrol to vote’ (Australian Radio Network)

Familiar faces always drive audiences to sit up and take notice.  The fact that they were personal messages shot by well-known identities makes this very genuine; resulting in higher engagement as people will watch the whole clip to the end to see who was featured next. Great way to get a message out, loved it!

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Social Scorecard is compiled exclusively for Radio Today by Jess Frangelli.