5 Tips to Manage Social Engagement on Your Site

5 Tips to Manage Social Engagement on Your Site

When it comes to a successful social media campaign, the key is to make sure fans, followers and connections aren’t just reading, but engaging in what you have to say. Often, engagement is thought of as being pro-active, but it’s equally as important to use tools that help organize and disseminate information to give you the best chance of getting a good response.

5 Tips to Manage Social Engagement on Your Site

There are 5 main angles you need to approach social engagement where your blog or web site is concerned: Social Commenting, Social Plugins, Managing Reposts, Analyzing Growth, and Growing Via RSS.

I will go over each of the 5, explain their importance, and give you tools you can use to get the job done!

1. Social Commenting

The days of the standard WordPress commenting system are behind us. Far behind us. You need to make sure your site is moving with the times. Install a free commenting system like LiveFyre or Disqus.

LiveFyre

Commenters who can post out and be pulled in through social networks are more engaged with the story, tweeting out their comment is a breeze, and it really facilitates discussion. In one easy click you can send a message saying “You were just mentioned in this conversation…” with a link back to the blog post. It’s amplification on steroids once it gets going.

Why Is This Important?

Perpetuating a conversation gives your blog post a longer life, and if you can manage to get it into the social media sphere, you can harness that inherent virility that comes with it.

2. Social Plugins

It may seem obvious, but I often see sites that are missing a trick by not including all the ways to send things to social networks. The best plugin I’ve found is Digg Digg, which allows you to easily customize which social plugins you want to add to your side bar. It really has everything, even the new Google Plus.

Digg Digg

Why Is This Important?

You don’t want to pigeonhole people into just one or two networks. Make it easy for people to share by putting all the major networks and stumble so that you can get maximum exposure. The more exposure you get, the more engagement you will receive.

3. Managing Reposts

You need a “ground control” so that you can catch all the engagement that occurs. MarketMeSuite is an absolute juggernaut of a marketing/management tool. It takes the best elements of your favorite management platforms, mixes in geo-targeting and pro-active marketing, and gives you one giant place to share, cross promote and organize.

MarketMeSuite

Why Is This Important?

You need a centralized place to monitor all of your social marketing efforts, and allow your entire team to work together. Set up searches for any mentions of your brand to be sure you never miss a chance to turn a reader into an engaged evangelist.

4. Analyzing Growth

Getting engagement and monitoring is a big piece of the puzzle, but how do you prove it? Enter Twitsprout, the one page social analytics site. Currently in beta, it offers a decent insight into how you are doing on Twitter. It shows follower growth by day, hourly change in following, growth rate increase/decrease and follow area list ratio.

Twitsprout

Why Is This Important?

ROI on engagement is really difficult. Twitsprout is starting to crack it, but they are still very focused on Twitter growth. I’ll let it leak here that MarketMeSuite version 4 is going to go a step further to crack this nut and show some pretty awesome analytics on actions that drive interaction, so stay tuned, it’s being released in early 2012.

5. Making Your Site RSS Social-Friendly

With all the ways for people to automate RSS to social media, you need to make that RSS button easy to find. I’m talking front and center on your blog, right next to your social profiles. And encourage people to share your posts.

RSS

Why Is This Important?

Get your RSS feed syndicated by the right people on Twitter and Facebook and you’re going to be looking at upwards of a 200% increase in exposure and engagement. Target the key influencers in your industry and send it to them. The blogs that pay attention to details like RSS get free traffic that no amount of SEO can bring.

Key Take Away

Writing great content is only the first step. Getting people to your site to read it, engage, appreciate and share – that’s what makes your site a success. I hope these 5 tips have helped you think about ways you can make your site more social, and please share any other tips you have by commenting!

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