Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. Instagram. YouTube.
What makes content on those channels effective? The answer is engagement.
The more social media engagement a post gets, the more it gets shared. Comments (i.e., conversations), therefore, are a big deal.
There’s a lesson to be learned here about your overall marketing strategy.
You can find conversational marketing at play within all of these social channels. When LinkedIn notices a post with a ton of comments, it shares it with more people. On Instagram, one of the best things you can do to grow your following is to engage with related accounts. Search for pages and hashtags, find your niche, then comment and like people’s content to get people back to your page.
These social media platforms boost content with the most engagement because they know real people are engaging on it. That’s exactly what conversational marketing is.
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Speaking of conversations – I’d love it if you listened to this Seeking Wisdom episode in full and shot me a Tweet @davegerhardt to let me know what you think ?
You see, the goal of traditional marketing for the last 10 years has been automation, not engagement. Marketers have been focused on getting people to their site to fill out a form through a fully automated process. Perhaps you send an email, but the email comes from do-not-reply@yourcompany.com because your focus is to get them on your landing page.
Here’s the problem – people are more skeptical than ever. Without a human touch somewhere in an automated process, they’re likely to not trust it. Twitter just did a huge purge of fake accounts, and people lost a ton of followers they didn’t even know they had. Everything is going back to being real, to being authentic, to being human.
Think about social media engagement in the early days of Facebook or Twitter. There were no bots on there. Everyone on the platforms was actually using them.
The shift back to being real people is so important in your marketing. Conversational marketing is not about chat. It’s not about bots. It’s about having conversations and bringing that to your marketing.
The best webinars for us at Drift haven’t been the ones with slides. They’ve been someone going deep on one or two topics then taking live Q&A.
If you’re a marketer today, think about how to have more conversations. Maybe that’s in a Facebook group or a Slack channel. Maybe somewhere else.
The point is that in marketing, humans win out.