How to build engagement through your facebook page

Lots of housing organisations now have facebook pages, which is great – facebook is undoubtedly where our customers are. But social media only really gets powerful once you achieve engagement with your audience. How can you generate conversations so that you can improve services based on the feedback you receive?

What we found at Wolverhampton Homes is that it takes perseverance and ideas. We’ve been on facebook for just over a year and at first, we had very little interaction or engagement.

We knew that we had to do more to get tenants involved so we promoted the page online (our website and twitter account) and offline (newsletter, posters, events and merchandise). We developed a content plan, which sets out which stories, pictures, videos and topics we post. We had regular brainstorms in the communications team on how we could generate conversations. I also gave my team members targets of how many likers we wanted to achieve and asked them to come up with new ideas to spark engagement.

We all use facebook personally and that has helped us understand the platform as a consumer; we could see what tactics other companies were trying. We also went to social media networking events where we picked up tips from other organisations.

Not everything worked – we ran a couple of competitions that we had very few takers and we had many posts that didn’t achieve any likes or comments, but after about six months, we reached a tipping point.

We finally had enough customers who liked our page to start seeing some genuine and useful engagement and we were producing regular, useful, interesting content that our customers seemed to like. Customers started writing on our wall, asking questions, commenting on our posts and even posting their own pictures.

Now we are fortunate that we have regular interaction and engagement with customers through our facebook page. It’s rare that a day goes by without some level of engagement or discussion, and all these comments and feedback give us the opportunity to improve our services and change things for the better.

Anyone who is trying to build engagement through a facebook page should stick with it. The engagement won’t come quickly (unless you’re very lucky!) so don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t start seeing engagement straightaway.

(I originally wrote this post for a publication by Verse One.)

Great copywriting from Tesco

I'm a bit of a geek for great copywriting and this was so perfect I just had to share it. In case you can't read it from my rather blurry pic, it says:

'Favourites.' Your regular in-store shop waiting for you online.

It was on the back on a Tesco delivery van. People driving behind it have mere moments to take in the message and this is so elegant, crisp and economical with words that it does the job brilliantly.

I love the single quote marks - the introduction of the favourites concept. I love the use of shop to describe what you buy, rather than basket, trolley or items, which transforms products into a destination. I love the 'waiting for you' which subtly compels the reader to act.

In short, I think this is very fine copywriting. Bravo Tesco!

You know you're an innovator when...

• You have your best ideas in the shower.
• People describe you as tenacious and you're never sure if it's a compliment.
• For you, good enough is never good enough.
• You talk a lot but you listen more.
• You bookmark web pages, favourite tweets or tear out pages of magazines obsessively.
• You're regularly exhausted from the battle (but you get up and do it all again the next day).
• You think of ideas for everything (and it annoys you that you haven't got time to put them all into practice).
• Your friends are all cleverer than you.
• You keep snacks in your desk drawer.
• You praise other people's ideas rather than claiming them as your own.
• You're willing to take the hit if an idea doesn't work out.
• You share your successes.
• People ask you for advice and you end up learning from them.
• You wake up in the middle of the night and email or text yourself.
• Your favourite question is 'what if...?'
• You love change.
• The harder you work the luckier you get.
• You never feel like you've reached the top. 

How to increase your Twitter followers*

*No, don't worry, I haven't lost my mind and become a spambot.

The other day I was asked how to increase followers on Twitter and although I gave a (140-character) reply, I thought it was worthy of exploring further. I wanted to say that the better question is to ask how can I increase engagement with twitter followers? Or; how can I make sure my tweets are relevant, interesting or useful to my followers?

Everyone who uses Twitter quickly understands that its power doesn't come from one-way, broadcast style communication but instead from conversations and interactions (such as retweets). It's much more valuable to an organisation or an individual to have regular, useful engagement with its followers than to have lots of followers.

For example, a parish Council might have a customer base of just 1000 people living in a small village. If it joins Twitter and starts to have regular, useful conversations with say, 50 of those people, they will be (real world) connected to most of the other residents of the parish. If you are helpful and informative, listening to them and answering their questions, they will re-pay you by spreading the word of your latest event, or what's happening with road works.

But likewise an organisation or a person might have hundreds of thousands of followers, but if they never converse with them the value they can detract from it is immediately limited (certain celebrities, I'm looking at you).

However, it's true that to get started building your community, you will need followers. This is where you can use those listening skills. Organisations can search for people who are tweeting about, or interested in, the topic they want to discuss and follow them. Listen to what they're saying, answer their questions, suggest useful (non-salesy) links, re-tweet their queries and generally try to be useful.

Your tweets should be human, funny, kind and empathetic; never commerical, boring or repetitive. The customer insight you can get from twitter is phenomenal: your customers will tell you more about them than you ever thought possible. That's why you've got to listen and be interested in what they say.

You can also read and comment on their blog posts, like their facebook pages and watch their youtube videos - it all helps to build your understanding of that person or group of people.

Fixating on the number of followers you have is like fiddling while Rome burns; it might make you feel better but it won't get you anywhere. Instead focus on developing relationships, having conversations and publishing useful content. Before you know it the followers will come.