The Simple Secret To More Engagement and Better Metrics

What is the secret sauce to improving your social media campaign metrics or blog post engagement? 

It isn’t a magical tool that you pay a monthly subscription fee towards or a special skill you can check for on someone’s résumé. 

The key to improving your metrics and engagement is consistency. 

We might risk sounding basic by saying this but keeping a consistent posting schedule on your social channels and your blog is one of the simplest things you can do to start growing a following and building a community of readers and engaged customers. Posting consistently and keeping to a social media/blog calendar is not as easy as it sounds. How many times have you gone to a company’s blog or Instagram account and noticed the most recent post was from 2016? It’s one of the fastest ways to tell if you are engaged with your online and social presence; customers take notice. 

There are all sorts of things that keep marketers from following their posting schedule: they may initially have momentum that wanes when they don’t see immediate followers or engagement, they may not see the point in posting regularly, or they may not have the bandwidth to commit to posting regularly. 

Whether you’re a digital marketing associate or the head of your company, there’s always a long list of things to get done. Here are our top tips for sticking with consistency: 

1. Create a posting schedule and content calendar: Again, we’re talking simple stuff here. But showing up each month in advance and building a monthly content calendar for your blog and/or social channels will take some effort. But once you have a schedule you’re sticking to (new blog posts on Wednesday, curated content on Fridays, for example), it becomes easier to create and source content to fill out your calendar. And not every social network needs a post every day! LinkedIn and Facebook can suffice from a couple of posts a week. Twitter and Instagram require more engagement and should have content posting daily. 
2. Use batch working to stay ahead: If the thought of multiple social posts and blog articles per week makes you break out in hives, don’t panic. The secret is to create and schedule all your posts and articles ahead of time. Tools like HootSuite, HubSpot, and other apps allow you to create your tweets ahead of time and schedule them for later in the day/week/month/year. But first, dedicate time in your schedule to create the content for the posts that you sketched out in your content calendar. With “batch working”, you may set aside a full afternoon or day to write several blog posts, whip up the graphic work for tweets, and write the copy for LinkedIn articles. By dedicating a large chunk of your time to this one activity, you can get a huge amount of a month’s worth of social and blog posts done. 
3. Outsource your social media/blog creation duties: If all else fails, you can outsource​ your social media and blog writing to an agency. You’ll still need to work with them to develop your overall goals and strategy, as well as supplying any necessary information or collateral. But they’ll post for you and engage with your community (if it’s a part of your arrangement). That’s about as easy of an Easy Button as you can get! 

There's three options to work on committing to a more regular posting schedule for your social media accounts and blogs. It will take time and patience, as well as practice, to see the results, but you're guaranteed to get better results if you keep at it then if you quit!