How Community Involvement Can Help your Brand
We know engaging with your customers while in the shop is important, but what about community involvement? It can be easy to overlook the importance of building a relationship with the community you serve.
If you can build a relationship with the community, it can enhance your brand’s image. You can use community involvement to your advantage by posting organic content on social media.
What is Community Engagement?
Community engagement is somewhat of an art form. It takes time to build relationships with customers, and what better way to do that than on social media? Community engagement involves using social media to build relationships with community members by posting relevant content and engaging with your audience.
Engagement on social media consists of comments, replies, direct messages, shares, likes, clicks, and mentions. These metrics help you better understand how your content resonates with your intended audience.
How Important is Organic Content on Social Media?
Organic content is great for a business to appease platforms like Facebook and Google. Working to satisfy the algorithms these companies have created will help your content reach more people. Organic content is used to build relationships, aid customers who have questions or concerns, and for brand awareness.
You can also use organic content in combination with paid ads to “boost” the potency of your content. For example, you could take photos of your technicians performing maintenance services and then boost your post to reach a larger audience. Boosting a post means paying to have your content seen by a greater audience.
Although you can reach more through paid media or ads, organic content is still important. According to Hootsuite, they found that the average reach on Facebook for organic content is 5.2%, so having that combination can give your organic content a chance to be seen by more consumers.
Ways to Get Your Business Involved in the Community
Organic content includes things like photos, videos, memes, or stories. The examples below use organic content and paid ads to increase the chances of that content being seen.
The first example is from Norwood Auto Service Center. They hosted a fundraiser event for Paige Dicks, who at just eighteen months old was diagnosed with B Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.
These organic posts are for your current followers, but they can also help garner the attention of potential customers
Image posts are interacted with 179% more than other posts on Facebook. Posting image content is an easy decision for business owners who like to document progress in the shop.
Engagement on platforms like Facebook and Google can also be boosted when you work with or tag other businesses in your local area.
For example, another one of our clients, Romita Auto Service, hosted the blood drive “Blood for Oil” in which they offered free oil change vouchers for people who donate blood. Look at the number of people it reached!
They did not tag NAPA Auto Parts directly but, they did mention the brand in their post. Spreading the word about other brands can entice people to become potential customers for those businesses as well.
These are just a couple of examples that you can use to base your content around. Both examples do things the right way. Both posts are reaching their current and potential followers and enable their followers to share the event with their friends.
If you think that your content needs more community involvement, contact your account consultant. If you have questions regarding digital marketing solutions, reach out to Optimize to answer your social media questions.