Over the past seven weeks I have been looking at different brands and their engagement levels with consumers. Some of the brands that I’ve worked closely with have been Netflix and Dove and I’ve been watching what they’ve been doing well, and what’s they’re doing wrong. I’m going to talk about how to make your consumers engage and connect with you on social media, and why it’s so important to engage with them back.
1. Your Plot Is Useless
If you want good, meaningful engagement, you need to have good, meaningful content for your followers to engage with. If you want to take a minute (or two) to read this journal article from 2019, an exploratory study on how stories generate consumer engagement to better understand why having a good plot is super important for good engagement. It’s written by Laurence Dessart and Valentina Pitardi, both who have gone to prestigious business schools. If you don’t want to read it, have no fear, as I will explain it to you.
Having a plot that viewers connect to, and reach your viewers is imperative for quality content engagement. An advertisement by Dove called “Dove Real Beauty Sketches” which resonates with some insecurities that people have and topics that aren’t talked about. It made women consumers of Dove feel like they have a community, encouraging each other, and talk about how good the ad makes them feel. If your consumers don’t care about your story, if they can’t relate to it, they won’t comment, like, or send it to their friends.
1. Your Characters Are Un-relatable
In the same Dove ad mentioned before (watch it if you haven’t yet!). The women in this ad are real women, that look like the women you walk by in the street, the ones you work with, and look like you. If you choose characters that have these perfect lives, perfect looks, or are not relatable to the people you’re trying to appeal to, you’re going to flop. No one likes to feel bad about themselves.
This journal article from 2018 (written by, like, four different people) is about customer engagement, as well as the relationship between involvement, engagement, self-brand connection and brand usage intent. When consumers make cognitive or emotional investments in a brand, they will keep engaging with brands. When your characters are relatable, those investments make themselves.
2. Your Story Isn’t Believable
By watching this ad, you can see these real people talking and the pictures being described and drawn. You watch these people talk about other people they see in the ad in such a better way than they see themselves, and none of the ad looks manufactured or fake.
Rania Nakhil wrote this journal article in July 2019 which goes into depth about meaningful storytelling as a brand engagement approach, a brand needs to be credible, emotional, and relevant in order to create a meaningful story. This ad became one of the more credible Dove campaigns as it was transparent, you got to see the women telling the stories themselves. The emotion in those women evoke emotion in consumers who watch the campaign, who have similar thoughts and feelings. Body positivity and self-image is highly valued by society, so Dove is spot-on in making itself relevant. When you put out unbelievable or unrealistic stories, people don’t feel related or seen by your brand.
3. You Don’t Try to Make Your Followers Laugh
This last one actually doesn’t have to do with Dove. While Dove went with the emotional, touchy-feely route to relate to your users, another way to increase brand engagement is to make your followers laugh! Netflix does this a lot by using funny, relatable memes. Check this one out:
When big corporations use funny memes like this, it reminds users that there’s someone behind that Instagram who does the same things they do, and acts the same way they do. It’s pretty funny. Who doesn’t like to laugh?
So basically, there’s a bunch of different things you can do to really boost engagement from your followers, but it seems the overall theme here is to humanize your brand. People like it when they feel that people are talking to them, not big scary corporations. Followers like to see people who look like them, act like them, and think like them (narcissistic much?) Just by using these four methods of creating human characteristics to your brand, engagement will increase in no time. While it’s important for your brand engagement to increase, it’s important for you to engage back. Remember, people don’t like talking to themselves.
Do you have any tips on how to make your followers actually like you on social media? Drop them below.
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