We no longer ask ourselves if social media sells. It does, and it’s a fact. But for your customers to buy from a brand and keep coming back, you need more than a social media profile or two. You need engagement. Engagement that is not restricted to regularly posting well-crafted content to your profiles. That’s just the start of it.
We’ve recently caught up with Iwona Polak, Head of Marketing at NapoleonCat, to talk about social media engagement strategies that help small businesses sell more on social media. Iwona has been helping eCommerce companies for over ten years now. Since 2019, she’s been dauntlessly assisting eCommerce sellers (and other small businesses) in winning the social media game – and selling more.
Q: What is NapoleonCat?
NapoleonCat is a social media manager’s wingman. It’s a management and publishing platform offering a whole range of social media tools, from smart scheduling and seamless engagement, to advanced analytics.
We kicked off in 2013 with a focus on social media analytics – helping brands analyze their social media performance and assess how their competition was doing. But we quickly noticed that what businesses were struggling with the most was building engaged communities.
It’s pretty simple – what’s the point of analyzing your performance if you don’t have the tools and strategies to improve it. That’s when we decided to create a tool that could help business owners and social media managers build engagement, making the task easier and less frustrating (because let’s face it, it can be, with the continually changing algorithms putting up new hoops to jump through).
And so our flagship product was born – the Social Inbox. It’s a single dashboard where marketers, business owners, and customer service teams can easily track and respond to comments, messages, and other interactions happening on all major social media platforms. Something a lot of them were missing, manually flicking between tabs in their browser and then jumping on their phone to check Instagram, then back to Facebook and Twitter. Anyone who’s ever worked in social media knows what I’m talking about.
Q: What does social media engagement mean to you?
We no longer live in the age of one-way marketing broadcasts, with our customers only on the receiving end of brand messages. Social media is a two-way conversation, and engagement is what makes that conversation successful.
Today, with the way most social media platforms work, it’s not enough to just post great content and then wait for the likes and comments to roll in. You need to post the right things at the right time, which can only happen if you have insight into your audience’s behavior on social media.
And then, you need to keep that conversation going – with timely, on-point replies. So, to build engagement, you need to engage yourself as a brand. Especially if your goal – beyond getting likes – is to turn your social media community into loyal customers.
So I see social media engagement as a two-step process: generating it with content and managing what you’ve generated by commenting back or answering messages to keep it going.
Q: Why is social media engagement important?
First of all, it’s a metric that social media algorithms value the most. If you build an engaged community, the reach of your publications will also increase. So your content reaches new audiences and potential new customers.
I’d say it’s imperative to generate high volumes of engagement on Instagram, as its algorithm doesn’t make it easy for businesses to reach even their own followers. However, these days it’s genuinely relevant for all social media channels.
Engagement is also the key to a long-lasting relationship with your customers. You probably won’t build loyalty in the long run without answering people’s questions, understanding their problems, or thanking them for their support. You know, like in any human relationship – which you’re also building in marketing, and I think it’s important to keep it in mind.
If you pay attention to what your customers do or say, they’ll give back to your brand and become its advocates. And if you engage back, you double the number of comments on your content, which adds to a higher engagement rate for the algorithms.
But there’s more. As B2B and B2C slowly give way to the human-to-human trend, authenticity on social media is a must. And I don’t mean it as just another buzzword (that would be particularly cynical). I mean being true in what you have to say and how you say it – and listening to what your customers, fans, and followers have to say in response.
This is not an easy task – as we tend to forget to listen to people in general, not just our customers.
But once you build these authentic relationships and trust in your brand, your sales will grow, too – that’s the natural consequence.
Q: How does NapoleonCat help build engagement on social media?
Let’s get back to the two-step engagement model. To generate engagement, you need to create content that will encourage people to leave comments, like, retweet, or save your content. It’s also important to post when your followers are active on social media, which often doesn’t overlap with your working (or waking!) hours. That’s when our social media Scheduler comes in handy.
You can schedule your post to go out at any date and hour. You can publish the same content to more than one platform all at once. You also have access to platform-specific features available in the post creator, so you can fine-tune your posts to each platform. This eliminates the risk of adding location tags where they don’t belong, posting a link to Instagram (where no one would be able to click it), or posting content that just seems a bit off.
To facilitate the second step, which is managing engagement, I recommend our Social Inbox. That’s one inbox for all your social media profiles. We pull comments, messages, reviews, and other interactions from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms in real-time. Brands have a handy tool to give timely responses and never miss a single comment that would otherwise land, for example, in a separate inbox on Instagram, or you would never even get a notification if it’s a comment under your ad (which I know is a common problem for almost any social media team).
So as I said before, there’s no more jumping back and forth between your laptop and your phone, saving our customers tons of time they can spend more productively (or even take a break if they need one – we’re only human, after all).
Q: Are there any other features that help companies in engaging people on social media?
Sure, and I have a big one I haven’t mentioned yet, which is our Auto-moderation feature.
Anyone who’s ever had to deal with managing comments and messages on social media knows this: it takes time and effort. Especially if you’re a small business, where a single person is responsible for sales, social media, shipping, etc. I’m sure you’d value an assistant to answer repetitive questions for you, like the ones about your opening hours or shipping options.
NapoleonCat’s Auto-moderation is like your assistant. You set up rules and define keywords, like “shipping,” that will trigger automated responses every time someone asks a question using the keyword.
I know automation often conjures up images of robotic, impersonal communication that loses that human touch entirely. Which – if done right – is not the case at all. You can create up to 20 different replies that will be randomly published every time the rule is triggered. Plus, you have more time to deal with issues that require individual treatment. And you can save hours weekly and take the load of constantly answering FAQs off your shoulders.
Auto-moderation can also shield your profiles from spam or inappropriate content. If you deal with high volumes of inappropriate language, you can set up an Auto-moderation rule to automatically hide or delete such comments.
Q: You said that managing ad comments is problematic, what’s that about?
The problem with Facebook ads is that you won’t receive notifications once a comment is posted, so if you don’t manually check these ads, you won’t even know it’s there – which prevents you from reacting. This might cause a number of problems. Your competition may be taking advantage of your paid reach by posting links to their websites, dissatisfied customers may be pouring their hearts out, or trolls may just be trolling. And you will be none the wiser.
In our Social Inbox, we pull ad comments in real-time, so that nothing escapes your attention. You can also set up Auto-moderation rules for your Facebook and Instagram ads to automatically reply to or delete comments. And keeping a close eye on your ads will improve the performance of your sponsored content and help you avoid burning your ad budgets.
Q: Let’s take a look into the future. What role will social media engagement play in business?
The social media landscape is always changing – that reads like a cliche, right? But it’s true, and if we want to succeed, we need to keep up.
Recently, we’ve been keeping a close eye on how Instagram has been evolving. We’ve noticed that brands struggle to reach their audience ever since the platform started introducing changes like disabling the ability to share posts from feed to stories for some users.
I think that the platform wants to encourage brands to post sponsored content. If you don’t have a huge advertising budget (which is likely if you’re a small business), then you need to try even harder to engage your audience. And that’s something NapoleonCat can help with.
Q: How can companies get in touch with NapoleonCat?
The best way to contact our Customer Success team is through the chat on our website or through the form. If you don’t have questions, you can sign up for our 14-day free trial and try the tool yourself.
About NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat is an advanced social media management platform that helps businesses from 70+ countries around the world to manage profiles on multiple social platforms: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google My Business. With NapoleonCat, small and medium businesses, agencies, and eCommerce sellers can streamline social communications, improve their response rates, and analyze their performance – all in one user-friendly dashboard.
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