How engaged are you on social networks? Tracking mentions on social is one thing. Keeping on top of social conversations and engaging in them, being.. well..social, is quite another. Luckily the latest features from Agorapulse are here to help you.
In this article I will outline 6 ways you can improve your engagement with Agorapulse:
- Keeping on top of your inboxes
- Tracking subjects that are relevant
- Tracking Instagram
- Qualifying people, so you engage with the right people
- Measuring engagement
- Getting your whole team engaged
1. Stay on Top of Your Social Conversations with Social Inboxes
If you're trying to get a hold of who's spoken to you or about your brand, you have to be very organized. Or get help. Agorapulse does both for you. Each of your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram has its own Inbox that gathers all messages and comments sent to you.
With this Inbox, you no longer have to toggle among your private messages, @messages, comments, and replies. They're all in one place, in chronological order, and in a familiar email style that makes it easy for new users to get up and running.
And as with your email client, there are some built-in features to help you to achieve Inbox Zero (my dream).
When you log in, you immediately see the number of items waiting for your reply. (Think unread messages in your email client.) This simple number helps you manage your time - it kindly lets you know if clearing your inbox is something you can tackle in 15 seconds or in a longer period of time. For me it is a longer period.
If you're managing an active Facebook page or need to monitor comments on many Facebook ads (unpublished posts), Agorapulse is a good alternative to Hootsuite.
2. Discover Hidden Opportunities with Advanced Monitoring
On social it is good practice to listen before you begin talking. That's not only good online marketing, but it's also social.
On Twitter, Agorapulse helps you monitor keywords and phrases that you really want to follow. For example, you want to search for "Mexican food" but you don't want the word "burritos" in the results? You can save up a search like that to hone in on tweets that will benefit your market research or brand awareness campaign.
To monitor on Facebook, Agorapulse has created a great feature that categorizes a page's users by those who mention your page, comment on your posts, like or share your content on Facebook. This "users" tab is a goldmine if you want to build an ambassador program or at least know who you should get to know a bit better.
3. Track Instagram Engagement
A recent survey by Locowise found that Instagram was the most engaged network. They reviewed engagement across 2,500 profiles using a range of different engagement metrics. The big finding was that engagement on Instagram far outperforms both Facebook and Twitter. Average engagement per post on Instagram was 2.81%. On Facebook, engagement was 0.25% and on Twitter 0.21%.
Instagram is becoming a more important network for marketers and it's great to see that Agorapulse have Instagram to allow you to monitor hashtags and locations.
4. Qualify and Tag Your Followers
The danger of social media is that you can spend way too much time in conversations with people who'll never do business with you or be an advocate. To help you Agorapulse has designated badges for users on your channels who leave you a comment, mention your brand, or have liked a designated number of your posts.
The "tag" feature on the Agorapulse dashboard can further segment your followers by categories you designate (by market, geographic location, occupation, etc - whatever works for you.). It's another great way to organize your fans & followers to easily find them all later and re-engage a specific segment of your audience. Say you're looking to build more relationships with fitness bloggers. Then check your customized "fitness blogger" tag to read the latest tweets and Instagram posts from users you've labelled there.
Agorapulse also gives you the full history of all past conversations with users. This unlimited history will help you see the context of any new message you receive and your engagement with them.
5. Measure How You're Doing
Once you begin listening and talking to qualified users, you'll want to measure your effort to see if it is producing results. That's where Agorapulse reports comes in handy.
The Facebook reports are particularly robust and include an easy-to-understand PowerPoint deck to share with team members or clients. One of many data points it gives the days and times of the week you should post for maximum reach and engagement.
The Facebook competitor benchmarking feature allows you to see how your posts fare against your top competitors.
6. Get the Whole Team on the Same Page
When you have a team involved with your social media marketing, you need to know who said what on your social channels. Being unaware of what your teammates have said online makes it look like your team is not very social behind the scenes!
Agorapulse helps here with a couple of collaboration features. First, your dashboard gets you up to speed on who has reviewed a comment or posted a response on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Second, if a comment appears on your social network that a teammate is better equipped to handle, you can flag that comment for that particular person.
Agorapulse allows unlimited collaborators on all of its paid plans so staying social as a team ends up being a good value.
Summary
Face it: social engagement is hard and there is no single social media dashboard that does everything we want. However, Agorapulse with its inbox, monitoring, user ranking, reporting, and collaboration features is getting much closer to the all-in-one dashboard we need for effective social media management. Agorapulse is also ranked #1 for user satisfaction by G2Crowd in the Social Media Management category, a sign that it's doing things right for its users.