With 5.22 billion social media users worldwide, it's safe to say that most of your customers are using social media. So, as a business, you’ll definitely want to connect and engage them wherever they are, to fuel your growth.
However, trying to engage customers through social media can be tricky. They’re not looking for generic ads; they want meaningful interactions that are relevant to them. So, how do you actually engage your customers on social media?
In this guide, we’ve put together 5 ideas to help you engage and strengthen relationship with your customers on social media.
What is social media customer engagement?
Social media customer engagement refers to the process of using various strategies and tactics to interact with and engage your customers on social media platforms.
The idea is to build stronger relationships, keep customers loyal and make sure they’re always in the loop with the latest updates. When done right, this kind of engagement can lead to improved customer retention, repeat purchases, happy customers spreading the word, and even a sense of community around the brand.
5 ways to engage customers on social media
Here are 5 strategies you can use right now to engage your customers on social media and make your brand stand out:
1. Create exclusive community forums
A community forum is a great way to engage customers on social media. Create exclusive groups on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Discord and attract members by sharing exclusive discounts or early access to new features.
To keep your customers curious and interested in coming back to your online community, start daily discussions on niche industry topics or share valuable content like how-to guides and industry reports.
As members join your group, make sure you have clear rules in place that spell out the do’s and don’ts of posting content on the group. This will help you build a safe space for customers to communicate with each other as well as with your brand.
2. Host a contest or challenge
Running a contest is a great way to grab attention and get people involved. Before running make sure you're following the platform's rules and discourage any spammy stuff, like creating fake accounts or posting irrelevant content.
Next, clearly explain how the contest works—who can join, how to enter, deadlines, and what the winners will get. You can even create a custom hashtag for your contest. This will help you spread the word and make it easier to find submissions. If you want to hold the contest specifically for your customers, you can make it so by ensuring that the entries can only be sent by the users of your product, for instance, asking them to share their unique use of your product.
For example, Canva ran a 'Design a Motivation Poster' challenge, encouraging users to create inspiring visuals using their platform's wide array of tools and templates. The reward? A one-year Canva Pro subscription and a $50 Canva Print credit. To get involved, participants simply had to share their designs using the hashtag #CanvaDesignChallenge, so others could easily check them out and join in.
3. Conduct AMAs (Ask Me Anything) and webinars
A leadership ask-me-anything can be a powerful addition to your social media customer engagement strategy to bring you directly in front of your customers. These events primarily focus on exploring new features, industry trends, and best practices that keep customers informed and build momentum for upselling.
Webinars can also serve as an AMA, offering a structured format for interactive Q&A. This approach blends the depth of a webinar with the open, question-driven nature of an AMA, which allows you to provide even more value to your audience.
For example, Slack, a leading collaboration and communication platform, often partners with industry experts for a webinar where they talk about new features they've introduced into their app and resolve queries of the attendees.
4. Organize social media takeovers
A social media takeover in this context is when a customer temporarily takes control of a company’s social media account to post content. They are a fun way to bring in some juicy UGC as well as subtly promote your brand.
To make the most of these takeovers, schedule them around company events, product launches or seasonal promotions. For example, if you’re launching a new feature, have one of your loyal customers take over your social media to make things feel more personal and share their unique perspective on how the new feature fits into their everyday life.
Take a look at this example from Finnair, a flagship carrier in Finland. The post below is from one of the customers who published through the brand’s social media account and shared her views on Finnair's services.
5. Put the spotlight on client successes
Sharing customer succes stories is one of the most effective ways to drive social media customer engagement. That’s because when you share their achievements—whether it’s a milestone, an award, or a major business win—you not only celebrate their journey but also establish your business as a credible authority.
Some ways to spotlight your customer success include:
Customer testimonials: Share direct quotes or short videos from satisfied customers discussing their positive experiences with your brand.
Client case studies: Showcase detailed stories of how your product or service helped a client achieve their goals. These can be created as a blog, which you can later summarize in a social media post to drive engagement.
Client of the month: Feature a customer who has achieved significant success with your product, and you celebrate their journey. You can share a photo, a brief interview, and a description of how they’ve benefitted from your product.
While you may publish these normally on your website, it’s a good idea to share them on social media channels and tag the respective customers. Additionally, you can nudge discussions around them by asking other customers to talk about their own stories to create a buzz.
Check out this customer success story from Mailmodo highlighting how Foundit, a top job portal, used interactive emails to help candidates update their profiles right within the email. It led them to 1.7 million updates in just six months.
An alternative to social media customer engagement
While social media is a great platform to engage your customers, it’s easy to agree that it’s not as direct and targeted as you’d like it to be. Hence, your efforts may get lost easily and you won’t be able to track the results of your efforts on your customers.
Here, email marketing does wonders. It allows you a direct channel to your customers by delivering your message directly to them and even allows you to target your engagement efforts. You can also use Mailmodo, an end-to-end email marketing tool that allows you to create and send AMP-powered interactive emails within minutes that can take your engagement level to the next level.
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Experience the power of interactivity right now
Here are some other features that you get with Mailmodo:
Drag-and-drop interactive email builder to create interactive emails in minutes
Email analytics dashboard to track the performance of your email campaigns
Email automation to set up triggered emails and email sequences for continuous engagement
Email gamification to make your emails fun
While these are the main features of Mailmodo, these aren’t all. There are additional features that allow you to enhance customer engagement and make your efforts more effective. Why don't you give it a try for free!
Create and send AMP emails without coding in minutes
Final thoughts
Getting to engage your customers on social media isn’t always a simple process, but it’s a necessary one. This is how you can ensure your customers stay with you and become loyal advocates.
So, use the strategies mentioned in this guide, pick the ones that work for your business, and start engaging the people who matter most to your success. Additionally, you can also try out the alternative suggested in this article if that suits you better.
