How to use social displays to boost content engagement

Over the past few years (writes Toby Britton), ‘content marketing’ has gone from being a little known corner of digital marketing, to a dominant force in marketing strategies all over the web. Things have quietened down somewhat since the web-o-sphere reached ‘peak content’ around the end of 2015, but the tried and tested formula of creating great quality, strategic content is still going strong.

However, there is one problem. With so many brands and marketers pumping out more and more good quality content, how can you ensure your creations get the attention they deserve? Digital audiences are bombarded with tempting content seemingly every second, but with so much to choose from (and only so many hours in a day) how do you make yours the content they read, comment on, share socially and remember?

Using social displays and walls 

If you’re running any digital campaign worth its salt, you’ll be sending out social messages about your new content when it goes live – and using all of your social media platforms to promote your new creation. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to walk the line between driving traffic and spamming followers’ social feeds.

You don’t want to lose followers by making your channel over-promotional, but you also want to drive as much traffic through to your shiny new on-site content as possible.

You could pin your message to the top of your account as a ‘pinned tweet’, or advertise it in your Facebook header image, but these approaches won’t keep the information fresh in a follower’s feeds. The solution? Social walls!

What are social walls?

These are a fantastic tool for driving traffic and boosting awareness of all the amazing new content you’ve been producing. As consumers increasingly suffer from ‘social media fatigue’, 69.5% of users now claim they once again prefer to connect with their favourite brands via brand websites.

Easy to set up, social walls pull the messages of your choice from the social media accounts of your choice, allowing you to present an interactive and engaging display of posts including announcements of fresh brand-owned content and user generated content.

These social walls can be displayed anywhere, from a dedicated page on your website, to your homepage and even on live screens at events and in stores. This is a superb way to garner fresh attention for your brand owned content, drive more traffic to your creations and boost content engagement.

Social displays in action

Let’s take a look at how all of this works in practice with a few case studies from happy Miappi clients:

• Vitality – #EverydayAthletes
  The Vitality #EverydayAthletes was an exciting campaign which encouraged users to ‘take note of the small things that can make a big difference to your health and wellbeing’. The insurance group created a brand new, standalone site from which to run the campaign, packed with fresh content. At the heart of the site, a Miappi social wall collected and curated content both from the brand itself and from users sharing their stories, to present the content in a dynamic, engaging format.
• Sony Music – Various artists
  Artists from Neon Jungle and Judas Priest, to Little Mix, the Kinks and Kodaline now make use of Miappi walls on their websites. All managed by Sony, these walls provide an important digital hub fans can visit to get all of the latest news about their favourite musicians and to engage with fellow fans. The social currency of seeing your social message on a favourite artist’s website via a Miappi wall makes these displays a real draw and a great place to promote brand content alongside user generated content.

  

• Cointreau – #CointreauSoiree
  When Cointreau wanted to create more buzz, they did so in style – by setting up a pop-up Parisienne café with fashionista Garance Doré during New York Fashion Week 2015. Miappi walls played an important part in this carefully curated campaign. With a strong and stylish aesthetic to adhere to, user generated content showcasing the event was chosen carefully and set alongside beautiful brand-owned content to create a localised event with global reach which triggered big brand engagement in New York and beyond.

Putting it into practice

So how can you squeeze more content engagement from your strategy by implementing a social wall just like these brands? We’ve got a few helpful pointers to help kick it off:

1. Do something good

Social walls might look magical, but we can’t work miracles. That means you need to have something worth engaging with before you can start building buzz and interaction around your content. Think carefully about your demographics’ interests, what’s already out there and how you can set yourself apart with something new and exciting. Creating serialised content which is released piece by piece is often an effective technique, but ensuring content looks good and proves worthwhile to your target markets is essential.

2. Make it look good

   

When it’s time to promote your new content socially, make sure it looks the part. Use a gripping message and an eye-catching image, video or gif to ensure it stands out from the crowd on social platforms and looks really good when it is pulled through to your social wall. With your social feeds connected to Miappi, your dashboard will be filling up with loads of great content. Use the Miappi curation features to choose the posts that will resonate with your target audience and gain the most social traction. You can even add calls to action under key posts that link directly to your content and test out different messages to ascertain which drives the most traffic. Here’s a quick guide to how it’s done.

3. Perfect your mix

81.5% of users would be open to or excited about seeing their social posts showcased on a brand’s website – so, blend your brand-owned content with user generated content to create the perfect mix. This will attract views while also boosting click throughs to your creations.