Return on Investment is incredibly important, and when it comes to soft marketing tools like Facebook and Twitter, it’s easy to think that putting up a link and a bit of text would get your followers from your page to your website and buying. But social media is, and has been, a marketing tool that requires just as much finesse as print, email, and other traditional marketing tools.

So, how can you get better engagement on Facebook and Twitter?

The latter half of this month we worked to promote an international conference held simultaneously in London and Sydney called the Change in the Age of Disruption. The conference was put on by the Change Management Institute, a global non-profit institute. The goal was: increase ticket sales using Twitter, Facebook, and email. Engagement was down and it was time to get them paying attention. Collectively, we came up with a marketing plan for post ideas. People love variety in their content and they love images. Your images should grab their attention enough for them to stop, read your copy (and make it short, because you don’t have a lot of time with them) and hopefully get them to click through to wherever you’re leading them.

For this particular conference, our one-two, one-two needed to have key elements to get followers to play along.

• Ask questions to get the audience listening
• Offer links to articles that related directly to them
• Inform them about the conference, news from and about the speakers
• Conference-adjacent information like local restaurants and hotels in the area
• Ticket details

After having a bit of a soft start for the first week to make sure we had the right footing, we launched into putting this content up with images we felt could make the audience pause for a moment with us and, hopefully, be more aware of the brand. Once they were aware of the brand and felt connected to it, they would be more likely to want to buy tickets and attend the conference.

Within three weeks time, for Facebook and Twitter, followers increased by 7%

Below you’ll find the Twitter Analytics snapshot from September and October:

Our snapshot for a month-over-month view of Twitter Analytics reflects:

• 164% increase in tweet quantity
• 89% in tweet impressions (how many people saw the tweets)
• 189% increase in profile visits
• 128% increase in mentions (how many people were using the Twitter handle in their tweets)
• 94% increase in follower quantity from the followers gained the month before

Overall, the increase in posts and content type really helped to get people interacting, watching and paying attention. For Twitter, using applicable hashtags also helps to get new eyes on your content and this will help contribute to engagement increases in most cases.

Facebook Analytics are a little different and we’ll give a brief overview of just a couple of them. The below graph is a reflection of the increase in visits from September to October.

Visits translates to: someone goes directly to your page. This means whatever content you’re posting and is showing up in their feed (if they’re following you) is engaging enough to get them to come find you. Or, they come in from a Google search or from the social media buttons on your website.

With post reach, you would think that all your followers see your posts, which would be amazing, but in truth only a percentage actually do.

When you’re not boosting your posts, only your followers will see your content. So, when you follower base increases only a little at a time, you don’t see much of an ‘organic’ reach. Organic translates, simply, to the number of people you didn’t have to pay money to Facebook to get to see your content.

And as a quick overview, these were the statistics from Google Analytics for the conference website for September and October. As compared to the month prior, more visitors were returning to the site who had previously visited.

Whereas the sessions, or the length of time a visitor spends on a website, dramatically increased which meant people were finding the content there worth reading and decided to stay a while.

In the length of time spent for the conference, the overall engagement went up significantly!

Without having paid to reach more followers on Facebook or for Twitter ads, you can still see that the time spent creating more posts, using images and graphics, writing short copy and using hashtags with a well-laid plan can really get people paying attention to your brand. And if they’re paying attention to your brand, they very well may end up becoming a loyal, buying customer or advocate for it as well.