Third Wednesday Webinar Presents Beyond Traffic

Why Audience Attention is Harder to Capture
One-Way Marketing: Content that Doesn't Spark Engagement
How to Engage Your Audience & Sustain Attention
Build a Relationship of Reciprocity
Q&A

Every third Wednesday of the month, we host our Third Wednesday Webinars, where we bring you expert insights on a variety of topics. If you weren’t able to attend our last webinar, we’re including the video and transcript for Beyond Traffic: How to Capture & Keep Your Audience’s Attention, hosted by Third Wunder founder and president, Mohamed Hamad.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Third Wednesday Webinar by Third Wunder.

My name is Mohammed. I’m the founder of Third Wunder, and today we are going to be talking about grabbing attention from your audience; how to create a community and how to um create engagement with your audience.

Why Audience Attention is Harder to Capture

Now, this question comes along, the fact that people’s interactions and engagements online have been changing quite a bit in the last year or so. There have been many fluctuations in SEO, people searching on Google has changed, and the algorithms have also changed. And with the advent of AI Search, both on Google’s side and from competitors like ChatGPT. And perplexity AI and others that are coming into the mix to digest the web for people and create consolidated and summarized information.

A lot of the traffic that’s coming in from different sources to a person’s website or websites in general has changed quite a bit in the last while.

And in saying that, people’s expectations of engagement have changed as well. So while there’s an ever growing need for original content and content that hits the mark, what people are finding is that they want personalized content. Content that really speaks to them, and that’s getting a lot harder to do and it’s getting very saturated.

The Attention Economy is Overloaded

Organic reach in general has also been shifting in social, with an influx of paid accounts, meme accounts. You have a lot of influencers that are pushing their own narrative, usually through paid collaborations and all of that. Not to say organic, but authentic content is starting to be eroded on social media as well. And the attention economy there is getting very overloaded.

The Shift from Public to Private Communities

What’s happening now is that people are retreating a lot from these big open, noisy environments, and they’re starting to create their own niche groups and communities. And you see that in the influx of Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups to a certain extent, but primarily Slack channels, Discord channels, closed LinkedIn groups, WhatsApp—

Communities where people are talking to others that are like-minded in a way that one feels natural, feels organic, feels like people are talking to each other genuinely without an agenda to sell, to convert, to do all of those things that all us marketers love to throw out there.

So what’s happening is organic reach on any of these social networks is also plummeting. Like if you look at organic reach on Facebook from let’s say 2012 in the heyday of social media, which was around 16%. In 2023, it’s down to 1.52%, right? So what that means is that whatever you push out there, either on a personal level or even on a company level, that is shrinking and it’s in terms of mind share and market share.

Consumers Expect Personalized, Two-Way Conversations

So, what’s happening is people just want to have conversations with other people. People want to have and want to congregate around common topics, whether it’s their favorite movies or favorite movie genre, or the type of food they’re interested in, or destinations they want to travel to, they coalesce around these topics. And just from last year, about 80, let’s say from the biggest market that we can find data on, 88% of Americans have actively engaged in niche communities. And nearly half of younger consumers, that’s around 45% of consumers online, are really gravitating to private conversations or niche communities.

So what does that mean for us as marketers or as business owners or entrepreneurs or people that work in organizations that are really pushing out or trying to engage with the community that we serve, our clients, our constituencies, you know, what do we, how do we get that engagement? And Search.

Like I mentioned before, in the last year has seen some volatility. So, what we end up needing to do is whatever we get, we wanna nurture a lot more. We wanna make sure that we get them to engage with us so that we can also grow our own first party data about them because third party data is going to be harder and harder to get.

One-Way Marketing: Content that Doesn’t Spark Engagement

What is it that most marketers do these days? This is what we end up calling one-way marketing. Well, with one way marketing, basically, we just pump stuff out there. We pump out social content, we pump out blog posts and reels and all of that in hopes that one of these things will resonate or we’re connecting with them. But one of the things that we don’t necessarily do, and I see this a lot either from our clients or in the industry at large, many people don’t create conversation.

Talking At Your Audience, Not With Them

They don’t push for a two-way dialogue because it’s hard. It’s hard, it’s time consuming, you need to be very timely with it. So, for instance, most blogs will have their comments turned off, and that is for what, the fact that there’s a lot of spam that ends up in your comments. It’s very hard and time consuming to moderate. And it’s just something that over time, especially depending on the subject matter, if you end up with a news site and you have something very political, most people, it’ll just turn into a flame war. So what you want to do is you turn that off.

But how do you go off and actually create engagement on your website when you get the traffic, you know? Once you get people over, how do we think beyond the traffic that you get and how do we get them to give you something about themselves, engage with you so that you can draw them in a little closer?

Now, at the end of the day, we always want to grow our first party data and that means creating an email list, right? And with an email list, we need to make sure that we know who these people are, what they’re interested in, what’s the next step to communicating with them, to reaching out to them? How do we personalize communications with them, right? And that’s through dialogue, through asking questions, creating conversations, creating commentary, and opening it up for people to give you that information.

Trying to Speak to Everyone (and Resonating with No One)

So how do we talk to our audience? Now, there’s multiple ways that we can go about this, and it all really starts with the first entry point. The majority of the time, the first entry point is through something that you’ve shared online. They’ve either published a blog post and they’ve come through search, you’ve published something on LinkedIn or Instagram or anything like that. And they’ve seen it, but are we getting them to do something, to say something, to engage with it, to comment, to share, and all of that. That one, increases the reach of that beyond what it is.

And at the same time, gives us something a little bit about them, right? What is it that interests them in the content you’re sharing and how do we get them to talk about it so that other people can also see some communication and reply, respond, share, and engage.

How to Engage Your Audience & Sustain Attention

Now, I’m gonna talk about a couple of ways to increase attention on content that you have. And I’m gonna start off with, let’s say blog posts. We all create blog content, we all engage in, you know, we read blog content, we save it, we engage with it in a certain way. But for the majority of the time, the content is very passive, right?

It’s just shared out there for people to consume, but there aren’t really strong calls to action to do anything beyond that. And the best way to really push people to do something with it is to create microinteractions. It’s what we call pattern interrupts, right? So, as someone is scrolling through a page, or scrolling through a blog post, there’s the text, there’s images, there’s videos, hopefully, there’s maybe sort of like embedded social content. Those pieces of media usually give people pause to do something.

But in the majority of the time, we don’t really get them to do anything with it. So, one thing that’s super interesting is that interactive content within a blog post, such as videos or engaging content can really generate about 1,200% more shares and engagement than just regular stuff. So, if you’re writing a long thought piece, try to add something engaging. Try to break up the content with images that are interesting or funny or graphs or infographics or anything like that.

You know, infographics had their heyday when everything was turned into an infographic, but for good reason. They worked quite a bit and people shared them out and they had a lot of SEO value for all sorts of reasons. But the one thing that most people don’t do is create engaging engagement points. And what I would say to that is micro polls, right? Creating within your content questions that people can fill out in the form of inline polling or inline surveys.

And what that does is asks people what their opinions are, what their experiences are. What is it that they can contribute to you? Everybody loves to give their opinion. Everybody wants to share their experiences. Everybody wants to be seen or heard, and that’s a good interaction point or a place for people to say, “hey, I’ve got an opinion about this,” but also, if you frame it in the poll and that you will also see what other people’s—or what the general public actually thinks about something. Do you align with everybody or are you different?

Build a Relationship of Reciprocity

That is a great way to get people to engage with you, but also for them to get something back and see how they fit in. Back in the day, BuzzFeed kind of created that interaction model and it works really well.

So, what do you get out of that? One, you get real world data. Data that is unique to the conversation that you’ve started with a blog post, but also an engagement with your audience. And what that does is you can also capture either their email address or their name to receive the final output of it, or just to get them to engage with you again if they want to subscribe to your newsletter and all of that. And there you’re getting first party information, you’re getting first party data, and you’re able to now grow your email list.

That works on your blog content because you’re not gonna have comments open, that’s a different way of actually engaging there. Now, you also want to share your content, right? So what you want to do is any images that you have, that you’ve created yourself, any graphs or any infographics or any original content, there are ways to add click to share, right? So, you can take that, you can take that image and just add a, a button in there that says share on LinkedIn, share on Facebook, or any of the platform that accepts shared, shared content like that, and make it easy for people to send it out to the um the platforms that they engage with, with the most.

What that does is one, it takes that one thing that they thought was really interesting and shares it to everybody else with a backlink to your website, and allows them to put their opinion on it. They have a comment on their platforms to their audience that they’ve seen something interesting that you’ve created and links back to it. Now, most of these social networks don’t really like it when people share external links, right? But it is an interaction and it is a link back to your website, and it is a way to explore it’s a way to have people explore more of your content.

So those micro things, micro interactions, getting people to converse with you without conversation, give you some information about them, but also share your content with the broader public. Now, on social channels, because all of the social channels want people to stay within their platform. They always will end up devaluing any external links.

So, if you share an article or a blog post from your side of things onto these social channels, you’re gonna see your engagement tank. The visibility and reach of that content is going to be very low. For instance, on Instagram, you can add a sticker on a story, right? And usually with these stickers, you can add a URL that will take someone to an article or to a donation page or whatever it is that you want people to engage with. That story is going to see very little engagement because it’s not going to get thrown in because the algorithm wants people to stay on the app.

So, how do you get that engagement and send people to content outside of the platform without having your engagement tank? And the way to do that is through automation. Now, there’s a bunch of tools for each platform. I think for things like Instagram and Facebook, where it has an open API where people can build platforms, build products on.

You can use something like ManyChat, where you promote people to send a comment or reply with a certain specific word. And that platform, ManyChat from ManyChat.com, which is a great platform.

It’ll listen once you connect it with your, with your account, to these engagement points. We’ll listen to a specific hashtag that you ask people to comment with, or even a phrase. And what that’ll do is automatically send them a direct message with whatever content that you want. So, what does that do? That reduces the overhead that you have of always being on.

You don’t want to be sitting there with your phone, always waiting for people and missing out on these notifications because you had it on silent, you were on a meeting or you’re watching a movie. You don’t want to always be on, right? So, this is where automation comes along and gives you that extra boost and edge to one, be really attentive to your audience and throw at them what they were asking for.

So, for instance, if you had a promotion on a product and you said, “reply in the comments below with hashtag XYZ.” As soon as they type that in, you can reply to that message with, “hey, check your DMs, just sent you a coupon code,” for instance, send them a link to a specific URL or a promotion of some sort, right? This type of thing works on Instagram stories, Instagram reels, Instagram posts, as well as anything on Facebook.

For something like LinkedIn. LinkedIn doesn’t have an API in that respect that allows you to do something like that or these types of automations. But what I would say is that LinkedIn has two methods of engagement in that respect. It has polls, which you can send out polls to, um, your audience and um ask them for information or ask questions that will help you develop or flesh out ideas, but also kind of gauge where people are at. And polls are very self-explanatory.

The other point is documents, carousels and saved documents. Now, you can take a white paper that you have or a long form piece of content and share it as a document that people can download. And you can see your engagement with these downloadable pieces of content, but you can also use ads to share a teaser of the document, maybe the first 5 pages or whatever it is, or like a cut down version of it with a form attached to it from an ad that says give us your details, first name, last name, email, whatever it is, information that you want, and we’ll email you the full documents. So that way, that’s almost like a lead magnet from LinkedIn.

These are these microinteractions that you want. Now, this is sort of building a rapport or a relationship of reciprocity, right? They’re giving you information.

You’re providing value. You’re always creating engagement. The more the conversation is opened up on these platforms, the better it is. For one, your visibility and your reach, but also the perception of you as a conversation starter, as someone that is there not just to talk at them, but talk with them from a personal level.

Build a Community

Now, most people have now started to move into these niche communities, right? There’s no shortage of Slack channels and Discord channels that are specific to an industry at large or a specific conversation. And once you create conversation with people, it starts to get easier to move them into a closed group or to build a community around that.

Now, that’s usually the end goal and the holy grail of doing all of this because you need a critical mass of people to join a community or join a group and have the comfort that they have with you to start conversations and talk with each other. A group could start off with maybe 5-to-10 people, but how do you sustain a continued conversation with your groups?

Over time, and that comes through practice, right? The more you understand about your audience, the more you understand their pain points, through comments, through their interaction, through these surveys and polls, through all that you’ve ingested. You can flip that back into conversations in your private spaces.

Now, another way of also doing it as well is doing Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions or let’s say webinars like this where you have someone or you get a guest speaker to come in and talk about a specific subject matter that is interesting to everybody within the group. People can ask questions and all of that.

Q&A

Now, I’ve been talking for quite some time and I would love to hear from you guys. I’m gonna have a look at the questions in here, and these are some great ones.

Let’s see here, Kelsey.

Wondering what integrations for polls work well in blogs that people have tried.

So this is a great question, depending on the type of blog that you have. So if you are using WordPress, we use gravity forms for a lot of things, polls, forms, and all of that, and it has integrations. And what you can do with that integration is actually pipe it into, let’s say your CRM or any automation tools, which is a great start. Obviously, there are things, like Type form, that usually is integrated with other tools like, your CRM, HubSpot, Salesforce, whatever it is. But also you can do a lot more with that data if you have Zapier or anything like that. So that’s a great question. Thank you.

Let’s see.

Tom, we’ve got, from my observation of my Instagram traffic, I realized that if you share one or two stories and it gets high traffic, but if you share more than the three, they don’t get visibility.

That’s interesting in that, yes, Instagram’s algorithm is really funny. It’s very variable. So what usually Instagram does is when you share something and it gets high engagement in the beginning, it chunks out its delivery process. So, it’ll show it to a few people, usually outside of your network, and then it gauges if it’s interesting or not, and then it’ll start to blow it up. If it’s not interesting for a small group of people that don’t know you, it will reduce the amount of engagement or reach that it gets. But if it’s super interesting for people that don’t know you, it’ll start to ratchet it up. All right.

Any other questions here?

Again from Tom, what do you think about LinkedIn in automation? I see that if you automate a post rather than intentionally post it, they get a really low intertraction. I feel like the algorithm pushed you to invest rather than organic.

So, again, with LinkedIn, it prioritizes content that is first party. So, if you have a blog post, you’ll get a lot more engagement and reach if you publish it on LinkedIn itself. So, LinkedIn has an article or almost like a blog and a newsletter now that they’ve implemented that. LinkedIn is trying to be everything for businesses from documents, carousels, polls, live webinars, you’ve got newsletters and articles, and then you’ve got microblogging, and then you’ve got video.

So, whatever it is that you do on LinkedIn and it’s first party, it’s going to get a lot more reach than, let’s say, sharing an article on your blog to get to that. Now, there’s two things that are super interesting about this. One, is that, let’s say you share a blog or an article on LinkedIn, you can put a backlink to your own website. That will, drive traffic to that.

Now, the second part is that with the advent of AI search, Google is now prioritizing large content farms like Reddit and LinkedIn. So, whatever it is that you publish on LinkedIn is publicly accessible to search engines, and whatever you do there, and it has a backlink, one, the search AI is going to prioritize that because LinkedIn is a source of knowledge and it’s a trusted source of knowledge. But two, now you’re getting authoritative backlinks to your own website from a huge source there. So, playing around with publishing on LinkedIn and adding value to that community and having the conversation started from there.

OK.

Any more questions? Thank you guys. That’s a lot of stuff over here, lots of engagement. I’m curious if you have any more questions for me on this one.

OK. Just before we go, I’d love to get just a small little pole over here just because I am talking about poles. I’d like to know what is your biggest struggle when it comes to engaging with your audience?

Is it, one, getting people to notice your content, or keeping their attention once they engage, or encouraging interactions, comments, likes and shares, and turning engagement into conversation? OK. So, we’ve got one.

Right.

Excellent. Getting people to notice my content.

Yes, that is always tough to get the reach out there.

Awesome.

Well, this concludes this episode. Thank you guys so much for joining the conversation. I hope to see you in the next sessions and looking forward to seeing your comments and interactions. We’ll be reaching out soon. All right.

Thank you.

Table of Contents

Third Wednesday Webinar Presents Beyond Traffic: How to Capture & Keep Your Audience’s Attention

How to Make AI Work for Your Social Media Marketing / 8 mins read

TikTok Is Helping Small Businesses Have a Big Impact / 7 mins read

Shoppable Content is Where it’s at—Instagram Shopping / 5 mins read

Third Wednesday Webinar Presents Effective Feedback for Creative Projects

5 Writing Frameworks to Guide Your Content Marketing

From Ideation to Creation—Mastering the Blank Page

The Importance of Iconography in Design

Categories

Strategy

Campaigning

Design

Social Media

Development

Branding