Six Social Media Discovery Questions To Ask Clients (Before Onboarding)

Engagement has become an essential factor for social media algorithms. How users comment and respond to your content influences what they see on their news feed.

These changes to the algorithm have improved the user’s experience: they now engage with content that is relevant to them, and only see posts that they care about.

Brands, however, are having a harder time adapting to these updates. Many are left in over their heads, trying to find ways to boost their organic reach.

So how can you beat the algorithms to reach your customers and promote your brand?

1. Pay.

Or…

2. Embrace the comment.

Read on to find out the top strategies for driving conversation and comments on social media.

What You’ll Learn in This Article:

Let’s dive in! 👊

How Social Media Algorithms Work in 2023

Every social network uses a different algorithm to prioritize content in your feed.

However, there are some commonalities.

Algorithms on social media seem to favor comments and back-and-forth conversation. If your post gets a lot of comments, it will get more distribution (reach). If your group gets activity, it will show up in the news feed.

Here’s how algorithms work for each major social channel:

Facebook Algorithm Signals

In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Facebook would prioritize “meaningful interaction” in its news feed. What does that mean for brands? Facebook qualifies “meaningful interaction” as posts that generate conversation.

Here are the top-ranking signals that the Facebook algorithm takes into account:

Comments: High conversation leads to better ranking in the Facebook news feed. This is why the algorithm favors live videos – they generate six times the engagement of regular videos.
Comment replies: Facebook also analyzes how people are replying to comments. Posts that generate lots of replies will get consequently favored in the news feed.
Reactions: Users on Facebook can respond to posts through ‘reactions’ that represent various emotions – Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry. Reactions give your post a small boost in the news feed.
Shares: The algorithm favors posts that either get shared publicly or privately through messenger. However, shared posts must also have engagement for the algorithm to take notice for your Organic Social Media.

Instagram Algorithm Signals

Like Facebook, Instagram announced that their newsfeed would favor “the moments you care about”. The algorithm favors content that is most likely to interest the user.

Here are three major ranking signals Instagram’s algorithm looks at:

User relationship: Your relationship to others users influences how they see your content. Just like Facebook, the algorithm favors content that users engage with.
User’s past behavior: Has the user interacted with similar accounts or posts before? If yes, your post is more likely to show up in their news feed.
Post recency: The algorithm will favor recently published posts. Older content gets pushed down the feed (unless the relationship signal is high).

Twitter Algorithm Signals

Twitter’s algorithm spotlights the “what you missed” based on accounts that you interact with most. It also adds extra recommendations of potential interest.

Here are the top-ranking signals that determine Twitter reach:

Engagement: The algorithm processes user interaction based on their comments and replies.
User’s past behavior: Twitter analyzes tweets the user has engaged with in the past, and how often they use the platform.
Recency: Recent tweets get a high ranking on Twitter’s feed.
Tweet content: How is the tweet structured? Does it contain an image, video or GIF?

LinkedIn Algorithm Signals

LinkedIn’s mission is to connect the world’s professionals and make them more productive and successful. How? By helping members actively participate in professional conversations.

Here’s how LinkedIn evaluates content:

People you know: LinkedIn factors in your past interactions, current employers, and implied interests to prioritize content from people they believe you’ll know. Commented on someone’s post in the past? There’s a good chance you’ll see more of their content soon.
Talking about things you care about: LinkedIn rewards authentic conversation with visibility. The more users comment and reply on a post—a signal of a constructive conversation—the more likely it will be shown.

There are other signals they look at to determine the topic of content you’ll find interesting, from hashtags to groups, but a high volume of quality comments clearly stands out as a powerful attribute.

In LinkedIn’s explanation of its “community-focused feed optimization“, the authors note the algorithm’s goal to surface more discussion.

“At the heart of the feed sits a machine learning algorithm that works to identify the best conversations for our members.”

1) Difference and positioning: What makes your brand different?

What it teaches us:
The story you will tell on social media platforms. Dig for the characteristics that differentiate you from your competition, and the brand associations your customers value most.

This informs your content strategy, paid campaign messaging, personality, and visual look/feel.

Some questions we may ask to better understand point-of-difference:

What makes your capabilities, services, and team unique?
What separates your product or service from direct competitors?
Why do your clients (or customers, users, members) choose you?
What are operational talk triggers do customers reference most often?

2) Current Initiatives on Social : What does your current social media marketing program look like? What platforms does your brand have a presence on?

What it teaches us:
Where you sit on the social brand roadmap. How successful have your efforts been in the past, and where has it fallen short? It also begins to get us thinking about what your social goals really should be.

This phase is one part audit, one part interview. The audit can uncover the historic posting frequency and consistency. The questions below should help make sense of competency and process.

What content or tactics have worked, and what hasn’t?
What experiments have you tried in the past year?
How much are you spending per month on paid amplification?
How are you tracking success on a monthly and quarterly basis?
Do you have a Facebook pixel (and similar tracking tags) installed on your site?
What’s the biggest obstacle to social media marketing growth with your current team?

3) Customers (and Audience): Who are your target audience segments and most valuable customers?

What it teaches us:
Once we agree on who we’re looking for (in your words), it becomes a whole lot easier to target your audience and plan content they’ll care about. Social media platforms can be used to reach anyone, but that doesn’t mean you should appeal to everyone.

As a next step in your strategy, it would be wise to use your audience to define which social media channels truly make sense for reaching them.

Some questions you can ask to better understand target audiences:

What are the backgrounds, demo and geographic profiles of your target customers?
What are their interests, online preferences, and purchase decision pain points?
How do they research, evaluate, choose, and buy your product or service?
What would they find funny, useful, beautiful, and inspiring?

4) Objectives: What are your specific, measurable goals for social media marketing?

What it teaches us:
The focus and measurement for your social media marketing.

In a small business, startup, or non-profit, it’s common for social media programs to begin without defined KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

Conversations about what success “feels like” help us understand what to prioritize for success this year: organic awareness and audience growth, or customer acquisition?

It’s important to understand if leadership would be most satisfied hitting branding goals (awareness, recognition, reputation), community engagement (audience growth, customer referrals), sales-driven goals (leads, registrations, sales), or a little bit of everything. More often than not, the answer is the latter.

Some questions that can help define primary and secondary social media goals:

A year from today, how would you measure your brand’s social media presence a “success?”
What are your measurable goals for marketing, sales, and customer service?
How would you define success for each social media channel?

5) Vision: Tell us about your brand’s vision?

What it teaches us:
Having your external team aligned with your internal vision is uber-important for long-term success. To get to Point B (2023) from Point A (2022), everyone needs first to understand Point C (the long game).
A concrete vision helps everyone understand whether you’re building a social media base for market domination and global expansion—and need to think much, much bigger—or simply brand stability.

Some questions you can ask to better understand long-term vision:

Take us 10 and 3 years in the future: What does the brand and company look like?
What does the future of your industry look like, and what role does your brand play in it?
What else should be known about your growth plans?

6) Expectations of our Relationship: What are you looking for in a social media agency partner?

What it teaches us:
Setting expectations is the name of the game. An answer of, let’s say, “Go above and beyond what we’re capable of executing internally” or “Double our leads coming from social by EOY” helps articulate the true desire in a social media marketing partner. Nobody likes surprises or miscommunications.

Getting honest feedback at step zero puts the right combination of done-for-you (outsourced) and done-with-you (training) programs into perspective.

Some questions that can define how to structure an engagement:

Are you looking for a long-term partner or short-term support?
Which aspects of social would you like to own in the short-term? Long-term?
Where would you most value outside support?
What budget range are you able allocate to social (or this initiative) this year?

Of course, these questions might be the tip of the iceberg. A follow-up conversation can cover the market, industry, competitive landscape, company history, internal policy nuances, favorite colors, and other nitty gritty details on the product and organization. What questions are part of your discovery process?