Insurance Marketing featuring Facebook’s New Feature

One thing that I teach insurance agencies on a regular basis is that moving forward, digital marketing is going to be considered a traditional form of marketing, and not just in our industry, but in any industry. Part of your digital marketing strategy should include marketing via Facebook, seeing as it is the world’s largest social media platform, making streamlined communication with your customers, clients, and prospects both easy and effective. If your company is not on Facebook already, then creating a Facebook page should be your first step. However, I didn’t write this article to give you tips or tricks about Facebook marketing, but instead to talk about its new feature: the reaction button.

Facebook’s New Reaction Button

Before they unveiled their new “reaction” button, there was a “like” button in its place, one that we have grown all too familiar with. By giving a post a “like” in the past, you gave it your positive vibe, approval, or showed that you were genuinely interested in the post. We, as marketers, were looking to get as many likes on our company posts as we could to increase user engagement, and in turn reach a wider audience. We would simply strive for likes, comments, and shares to increase our overall audience size, and at the end of the day for each of our posts that was about it. What we decide to include in each post, whether it’s a video, a link to the agency website, or a form of visual content marketing, can change; the thing that could not change was how our audience reacted to the post.

Now that Facebook has put out their new reaction button, people can go much further than just a like, comment, or share. Now people have the ability to react to your post, and the options they have to choose from are “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” or “angry” that have a corresponding emoji (smiley face) to go with it. Your audience can tell you how your post made them feel, think, or what vibe your post gave them overall. But, what does this new feature mean for marketing, for the insurance space, or for you and your agency?

Your Social Attitude Matters

In the world of social media, your social attitude matters for many reasons. Your social attitude is how you are interpreted in the social world, which is how your audience feels about your agency’s traits, ideas, message, and your way of communicating, and this all speaks directly to your agency’s brand. Think about it this way; everything you create in terms of marketing should tie back into your brand, whether it’s using your brand in your visual content, your message, your branded tone of voice, etc. Your brand is the core of your social attitude, but now your audience has a chance to show you their social attitude in return based on how well they respond, or react, to your posts.

Your audience’s reactions are quantifiable data that are not only easy to be tracked, but free for you to leverage. This is your chance to see if a branded message made your audience react in a certain way, and then track what’s going wrong and what’s going right, and adjust accordingly to strengthen your presence in the social world. For example, if I posted a campaign about feeding the homeless, and my audience reacted with “sad” and “wow” reactions, then this could be their way of saying that they empathize with me but are also marveled that there are people willing to help. If my post received a lot of reactions in this manner, I know I did something right. Similarly, I could have also posted some pictures of my staff with the homeless folks smiling together, and people could have reacted with a “love” or a “haha” to let me know they really enjoy how happy everyone looks after working together to achieve the same goal.

Now, what if you post something and it makes a lot of people angry? Not only will you see that in the comments, but they actually have a chance to give you an “angry” reaction as well. In some cases (such as making a post about a veteran who was disrespected), it could be good that they are angry because they are getting behind a cause and agreeing with you. But, in others, you could be posting content that made your audience uptight but that was not supposed to. For instance, there may be times when you make a post and get some “angry” reactions to it, but you need to take advantage here. Any time that you upset your audience, you have one chance to own up to your mistake and fix it, but then moving forward you can attempt to avoid upsetting them again in the same fashion.

Use reactions as a source of strengthening your content, and look for more engagement in the nature of your posts, how you brand them, and even try to get your staff on board with “reacting” to your agency’s posts online! If you can think of other ways that reactions can be used to your agency’s advantage in the social world, I’d love for you to reach out to me at cparadiso@paradisoinsurance.com, and other than that, happy marketing agents!