Social media has played a significant role as a powerful digital marketing and relationship-building forum. Big and small businesses alike have found the need to be on different social media platforms, with different goals, the top ones being to increase their customer base and to acquire a wider spread of their messages online.
A business’s presence on social media goes a long way in improving their visibility as a brand, and growing fondness and trust in the products and services they offer. The only way to achieve this goal is to ensure the social media engagement for your business is very high and stays that way.
Lucky for you, the following covers ten ways you can bank on to improve your social media engagement as a business:
Seek to learn your audience
As much as you want to run your brand professionally sticking to your main agenda of widely sharing your marketing messages, you must adjust your techniques when on social media. Different platforms have different types of audiences and a code of conduct. The audience on Twitter, for example, is highly interactive and conversational, while that on LinkedIn is more professional in both language and mannerisms.
In your research about your audience, you can use direct questions to ask them on who they are and what they like or create polls probing about their interests, particularly in your industry.
Create communities and forums
It is not enough to be part of other people’s communities. Your participation is essential, but it is much more important to get your audience engaged. Create a community in different platforms where people of all works of life can join for conversations on topics within your sector or industry.
Communities you create will allow you more control over what happens within them while providing the audience with platforms to converse and share.
Sharing audience-generated content
Since social media is relational, if you consistently keep sharing your marketing messages, people will be repelled away from your brand. The social media audience likes to feel included as part of the reason your brand is successful, and you can only achieve this by sharing audience-generated content.
Such content can be blog posts written by other writers, feedback on your business that is informative, sharing quotes from authors and other figures online, as well as sharing and retweeting posts from your followers. While at it, you want to make sure all these contents are relevant to your industry so you can remain on course with your brand’s essence.
Write a blog
Businesses that want to thrive on social media should consider indulging in blog writing. Blogging is the best way to share more long-form content, without necessarily over-populating your social media platforms with information that will not be taken up well.
Most of the people on social media do not enjoy long-form content, and since you still have a lot to share, a blog is a solution. With blogging, the best part is that it gives people more value and more reasons to be engaged in your brand.
The keywords you determine for your blog posts can be the same ones you translate to hashtags on social media platforms to earn more impressions online. You can then visit sharedcount to link up your social media accounts with the blog site and see how engaged your target audience will be.
Conduct contests
Contests directly provoke audiences to get engaged in the activities of a business. The most popular competitions that draw a lot of attention and engagements are media-upload contests, which typically involve photo shoots and sharing original photographs and videos to a particular course.
Asking people to share posts with the best natural hairstyle, for example, and awarding the best performer gets people excited, not only to participate but to spectate on the events of that activity. Keep the contest based on your products or services by using a theme for which would otherwise be a viable topic if you were to blog about it.
Organize offers and giveaways
Everyone likes freebies, and if you want to be a champ on social media as a business, this is the way to go. Instant coupons, discounts, rewards, free memberships, tickets, and free shipping are among a few ways you can incentivize your target audience on social media.
Offers and giveaways create a commotion on different networks, the positive kind that will attract you more traffic while keeping your initial audience very engaged. Try out different products so you can measure out which ones get the audience more excited than others.
Sharing different media
The world of social media is drawn to visualization above all else. If your brand is not engaged in generating quality and relative media, then you are losing your audience to your competitors.
Media like pictures, photographs, memes, video, infographics, among others, capture the attention of your audience, not to mention, have more likelihood to go viral because they are highly shareable.
You want to consider using media that is of high-quality, particularly for videos, if you want people to click on the videos and watch them to the end. Further, you can use the images to reinforce, emphasize and complement the text-based posts, so that people can find value in what you are sharing, about your business and your marketing messages.
Be personal with posts
Most businesses tend to keep things extremely professional online, and while this may work for platforms like LinkedIn, personalized messages are better when handling your social media audience.
Your goal of improving your social media engagement will depend on how well you can communicate with them on a personal level. A generic and automated message should only be to put the audience on hold before you are in a position to personally respond to them, say if the feedback was received late in the night.
Ideally, you can have a digital media expert to handle the feedback for all your business’s social media accounts, striking a balance between being personal and remaining professional.
Respond to feedback
Feedback is the one sure way you can know whether or not people have been consuming your products, services, and even your content. Whether the nature of the feedback you receive is positive or negative, your response plays a huge role in completing the communication process with your audience.
The idea here is to make your audience feel heard. Ensure your response is timely and as positive as possible, especially for the negative comments.
Post frequently
The consistency in posting and sharing content creates a notion in your target audience that they can rely on you to provide timely, current and relevant information.
Create a frequency that is comfortable for you to generate fresh posts without succumbing to pressure, but also blends well with the time that your audience is most likely to be online.
Overall, social media requires deliberate presence and efforts to build relationships, grow followers, earn trust and build dominance as a brand.