Today social media is available to anyone, and it offers highly effective opportunities for marketing, both paid and unpaid for any type of business. And the main factor that can determine whether your social media presence is a successful one, is how much engagement of the audience you are getting.
If you already have a good strategy for reaching your target audience, and they aren’t responding to your content, aren’t following you, etc., you are doing something wrong. However, one of the best things about social media is that you can always learn more and get more, and it’s never late to make changes to get better results.
Advertise Your Profiles
A good social media strategy is a combination of several things. Aside from creating an ad campaign promoting your products or services – to reach your ideal customers –, and offering quality content – to keep them interested –, you should also make sure that people know that you are on social media and that they can easily find you there.
To improve social media profile visibility, you can use any promotional material you have to advertise your profiles. For instance, you can include your user’s name or handles on pictures or infographics, or you can add your profile URLs. You can also share the URLs across other platforms.
You can start sharing your Instagram URL on your Facebook posts, for example, or include the link in the description on your Instagram posts, or maybe even send it via emails. This can not only bring you more followers, but it may also be more effective in attracting people to spend time on your Instagram profile, look through your content and potentially provoke engagement, than posts appearing on their timelines.
Produce Quality Content
Having truly engaging followers is priceless. However, to find them, you need to share quality content, and, most importantly, it should be valuable to them. Like with content, not any engagement is equally important for your brand.
The only way to boost meaningful social media engagement is to understand your audience. This way you can offer content relevant and valuable for the people you wish to reach – your ideal clients and customers – because their potential engagement is what you are aiming for.
Be Present on Multiple Platforms
Unfortunately, great content doesn’t ensure engagement. Your posts need to find their way to the relevant people. Offering quality content on profiles with the wrong kind of audience is a waste of time and resources. To avoid this, you should find out which social media platforms are most popular amongst your target audience and make sure your brand is there.
Like individuals, businesses and organizations may feel more at home on certain networks, according to their style or likes, so you may feel more comfortable using Facebook than Instagram, for instance. However, for brand visibility, it’s important to be active on different channels because while there are people who use several social media platforms at the same time, many choose only one.
Being on multiple social media networks at once is hard work, and it isn’t as simple as copying and pasting posts. Instead, you should make sure that your content can be adapted, and you should adapt it accordingly. You can do different things on each platform to advertise the other ones, like sharing your Instagram URL on your Facebook posts, for instance, as mentioned previously.
Boost Interaction
Make sure your content reaches more people by using the trends popular on the platform at the moment. This can be something like using hashtags or memes. One of the best ways to get interaction is to ask your audience to take an action. You can ask for feedback on something in the comments, organize contests, create challenges, ask for photos, ask questions, etc. Remember that for the engagement you get to be meaningful, this has to be relevant to your brand and your target audience.
To make your content more attractive and ensure that it’s consumed, you should also offer it in different formats. Audiences on the most popular social media platforms generally engage more with visual content, so many businesses try to post informative or fun pictures, videos, infographics, and so on.
Final Thoughts
Social media can be incredibly beneficial for your business if you know how to use it to your advantage. One of your social media objectives should be to get meaningful engagement. This means to reach people who might be interested in what you are offering – your target audience, offer them something valuable, and provoke their reaction.
Beyond Marketing: How Brands Can Use Social Media To Delight Audiences