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You’ve created accounts on the major social networking channels, targeted your potential customers, and started sharing relevant posts, but you see little engagement. What’s wrong? When creating their social media strategy, most brands use some low-effort techniques that don’t really set them apart from their competitors. To engage your target audience, you need to manage your social networks strategically and make them highly targeted and interactive.
Here are a few techniques that may boost your social media engagement.
Boost your social following with valuable content.
Creating highly targeted, informative, and interactive content and promoting it extensively on social networks is the backbone of your social media marketing strategy. It gives you the opportunity to boost the exposure of your blog posts, as well as engage your followers. Once they see the value your content brings to them, they will start liking it, commenting on it, sharing it, and linking to it extensively. It is also important to share the posts by other relevant online resources in your niche. With the help of social media management tools like Buffer or Hootsuite, you can find the hottest content, as well as manage when and how it will be shared.
Here are a few rules of sharing awesome content on social networks:
#1: Don’t limit yourself to articles only. There are numerous highly engaging and interactive forms of content, including videos, quizzes, downloadable guides, comprehensive case-studies, and visual content like gifs, memes, quotes, and infographics.
#2: Make it relevant. To grab people’s attention on the overcrowded social networking channels, you need to focus on the content relevant to your niche. Posting stuff that doesn’t resonate with your target audiences is a pure waste of time.
Ask meaningful questions.
We love social networks because they give us a voice, a chance to express ourselves. This is why we publish the photos and videos of ourselves, follow the pages we like, share user-generated content, post our favorite music, and comment on other people’s posts. And, this is something you should leverage when building a social media campaign. Here is how to show your target audience you value their opinions:
- Address their personality and individuality. Ask a question that motivates people to share their opinions on a certain topic.
- Create a quiz. People love tests that reveal something new about themselves they weren’t aware of before.
- Share a poll on Facebook or Twitter. They are super-easy to create, engage wide audiences and, above all, give you a great opportunity to learn important things about your customers.
- Ask something meaningful. Relevant groups on the major social networks, Q&A sites like Quora, social stream, Instagram stories, and blog posts all give you the opportunity to post timely, targeted, and thought-provoking questions and spark the interaction with your target audience.
Provide valuable offers.
Gamifying your social media strategy in 2018 is critical, but there are some old-school engagement methods that may still work for you. One of them is providing your customers with lucrative offers they cannot refuse. These could be free shipping, “pick your discount” offers, instant coupons, great discounts, or loyalty club memberships.
Giveaways are one of the most powerful ways to engage your target audience. Simply put, to enter the competition, your followers need to give you their email address, share your social media post with their friends, or post user-generated content on your page. And, the rewards you choose need to be truly valuable (e.g. your latest products, an exclusive piece of content, a massive discount, an opportunity to design a product on their own)
To provide catchy offers, here are a few steps you need to take:
- Make the offer important. By giving away pricey products or large discounts, you will inspire more people to participate.
- Add an engaging image. User-generated photos usually perform better than the photos of a product.
- Always set an expiration date. Give your target audience a few days to find out about your offer, research it, claim it, and share it with their friends. For example, a week could be a perfect length of a giveaway.
- Promote your offer extensively. Share it regularly and pin it to the top of your social media profile to make it easy-to-spot.
Humanize your brand.
Your customers are not interested in your products and services only. There are thousands of brands like yours on social networks and, to buy from you, they want to learn more about you. Precisely because of that, you need to use social networks to emphasize your brand’s core values and missions, tell how it was born, and who the core people behind it are. Here is how to show the human side of your brand:
- No matter what industry you’re in, use everyday language when interacting with your target audience. It’s important to make customer interactions smooth and human-like.
- Show your sense of humor. Share fun and engaging content and yet, be careful not to offend anyone.
- Engage in conversations. Use social media monitoring tools to track your brand and product mentions and participate in discussions in real-time.
- Give instant feedback. You could, for example, implement social media chatbots to be available to your customers 24/7 and provide them with meaningful answers.
- Own up to your mistakes. It’s perfectly normal for your company to make a mistake as long as you acknowledge it and inform your customers about how you’re planning on fixing it.
- Be consistent. Develop a unique brand voice and tone and implement it in all your social media interactions, be it your content or customer interactions. As for the visual content, make sure you always use the same fonts, color palette, and filters. Finally, create a social media calendar and post your content regularly.
- Share behind-the-scenes content. The photos of your staff, stories from your parties, or videos from the events you’ve participated in let you engage your customers on an emotional level.
Over to You
Even though social media is constantly evolving and changing, it is still one of the most critical aspects of digital marketing you need to invest in. It gives you the opportunity to show the human side of your brand, boost your brand’s exposure and, above all, build lasting relationships with your target audience. You just need to know how to use it wisely and, I hope you find the solutions mentioned above helpful.
How do you engage your audiences using social networks?
Guest Post: David Webb is a Sydney-based business consultant,online marketing analyst and a writer. With six years of experience and a degree in business management, he continuously informs the public about the latest trends in the industry. He is a senior editor at BizzmarkBlog.
