Okey, so you now know that social media engagement can do wonders for your business as mentioned in previous materials presented here at Digital Marketing Philippines. You’ve already taken action and created accounts and profiles for your business and brand at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and a host of other social media networks. Still, through all these efforts, you have not seen a significant increase in your sales.
So what gives?
The answer to that lies in the level of social media engagement you are having with your targeted customers. All these social media marketing efforts are wasted without proper and effective social media engagement. The reason behind this may lie in your lack of a social engagement strategy or you may also lack really engaging content. Your existing content may not be easy or convenient for engagement that your targeted customers may not even bother.
So, if you’re really serious about getting maximum social media engagement mileage from all your content marketing efforts, then you should learn how to create really good content that exactly does just that. The following are some tips collated from the best practices of some of the most effective content and social media marketers in this field – so you can create more engagement and other targeted responses from all your social media efforts.
1. Create Content that Focus on Your Targeted Audiences’ Interests
How good or how bad content is revolves around your targeted audiences’ perception. What can be considered good and relevant for others may not mean a penny’s worth for others. Content is relevant to a particular audience if it answers a nagging inquiry or satisfies a current need for information, whatever their purposes may be. Finding content that is relevant to their needs or interests will surely generate considerable social media engagement if done properly.
But don’t just stop there. Having relevant content that caters to the needs and interests of your targeted audiences may not worth to anything unless your targeted audiences can actually get access and read what it is you have to tell them. With millions of websites out there and probably a similar astronomical number operating within the same niche or industry your business belongs to – getting your targeted audiences’ attention can be a bit of a problem.
Do this by formulating a really neat and engaging headline and tagline that will clearly describe the information that your content holds. Adding words like “Ultimate” or “Top Ten” can surely get their attention but make sure you use such words with discretion and back your content with credible data from reputable sources.
2. Create Customized Interactive and Graphical Content
The key to generating social media engagement is to make it easy for your targeted audiences to interact with your brand or business through your content. You should make them want to interact with you and you can effectively do so by integrating graphical and interactive elements in your content. Social networks are making this easier for you, like the evolution of Facebook pages from the previous plain interfaces they offer to tabs and pages you can customize in-house or through 3rd-party apps.
These tools and apps can help you make amazing pages or tabs at Facebook making them more visible and more enticing for your targeted audiences to connect with for engagement. These customized pages can be designed to include a wide variety of engaging functionalities that your targeted audiences may find interesting. You can get their contact information (integrated with your email autoresponder) when they join your page or give them a link to offers and freebies that will do the same (see the opt-in tab form below).
Even if you have compelling content that will be interesting to your targeted audiences, but if you can’t get their attention long enough to actually read your content, then all your efforts will be for naught. What you need is that extra nudge, that very enticing element that will compel them to take the next step, and you can do this through customized graphics and other interactive elements. If you have the capability in-house, then you can have customized codes formulated. If this will not be possible, you can avail of 3rd party fan page creation services who can create customized pages for you at very reasonable fees.
Aside from these tools, there are also other tools that can offer really good interactive tools for you to use and increase social media engagement with targeted customers. A Facebook Questions-type tool is a great example that allows you to create simple polls based on an interesting question you can put forward in your pages, groups or profile pages. If your targeted audiences have some hesitations joining in the discussions and making comments, they’ll be more comfortable joining these polls or giving answers to Facebook Questions.
3. Create Content that Features Your Employees and Fans
“Social” in social media engagement means people and what can be more effective in generating engagement than featuring real people like your employees and better yet – your fans. Create photo albums that showcase your employees, highlight their achievements, or just create really clever and entertaining galleries like side-by-side photos of your best employees now and pics as babies. This will surely generate tons of engagement instances that will keep your social media world churning for some time.
You can also create photo and video albums that focus on your fans, particularly those who are already confirmed customers. Show your appreciation by posting thank you notes with fan pics using your products or in action with your services (with their permission and cooperation of course). If you have offline events and gatherings where page fans converged, you can post photos – lots of them – showcasing fans who attended and tagging them in the process. These tags will let the photos appear in their timelines and newsfeeds – creating a viral moment that will further increase social media engagement.
4. Create Content with a More Personal Touch
You can get more mileage in your social media engagement efforts by adding a personal touch with your social media activities. Your targeted audiences will really appreciate the effort you’re putting in making these posts and engagement activities more personal, and will show their appreciation by engaging with your content even more. You can do this strategy at all social media network you are involved with, but let’s take Twitter as an example this time:
- Let Your Followers Know Who’s Tweeting – You can add a more personal and more human touch to your business Twitter account by including the name, initials or Twitter handle of followers who contributed their tweets in your bio.
- Join the Conversation – Manny business and digital marketers who maintain a presence at Twitter sometimes fail to realize the importance giving recognition or acknowledgement to followers and online users who took the time to make tweets about your brand or business. A simple acknowledgement can be greatly appreciated, while answering inquiries, responding to complaints or appreciating compliments promptly and in a timely manner will definitely increase social media engagement.
- Spice it Up with Humor – You can take the personal touch strategy a bit further and add the humor element in your tweets. This will give the impression with your followers that they are dealing with real persons and not automatons. A laugh there and a funny line here can spice up your Twitter presence enough to increase social media engagement even more.
5. Create Content Featuring Contests and Giveaways
To make your content more engaging and interactive, you can create content that features contests, promos and giveaways that your targeted audiences will be interested enough to join. At Facebook, doing so would now be easier and more convenient now that they have changed their guidelines on contests and giveaways. Based on a Facebook announcement, businesses can now conduct these promotions in their own pages.
Previously, such contests were allowed only through third-party apps, but as Facebook specified in their promotions help document, “We want to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to create and administer promotions on Facebook, and to align our policies to better meet the needs of marketers.” This can increase social media engagement by having page fans join contests or collect entries through their messages, posts or likes which can serve as a voting mechanism for these contests.
The use of third-party apps for promotion is not yet dead of course, and business owners who want to have better social media engagement can use both these channels for their campaigns. Apps however provide more customization features than page posts, providing better management and security particularly if you’re planning on large contests with greater coverage. Some of the apps you can use to conduct these contests include the following:
6. Create Content Enhanced with the Power of Video
Video is a very powerful tool that you can use to increase social media engagement. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are making this functionality very convenient and easy to use but can create a big impact in terms of generating engagement. You can upload videos at Facebook, include a very compelling title, headline and description about your video, and tag your friends in the process. The more engagement it generates with your tagged friends, the more it will appear in their newsfeeds, which can make your video go viral and generate even more engagement.
Twitter has also included the video element when connecting with your friends and followers through its Vsnap facility. You can send 60-second personalized video messages to a follower. Just make your videos fun, entertaining and relevant and this can be truly appreciated within your Twitter network – enough to generate further social media engagement.
7. Let a Specialist Create Engaging Content for You
If you are facing a blank wall and have ran out of ideas for generating content to maximize social media engagement, then you can hire the services of qualified freelancers and specialists in the field of content creation. There are qualified and skilled virtual assistants who can do these tasks for you at very affordable rates. You just need to identify and test someone reputable to work with you to deliver the kind of engaging content you need.
Your business and brand presence in social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will not be enough without social media engagement. Without these interactions with targeted audiences, engagements that will eventually generate sales will not happen and all your social media efforts will just be wasted. So, take action, follow these suggestions presented to you – and generate more social media engagement for your business.
Jomer B. Gregorio is a well-rounded expert when it comes digital marketing. Jomer is also known as a semantic SEO evangelist and practitioner. Check out our Digital Marketing Services today and let us help you in achieving positive and profitable results for your business.