You’d likely be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t see the potential in social media as a channel for marketing and communicating with potential and current clients. However, most people would probably also agree that getting the right engagement can be a challenge. What people might not realize is that there are benefits to social media beyond the obvious. The success of your social channels actually benefits your other marketing channels in ways you might not expect. How does it work? And how do you improve your social performance? Here are 7 tips to help you get started.
1. Understand your target audience.
Your target audience is the people who are the most likely to need your services and resonate with your message. Knowing who they are, what they need, and how to market to them is a bit of an art form, but by doing a bit of research, you can begin tailoring your social content to them.
In conjunction with knowing your target audience, knowing when this audience is active online can help you plan posts accordingly to maximize engagement. If your followers are mostly online in the evening but you’re posting in the morning, the engagement on your posts can suffer from that. This kind of data is available in Facebook Insights.
2. Add imagery and video.
Incorporating visual content is one of the most powerful ways to increase your social media engagement, because it draws the eyes and can increase the chances that people will interact and engage. Video continues to be on the rise; on Facebook alone, over 500 million users are watching videos every day. That’s over half a BILLION people watching video on Facebook daily. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that Internet video in general will be over 80% of all consumer traffic within 4 years. So, you should absolutely use video on a regular basis throughout your social media channels. Video helps retain social media users and keeps them active on the specific platform you use to engage with them.
3. Have a sense of humor – when it’s appropriate.
Humorous content on social media can perform really well; these posts can be memorable AND are likely to be shared again and again. Humor can help you find ways to see what kind of reaction you can generate from your target audience, which can help you refine the tone of your posts. And, getting people to interact on posts like this will help increase your chances of getting them to interact with other pieces of content you post moving forward.
Content that makes your followers smile will present your business in an appealing light and foster a favorable view of your brand, but there are times when humor isn’t appropriate. Exercise caution when using humor – avoid being insensitive and joking about things that aren’t appropriate. If you have to question it, it’s probably better to just skip it and keep things lighthearted.
4. Be active, but go for quality over quantity.
Being present on your social media outlets is essential for your audience to see who you are and give them an opportunity to engage with you. With that being said, you also need to be intentional about the content you’re posting and if it’s something that your audience will find value in. Generally, you want to avoid flooding your audience with a lot of content that might just be all about you and your business. This can become boring fast and you could start to not only see a decrease in engagement, but also in the number of followers you have. Sharing high-quality content from other users and brands can provide a good mixture of appealing information that gives the custom content you create to promote your business the opportunity to shine.
5. Try running promotions and giveaways.
This might not necessarily apply to all businesses and their social media profiles, but people do love free things. Posts that encourage people to like, comment, and/or share for a chance to win something will help you capitalize on an audience that’s familiar with you and your overall brand. This approach can really help generate added exposure while increasing engagement and enthusiasm.
6. Engage in conversations with your audience.
It’s not uncommon for businesses to be so consumed with the comments coming to their social pages that they don’t think to respond back. It’s never a bad thing to let your audience and prospective clients know that you’re listening by taking the time to reply to what they say, even if it’s just a little comment like “thank you.” You went through all of the trouble to generate engagement, so why let that slip away by not returning the favor?
7. Interact with other pages.
Taking the time to regularly follow, like, share and interact with other pages will provide you with an opportunity to get more notice and potentially gain more followers and engagement yourself. This is something that most business owners don’t think to do, but it can give your target audience more insight into who you are while generating additional relevant exposure. Talking with other people and businesses and engaging with them is a great way to get them to engage with you.
Now you should have a solid understanding of how to create engaging posts on social media on an ongoing basis. But, a question that continues to come up regarding social media is: How does this benefit my overall online exposure?
Here are 3 ways social media can help SEO results:
1. Content Promotion
One of the main aspects of social media is the sharing of content. Whether that is text, imagery, video, etc., social media gets your best content in front of the users whose attention could turn into new business.
Driving engaged traffic to your website will help improve your website’s authority in the eyes of the search engines by influencing your bounce rate and time on site. These and other engagement metrics communicate value to the search engines, thus helping boost SEO. Social media marketing helps your user engagement while also increasing the traffic to your website and the shares of your content, both of which help your SEO.
2. Local Engagement
Social media platforms can provide a great way to engage with your local audience, which can lead to local specific authority signals being sent to the search engines. When you consider that “near me”-type searches are increasing by 130% year-over-year, you will see the importance of earning local engagement. Social media posts will help you grow your community exposure online.
Interacting with other local businesses and brands on social media and promoting your business’s involvement in local events is a great place to start building up local exposure. These posts can help attract local visitors to your website and send those positive “near me” signals to the search engines.
3. Link Building
Your social media channels can help you build relationships and social shares that often result in organic links back to your content. These links are incredibly valuable when it comes to building your site’s SEO strength. They’re also valuable for building awareness of your brand and relationships both within your industry and with your clients.
We Can Help
Don’t miss out on opportunities to grow your social media channels and boost your SEO—MyAdvice can help you hone in your strategy and make managing your socials easy. Contact one of our experts for a complimentary consultation today.
