Today millions of people spend several hours on various social media platforms daily. It is no surprise that social media marketing provides a powerful way for the business of all sizes to reach prospective customers.
And effective social media marketing strategy can give you remarkable success to your business, creating a loyal customer base and driving leads and sales. Promoting your brand via social media is hence vital to businesses, but uploading content to those platforms is not what increases your conversion rates.
The key to successful social media marketing is audience engagement. Follow these tips for building social media engagement below to boost your social media marketing campaign.
Assess competitors’ content
One of the best ways of creating engaging content is to check what has worked for your competitors and make something similar and even better. Watch what they are doing by going through their Facebook pages, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, the type of images they share, and replicating their tactics. If most of your direct competitors are not there, your indirect competitors are there.
Research popular topics on social media
Buzzsumo is a perfect tool to use to find the best content that has performed well on social media. You just need to type the keyword related to your business and see the top sites with the most shares on social media platforms. This way, you will get an idea of the topics people love talking about and sharing. Analyze this content and produce something better. This will give you a higher chance of success and more visibility on social media.
Ask questions
Another excellent tool for increasing your social media engagement is creating a conversation by asking your audience questions about things relevant to your business niche. Ask them questions about their biggest problems with your niche, their biggest desires, and their personal experiences with your goods and services. This will help you know the type of content to tailor to that audience.
Offer expertise
Regardless of your marketing goals, educating your audience is always a smart route. If you offer valuable information or practical advice on your niche, people will start looking at you as an authority and expert and might become loyal customers in time. You can offer your expertise in your business niche through your social media post or by recommending sites where the audience can find relevant information.
Share data and statistics
Sharing data and stats are a perfect way to build your credibility. Even if you have not uncovered the data yourself, the fact is that you are sharing data and vital stats about your niche. You can share news about your niche, such as global breaking news affecting your field of business. This is an ideal way to engage your target audience and get them to discuss.
Recommend tools and resources
Recommend tools and resources that you use to help you achieve results, which might help your audience. This will help increase your authority in your business field, and the audience will see you as the point of reference.
Hold contests and giveaways
One of the best ways to boost your social media marketing is holding contests and offering something to the winner. The contest can help promote your brand, such as asking them to share a photo when using your product. You can ask them to share their virtual results to contest for winning the product. The award could be a free product or service from your business brand or a discount code. This will help increase their desire for the product hence boosting your conversion rates.
The ‘caption this’ game
This is another effective method to keep your audience engaged. Post a picture of something, say caption this, and let the audience play the game of what they would capture the picture with. This will boost your engagement because people love to be significant, so when they put their caption, this answers, they want to show it to other people, so they get appreciated.
Share visual posts
Photos and videos provide a great addition to social media and marketing content. Use appealing visual posts that users will want to read. Including a short video, GIF, or image in your social media posts will make it attractive to all audiences and increase the accessibility of the posts. Share photos about products and results of products. You can also use customer photos or videos while using the product or showing the product’s result. Customers love to feel appreciated and will likely share the post on their social media profiles and encourage their followers to use your products or services. This will boost your conversion and rates.
Share your wins
Every day or every week, you will have little wins or achievements that you can share with your audience. Let your audience know about your little wins and invite them to that aspect of your life. By showing them your little achievements, they will also get inspired to go for their goals.
Make predictions
Make predictions about what will happen in the business niche. Lots of people are just wandering around looking for someone to follow or tell them what to do. Just give your ideas about what you think will happen about a particular matter. It doesn’t matter what will happen; after all, nobody will remember. People will only remember the times you were right, which will boost your authority and credibility in the niche.
Rants
This is another effective way to engage your audience, mainly if you believe in your taking side. A good example is talking about how you are against the get-rich-fast scams and why you detest such scams according to your business model. You can take a side on a controversial topic in your niche or rant against a particular topic. These tend to be relatively popular and engage the audience. You are triggering them to take a side, and if they take your side, they believe in you.
Fact and fiction game
Asking your audience what is a fact and which is fiction on matters concerning your niche is another way of getting them talking? They will create debates discussing the topic, and this will keep them well engaged.
Be honest about your mistakes
There is nothing better that excites an audience than honesty. By sharing your story about your mistakes, how you screwed up, and showing your faults, the audience will also open up and share their mistakes as they feel you have something in common. This will go a long way in boosting your social media engagement.
Ask for advice
People love sharing their advice and telling people what to do. You can ask your audience to advise you concerning your mistakes or other business aspects. Users love it when someone is considerate about their views and advice. If you have a problem, ask them about their thoughts and opinions. You could actually get some good advice for your business from the audience.
The ‘what if’ game
Here, you will be asking your audience to imagine stories. What if they could do this and that? You are encouraging them to tell a deeper story by imagining stuff. This will go a long way in creating conversation and boosting your engagement.
Post Inspiring quotes
Most businesses get massive success with these types of posts. By posting inspiring quotes on your social media platforms now and then, they will gain you a pretty good impact on engagement levels.
Share their stories
Inviting people to share their journey and experiences tailored to your niche. People love talking about themselves, so when you invite them to do that, you give them a platform and make them feel appreciated.
Show behind the scenes
Most social media users follow brands that display their real faces and behind the scenes. One way of building engagement with your audience is showing your real self by posting photos of you as a person. The potential customers feel more free, open, and have more confidence in your brand if they know the real you as a person. You can also post short videos showing a part of life, your routines, and behind the scenes.
Teaser posts
You can consider using tease photos and videos to keep the audience anticipating a particular business post or event. For instance, if you have a blog video that you think your audience will be excited about, you can announce it a couple of days or hours before, tell them about the benefits of watching the video and why they need to check it out. This will build up the anticipation.
Post frequently and consistently
Ensuring your social media channels are constantly active is essential in showing your audience you are on the latest trend and up to date. This means you should ensure you post content frequently to keep the audience up to date. Content is always being posted, so for most marketing campaigns, posting two times spread throughout the day, morning and evening, is the best strategy for ensuring social media users see the content. Choose the social media platforms that you are comfortable with and stick with them. For consistency, you can use two tools, Buffer or Hootsuite, to get you posting consistently.
Conclusion
With millions of social media platform users today, it is likely that most of your customers are already interacting with various brands, including your competitors, through social media platforms. So if you are not interacting with your audience through social media, you are missing out greatly. We hope that these social media engagement tips will help grow your business on online social platforms and boost your sale conversion rates.