Social media is getting more and more competitive. Everyone wants to capture the huge audience on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others. What really counts isn’t people seeing your posts but actually engaging with them. When your followers like, comment on, or share your posts you build real momentum. Let’s look at the 5 best strategies for creating social media posts that generate more engagement.
1. Stay on the Leading Edge
If you want to pique the interest of your followers, post the very latest news, trends, and issues in your industry. Review the latest books and products on Amazon. Comment on recent news stories, technologies, or product releases. To do this, of course, you must stay current yourself. Set Google Alerts for your leading search terms. Follow blogs and social media accounts of influencers in your field and see what they’re discussing. Attend live seminars or webcasts and report on what you’ve heard.
2. Post Consistently But Not Too Often
To increase engagement, you must post consistently. Otherwise people won’t even see your posts. When you post daily, your followers will start to recognize you and get familiar with you. On the other hand, there’s such a thing as posting too often. If you post to Facebook more than twice per day, you risk annoying your followers and coming across as spammy.
With Twitter, you can post more often because the feed moves so fast that most people don’t see every tweet. Do your own research and some up with a schedule that creates the most engagement for you. Also test to determine what days of the week and time of day your followers are most likely to read your posts.
3. Use Images and Videos
Including images in your content increases views by as much as 94%. People are much more likely to view, comment on, or share images that text. This includes photos, infographics, and memes. In order to capture your audience’s attention, choose images that are compelling and related to your topic. You might get people’s attention with a cute photo of a puppy, but if your business is selling auto parts or booking hotel reservations, this will be of limited use.
Video is an even more powerful tool for engaging followers. One trend worth noting is the popularity of live streaming. With platforms such as Facebook Live, it’s now easy to integrate live video into your social media marketing. Traditional videos are still very effective as well.
4. Hold Contests
Contests are another powerful way to increase social media engagement. Facebook is especially suitable for this, as there are contest apps making it easy to set up your own contests and sweepstakes. One thing to keep in mind is to make sure you abide by Facebook’s TOS when creating contests. For example, it’s not permitted to force people to share your post in order to enter the contest.
If you have a compelling contest, people will naturally want to share it with their friends. Think of a fun premise for a contest, such as people sending in photos, coming up with clever captions for an existing photo, or voting on something.
5. Invite Your Followers to Engage
One of the simplest ways to get engagement from your followers is to ask for it. Most social media posts leave out this step. Even if people enjoy your post, they’ll usually move on to something else without engaging if you don’t prompt them. A simple rule of carrying on a successful conversation is to ask the other person questions. This is true for social media as well as live interactions.
Simply ending a post with “What do you think about this?” or “Have you had a similar experience?” will often motivate people to reply. Another option is to invite people to click on your link or even like the post. Rather than just telling people to like a post, which comes across as pleading or aggressive, qualify it by saying “If you agree, like and share this post!”
To learn about creating more engaging posts for your social media following, give us a call or send us a note today at Small Dog Creative 661-702-1310!
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