Tabitha Jean Naylor
It’s common knowledge that employing right social media tactics can make a huge difference for a small business. If you’re finding it hard to get people to engage with your small business on social media, maybe you don’t understand which tactics to try as it can be confusing considering the vast amount of info online regarding social engagement. Here are three marketing tactics designed to boost engagement that get right to the point for easy understanding and deployment. Each of these tips is designed to increase engagement and take your social media interaction, traffic and shares from zero to 100!
Ask Your Facebook Followers Questions
Many small businesses are not seeing the results they want from their Facebook campaigns so if you’re one of them, don’t feel bad. With the typical Facebook user seeing an ever-increasing number of status updates and stories in their news feeds, it’s easy for them to overlook your page and scroll right past it. It’s been proven that Facebook posts that include questions receive far more comments than text-based posts. This is why you need to start asking your followers questions as doing so is a great way to get them to interact with you.
Instead of just asking a question and hitting “enter”, make an interesting post first and then pose your question at the end of the post. This will help increase the number of people who interact with you. Of course, your post needs to be interesting and relevant to your followers. For example, you could provide your followers with a sneak peak at a new product you’re about to offer, write a line or two about that product and then ask what other products your followers would like for you to offer in the future. This tactic is fast, easy and effective as people are much more apt to interact with you when you prompt them to via a question!
Host a Giveaway
Who doesn’t love winning something for free? Nobody, that’s who! An easy and effective way of increasing engagement on social media is to host a giveaway. Just be sure the item you are offering as the prize is something people will want. It’s best for the prize to be one of your own products or services but it could be something else people would be excited to win such as a tablet computer. Nowadays, there are numerous free giveaway platforms that integrate with social media like Rafflecopter and PromoSimple and the good news is they’re all easy to use!
When hosting a giveaway, be sure to follow the particular social network’s policies and don’t forget to promote the winners on all your social channels for more exposure. As a part of the giveaway, you could require that the participants visit your site and choose a favorite product or service from a particular category wherein they must leave a comment explaining why they love that item. You also could require that participants follow or subscribe to your other social channels. And, when you require that the participants “like” and share your giveaway, you’d also be boosting awareness and engagement even more.
Incorporate Photos
It’s been found that the most-shared and liked Facebook posts are those consisting of or including photos. Even using photos in tweets can help tremendously in getting re-tweets as online audiences like visuals as they’re easy to consume and something people can relate to. When you incorporate photos in your social media posts, they’ll grab the attention of your followers as they scroll through their social feeds. Visuals are more interesting than words on a screen and people can grasp the meaning from an image faster than they can by reading sentences. Photos also stimulate emotions more effectively and quicker than words which helps prompt people to take action faster than text.
It doesn’t matter if you sell software, insurance or pet products – you have something tangible to exhibit in your social media stream. Instead of just talking about what you sell, show it off instead and the more photos the better! Just make sure the photos you use are of the highest quality and optimized for the social channels you’re using them on. If you are using photos belonging to someone else, you need to get permission to use them or face getting yourself in hot water.
Because people like to see the faces behind the brand, post photos of yourself and your team. Are you located in a great brick-and-mortar location? Then snap a few photos of your business and share them with your audience. Another great idea is to provide your followers with a special peek behind the scenes of your office space or production site so they can see what goes on behind closed doors. Small businesses that regularly incorporate photos into their social streams enjoy greater social engagement than their non-photo sharing counterparts. So get busy with that camera and post some great visuals for your fans and followers to enjoy, comment on and share!
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