James Timpson
Social media is very much a part of everyday life for consumers all over the world, and businesses are capitalizing on this by placing great emphasis on social media marketing.
Your business could be at a major disadvantage over competitors if you aren’t on social.
At the heart of social media marketing is engagement.
You’ll see countless businesses on social media, but they don’t all place enough emphasis on engagement. Sure, it’s great to have 10,000 likes on a page, but if only five of those actually engage with your content then the bulk of your likes are worthless.
In the following paragraphs we’ll cover the key things you need to know about producing engaging and share-worthy content on social media. Hopefully we can help you to get one up over the competition!
What do we mean by engagement?
A great place to start is determining what mean by engagement and why it is so important. Engagement actions will vary from platform to platform, but essentially it is anytime that someone interacts with your content.
Let’s use Facebook as an example.
Engagement is determined as anytime someone clicks, likes, comments, or shares your posts. By getting a user to complete such an action, you are generating a relationship with them and also increasing the exposure of your business because the person’s friends will see the engagement in their news feeds.
So, its safe to say that engagement is at the core of everything when it comes to social media marketing and if you aren’t posting engaging content, you are simply wasting your time.
Content that sparks engagement
Now that you have an understanding of what engagement is, the next step is to tell you about a few ways to spark engagement amongst your audience.
Before you think about writing content for social media, make sure that all your profiles are as complete as possible, this social media cheat sheet is a great resource to get you started.
Questions
One of the easiest ways to spark engagement is to post a question to your audience.
The key here is to think of a question that will make the reader think while simultaneously making it easy for them to answer.
Closed questions that require a yes or no answer tend to be the best; people just don’t have the time to write an essay if you ask a complex question.
Quotes
Everyone loves a good quote, and if you search online you’ll find countless creative images that are centred on a meaningful quote.
If you can find a few of these that are relevant to your audience, post it and ask them to click ‘like’ or retweet the post if they agree.
Just by asking your audience to do something they’ll be more inclined to do it.
Competitions
People like a good competition; in fact it has been proven that many people opt to follow brands on social media due to potential discounts and competitions.
Think of a prize that is relevant to your business and make it simple for people to enter, asking people to just share a post is often a favored approach.
Polls
Polls are another way of driving engagement quickly.
Much like with the question example, you need to think of something that is relevant to your audience and that will get them thinking.
Try to keep the options concise, four or five should be the maximum.
Well, there you have it. The key to keeping your business alive in this digital age is through driving engagement on social media.
If you are currently marketing your company on social media but aren’t receiving the results you would like, take a closer look at your content strategy and determine if it really is focused on driving engagement.
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