In the world of social media marketing it’s pretty common for brands to play the low-effort game of just churning out Tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts, Linkedin updates, etc at high volume. There’s a better way. Everything your brand puts out into the social media environment should be rooted in two things: providing value and creating engagement.
VALUE
Just pumping out posts that are “salesy”, e.g. continually pushing your products and services, is a great way to turn off your audience. People will start to tune you out. To get and keep your audience’s attention you have to provide value. Why should they pay attention? What’s in it for them to follow you and read the content you’re putting out? The key is be creative. A few ideas:
- Be fun. Be different. Make people smile or laugh.
- Offer tips, tricks and advice that your audience can actually benefit from.
- Be visual. Use eye catching images and compelling videos.
- Get personal, offer a peek behind the scenes of your business.
- Feature your customers.
- Encourage and inspire. There’s a lot of negativity in today’s social media environment, give your audience positivity.
- Ask and answer (more on this below).
Always remember the underlying “What’s In It For Me?” rule when generating social content.
ENGAGEMENT
While you’re providing value, you need to ensure that you’re attempting to engage with your audience. The best social media strategy is baeed on building relationships The word “engagement” gets thrown around a lot, but few brands actually know how to achieve it. Engagement just isn’t easy to produce. You have to be, well, engaging. What does that mean?
- Ask questions.
- Invite people to ask you questions.
- Create polls and surveys.
- Inspire reaction. Humor is a great way to achieve this goal.
- Be expressive: try to grab attention, make people think and create conversation.
- ALWAYS reply to comments. Continue the conversation!
An important piece of the puzzle is to make sure utilize tools to monitor and analyze the value you’re providing to your audience and the resulting engagement on your social media properties. Keep an eye out for which tools we recommend and how to use them in the coming weeks. We’ll also be blogging about specific ways to provide value to and engage with your social media audience, and examples of brands that are good at it, in the coming weeks.