Social media can still be considered the Wild West for advertising, but don’t let that scare you away. A lot of business owners do see the value in social media and are using it, but they aren’t doing it right. They don’t necessarily know how to increase engagement in the most effective way and an increase in engagement means more people are paying attention to your brand. Here are a few tips to further your brand by increasing user engagement.
Be Yourself
People like when brands humanize themselves; it creates a relatable feel to your brand, which can drive sales. It really is as easy as just being yourself. Take a break from the monotonous “buy our product” posts and instead fill your Facebook and Twitter posts every so often with what’s going on with your company. Do a profile on an employee, post pictures of the office, have an employee live tweet or Snapchat a “day in the life of.”
Share Relevant Content
Scour the internet for articles about your businesses industry and share those posts. For example: say you own a pool company, share a post that might be “Top 5 Ways To Cool Off This Summer.” Or “Pool Cleaning Tips.” This makes your brand more resourceful to your target audience.
Keep It Light
You don’t want to only be posting about your business and what it can do for others and why a client should hire you or visit your store, etc. Keep it fresh by sharing jokes and keeping up with recent internet trends; a good example of this would be memes. You can also share videos to your page that have gone viral and are popular at the moment. Doing this will also increase your chances of your post getting shared, which can drive new potential followers to your Facebook or Twitter page where they will see information about your company such as what you do, your phone number and website. It’s all about driving traffic. The only potential issue with sharing memes or viral videos is that they are only popular for a limited amount of time, so you have to hop on them quick.
Your light hearted posts can even possibly go viral. Think back to the Super Bowl blackout in 2013 when Oreo posted the now famous Twitter post right as the lights went out in the stadium, “you can still dunk in the dark.” The post (that was made for free by the way) reached not only their current followers at the time, but millions of other people because it went viral. The post got 15 thousand likes on Twitter. By taking advantage of a real-time situation, Oreo essentially got hundreds of thousand of reach from the post and an incredible ROI by simply keeping it light and being timely with its post.
Think of your business page as your personal feed. What do/would you share to your friends? When you think like that, it’s easier to make content that isn’t all about selling your product or brand.
Be Timely & Regular With Posts
To stay active in the minds of your audience, you have to be active yourself. We suggest posting one to two times daily for Facebook and Instagram, twice if you are a medium-sized brand. For Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram Stories you should be posting even more frequently. If a holiday is coming up, take advantage of that and make some of your posts about said holiday a few days before. On the day of the holiday you can post a simple message saying something like “we hope you had a great (holiday here)”.
In a previous blog post, I talked about why hiring a marketing agency to do your social media is better for you. Agencies have access to different tools and software that you might not have access to or even be able to afford on your own. Access to these tools can benefit you greatly. Marketing agencies can provide multiple services for your social media such as providing analytics, (the kind that dives much deeper than what free analytics do) all the way to writing social media posts out weeks, even months out ahead of time and queuing them up to post at a certain time and day by using special software so you won’t ever miss a post. This allows you to work more efficiently, so you can focus on your subject matter expertise instead of marketing your business!
Giveaways & Contests
This can be a fun and fresh experience for your followers. It makes the user feel like he or she is a part of the brand. Take for example the contest “Do Us A Flavor” that Lay’s Potato Chips does through social media. Lay’s asks users to “do them a flavor” and “create” a new flavor of potato chip. The creator of the winning chip flavor that gets picked for Lay’s to use gets a 1 million dollar prize. This of course creates competition between users on the various social media platforms the contest is run on and drives traffic to the Lay’s website where the “creators” input their information for their new chip flavor.
You don’t have to be a large corporation or have a large prize to have a competition with your followers though. The prize can be something as simple as a gift card to the business you own, a small cash prize or anything else you can think of! The competition you create can be themed to your brand too! For example, say you’re a company that sells office supplies. Your competition can be something as simple as asking followers to take a picture of someone “who has the messiest desk.” Or if you’re a company that sells pet supplies, you could have a contest that’s “dress your pet in the best outfit you can create from our selection at X Pet Store and post it to our Facebook page and the post with the most likes wins a $50 gift card to our store.” The people who have posted their pictures for your contest can then be encouraged to share his or her post on their personal pages asking their friends and followers to go like the photo submitted so he or she can gain the most likes to win. So this means that competitions and giveaways can also encourage new visitors to your page, which can result in more likes and a larger reach for the future.
Competitions are great conversation starters as well and we all know word-of-mouth advertising is incredibly effective. The ROI on social media is excellent because there are no costs for retweets or likes. Social media is at no cost to join so they can be a potentially zero dollar investment (if you aren’t participating in boosted posts and the like,) this makes ANY return on social media great!
Customer Service
As with any industry, customer service is incredibly important. Good or bad customer service can possibly make or break a brand.
Anytime a customer engages your page, whether it’s a like, comment, share or review be sure to interact back with a thank you or an appropriate comment. If someone posts a negative review, respond to it ASAP and attempt to resolve the situation. By you commenting back on a bad experience, even if the review isn’t changed to a positive one after the situation is fixed, others can see that your brand made an effort to try to resolve the issue and it also shows you care. By interacting with your followers, it encourages further and future engagement with your social media pages. People like to see brands interacting with them, especially when they have had a negative experience. Sometimes, just simply reaching out to the person who is upset can be enough.
If you’ve decided that hiring an outside marketing group is the right decision for you, you have made a step in the right direction toward growing your brand. SYN3RGY Creative has a team of marketing strategy and social media experts and the necessary tools ready to help you and your brand accomplish your goals, give us a call or email today and let’s talk about what’s possible.
