Social media has become a driving force in terms of growing brand awareness for your company and finding your loyal customer base. If you want to convert fans and followers into customers for your products or clients for your services, you’ll want to—and need to boost engagement.
The good news is that you can utilize many free aspects of social media to boost engagement, and you don’t have to jump right into creating ads and paying for likes and clicks.
1. Use Hashtags
If you’ve ever seen the hashtags (#word) on someone’s social media post: e.g., “#productivity” or this: “#workfromanywhere,” the individual writing this hashtag is not just doing it to look cool (usually) or jump on the bandwagon movement.They are using this form to reel in people to their social media sites who share certain interests.
It’s called a hashtag. If you are not using a hashtag properly yet for your social media pages, you need to start trying them out and then watch your metrics to see if this small change in your actions can make a difference in your site visits. Hashtags started popping up on Twitter a few years ago, and now you can use them on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to great effect to boost your business’ visibility.
If you are running a special challenge or promotion, you can create a unique hashtag to allow your audience to follow your updates easily on social media (e.g., #waystowearnewscarf!).
I see many businesses utilizing hashtags on Twitter and Instagram but not enough businesses utilizing this tool on Facebook. Facebook gets a ton of traffic and searches, and if you’re not using hashtags in your posts on FB, you can be missing out on a lot of engagement with your product or service.
When using hashtags, it’s important to have a strategy in mind. For example, you don’t want to share a post on social media and use the hashtag #itsanicedayoutside. For starters, that’s long and doesn’t even make sense unless you are selling photos or paintings of winter scenes. Most people won’t be searching for those words.
Instead, you want to use hashtags that will target your ideal audience and customer. For example, if you run a travel agent business, you may use hashtags like #travel #instatravel #exotictrips #digitalnomad #budgettravel #getouttatown, etc. You can also search for possible hashtag groups online as the trends are updated each year.
2. Use Branded Graphics
Graphics and memes are trendy on social media and usually generate more engagement over posts with text ads only and links. This is a trend that is picking up speed and worth the small extra effort.While you should post images regularly on social media, making them branded images will be even more beneficial for your business. People love visuals, so if you customize graphics to include quotes, fast facts, or other information about your business and use the same fonts, colors, and styles for each image, your audience will become familiar with the visuals and use them to help identify your brand.
3. Commit to a Posting Schedule
Consistency is key. You have to create a posting schedule that works for you and be able to commit to it. If you post three times a day on Facebook for a whole week then fail to post anything else for the remainder of the month, you’ll probably lose other people’s interest. But don’t just be consistent with junk. Make your information the best you can, each time, for your audience.If you commit to your schedule and stick to it, people will start to expect your content on certain days and times and look forward to it.
For example, if you decide to post motivational financial quotes on Mondays, regular updates about your business on Wednesdays, and a helpful tip on Fridays, your audience will have a good idea of when they should head to your social media page and engage with your content.
To make things easier, you can also take advantage of some social media scheduling tools so you can schedule updates ahead of time, so you’re not taking time out of each day to be on your social media profiles.
- Twitter–Hootsuite, Buffer, Tweetdeck, and more.
- Facebook–Facebook has its own built-in scheduling system with analytics for Facebook pages which works pretty well. You can also use Hootsuite and Buffer to schedule updates as well.
- Instagram–Later, and Schedugram (paid)
- Pinterest–BoardBooster (paid) and Tailwind (paid)
- Google Plus and LinkedIn–Buffer
Summary: It’s All About Your Strategy
Social Media is not just used for entertainment purposes and to share videos (although most users don’t know that); business people must understand social media’s crucial advantages. When you catch the vision of what Social Media can do for you with a carefully planned implementation of an effective strategy to increase engagement—keep track of what this does for your numbers—you’ll be more than compensated for your extra effort.Remember to brand your images, use hashtags that will attract your ideal customer or client, and work smart by automating updates and sticking to a consistent schedule.
