You only have a small window of opportunity to get your message across to your audience. Here’s how to grab attention and engage your audience.
Be concise.
Think through the message you are trying to convey, and keep it short. Always use a picture that reflects this as well to grab attention and help communicate tone.
Always review your message and think about it from a potential customer's point of view. Would they be interested in what you're saying? You want content that is easy and fast to consume but is made of gold.
Call to action.
You want your customers to do something. Usually, this is to buy your product or service. Sure, not all the messaging needs to be that direct, but you need to close the deal by having a clear call to action. It could be 'Click on this link', 'Read this blog', 'Got a question, reply to this Tweet' - something which encourages further engagement from your initial message.
A question is a great call to action. When you do have a follower base, ask them questions to keep them engaged. A question gives the audience a clear way to engage and makes it easier for them to consider content they may want to share. For example, if you're a child toy company, get them to share photos of their kids playing with your product, and don't forget to offer an incentive - everyone loves free stuff!
A picture says a thousand words.
It helps you convey tone, is visually appealing and adds context to your post.
Moving pictures say even more. Videos work particularly well for products (as opposed to services). Show people loving your product or service and showing how it works and you remove the mystery, and any perceived risk your customers may have had. A short YouTube clip is 75% more likely to be shared, and the more people who see your product, the better!
Who are you talking to?
A manager cares about different things to a front-line employee, and different messages will appeal to each group. Make sure you are sending the right messages through the right channels to reach the right target. Your CEOs probably care more about increased ROI and your office workers probably care more about making their day to day tasks easier.
Segmenting your market doesn’t have to be hard. Particularly on sponsored posts, you get to choose exactly who you want to see your messages.
Mix it up.
Variety is a winner every time. Naturally, you want to increase your sales, but pumping out sales posts will just get on your readers' nerves.
Consider mixing up your schedule with fun posts, offers, videos of your product being used in hilarious ways, business opportunities as well as product placement. Think outside the box and be creative.
Think ahead.
Create a content calendar. Use it to help you schedule your posts, talk about different things. Set yourself goals of posting once per day, and having at least one fun post a week. Put it all on your calendar.
Did you know that you can even automate your posts? A fine balance is required so your audience still knows that your company is run by humans, not robots. React in real time to real-time events.
Monitor your social accounts regularly. It is a very convenient way for your customers to reach you, and you need to be there for them. Keep your audience engaged through comments. Reply, have fun, and show them your brand’s personality.
Crunch the numbers.
It’s amazing what a bit of research will tell you. Posting your content an hour or two later could increase your traffic way more than you’d expect because it’ll be coming up when your customers are on lunch and engaging rather than while they are working and ignoring social media.
OptimalPeople is an offshoot of OptimalBI, whose main business is data and analytics. We live and breath the stuff. Luckily, when it comes to social – there are piles of tools to help you out, and they’re free! You’d be silly not to use them.
Your platform will likely tell you -
Just to name a few! Check out the analytics on your social accounts, and hook up your website with Google Analytics.
Sponsored content
If you want to reach a wider audience and have something really awesome to say, consider sponsoring your post.
It'll cost you a small amount - you can determine yourself what your budget is for each post. When you sponsor content you get to choose exactly who you want to target, which can be really useful when trying to reach new customers.
In today’s advertising environment it is absolutely vital to include social media in your annual marketing budget. It'll probably be some of the best money you'll spend and has a way higher ROI than things like TV and print advertising for the most product and service types.
Make sure you get the analytics from the sponsored posts, so you know where to focus your money to get the best bang for your buck.
And finally, dot your ‘i’s and cross your ‘t’s.
A badly written sentence is less appealing to readers and will reduce your engagement. Things to check include-
If good England isn’t your strong point try drafting your content in a programme that has decent spell check, or install a programme like Grammarly to check for mistakes in your writing. Get a colleague to read over tweets and captions before you post them, and make sure you check the content as soon as you’ve posted it to make sure it’s all in order.
There you have it! These simple steps will give your content a swift kick up and have you humming all the way to the coffee machine.
