How to create social media content that engages and resonates with your audience.
Most Ottawa companies have figured out by now that the use of social media is a must for their online marketing campaign. In fact, social media is one of the best methods of interacting and engaging directly with consumers. However, you need to understand that much more goes into the use of social media than just posting questions and responses.
For example asking what consumers liked about your newest product is a fine way to interact and engage with your followers, but eventually you’re going to have to provide them with something of worth for them to continue following you and avoid losing interest. This is done by providing your followers with high quality social media content. There are numerous different types of social media content that you can use to engage your consumers, the following are just a few ideas.
Use Them Peepers
Visual content is some of the most successfully engaging as it’s something that followers will often share with their own social circles, whether it’s liking it on Facebook or re-tweeting it on Twitter. Choose pictures that relate to your brand in some way. If your company has a brand identity that is relaxed and care-free, don’t post photographs of businessmen in suits as this is contradictory to your image (unless it’s with a sense of irony or as a joke and the title of the photograph makes this clear).
“Once Upon a Time…”
Stories that relate to your products or services are a great way to engage your followers. Don’t be afraid to use some of your life experiences in order to help build up your online personality. Just make sure that it is in line with your brand identity and your brand’s voice and that the story is the right length. Stories are a fantastic way to draw followers in and to build or further relationships with the consumer, but make sure that they aren’t too long or you’ll lose them (online users are very wary of huge blocks of text). Be sure to ask for a response to your story – you can even ask your followers to share similar stories of their own. In fact, you can simply post a prompt asking followers to share stories relating to your product or service and you’ll get content made for you!
Hold Video Contests
Consumers have easy access to video these days now that most mobile phones come with video recording capabilities. Not only do consumers love making videos of themselves and their family and friends, they also love watching them. By holding a video contest, you’ll be incorporating both. You can encourage followers to post videos that they’ve made and then to vote on the best ones. Provide a topic for the video and a clear set of rules and there’s a good chance you’ll end up engaging hundreds of followers to enter the competition and even more to take part in the results.
Consistency is Key
Not everything you do has to be a competition, but some companies will ask trivia questions on a daily basis. There doesn’t have to be a prize involved – it’s just a fun way to engage followers. If you ask trivia questions at the same time and provide the answer at the same each time you do it, you’ll find that you’ll attract a group of followers that visit your page regularly in order to view the question, post and then view the answer – thereby increasing your engagement with them.
There are other ways to post recurring content as well. Instead of daily trivia questions, you could post a piece of content by one of your bloggers at the same time every week. High quality content will engage your audience, and if you release it at the same time, you’ll begin noticing that followers who enjoy the blog will log in and check your page for that content at the same time you release it each week – almost like tuning in for your favorite TV show every week!
Engaging your followers is one of the best ways that you can build brand loyalty, no matter what social channel you are using. These social media content ideas have been proven as excellent ways to engage your followers. However, just because they work for some companies doesn’t mean they’ll automatically work for yours. Every buyer persona is different, after all. This means that you should pay attention to your analytics in order to figure out which social media content strategy is the most effective for you – you don’t want to waste your resources on social media content that isn’t engaging your followers after all.
