Successful social media marketing takes more than growing your number of followers.
After all, you can have thousands (or millions) of followers, but if you don’t engage them effectively, they’re not likely to act on your offers. You miss out on conversions and sales opportunities.
Whether you’re leveraging social media platforms for B2B marketing, or you’re in the B2C space, you need a solid strategy to engage your audiences on social media and, in turn, transform them into paying and even loyal customers.
Kick start your efforts to gain loads of meaningful audience engagement by following these social media tips and tricks.
1. Follow a Posting Schedule
Creating a schedule helps you post regularly, allowing you to maintain a solid online presence across your social channels.
You can keep churning out fun, interesting, and compelling content for continuous audience engagement with a regular schedule.
However, regularly creating and posting social media content can take a lot of time and effort. Streamline this process using powerful IG tools for marketing with automation features.
One such tool is the Social Media Marketing (SMM) platform Vista Social.
The platform’s sophisticated, modern SMM features let you schedule and manage posting content across social media platforms at peak times and dates easily.
You can also streamline your content posting further using the platform’s Smart Publisher. It can create, curate, and publish content for you based on your set keywords and categories, saving you time and energy and reducing manual tasks.
Vista Social’s other key features include an Inbox to see your messages and a Reviews Management from your connected social channels.
With Vista Social’s reporting and analytics tools, you can schedule and automate generating reports on your social content’s performance.
Choose advanced SMM platforms to help you streamline planning, creating, and publishing your content regularly to increase engagement rates.
2. Entice Audiences to Share UGC
User-Generated Content (UGC) is visual content (or other creatives) that social media users create that often features your brand, product, services, etc.
UGC can help you connect with and engage your audiences better with the right approach since it encourages interactions with your brand while letting users show off their content.
Follow these tips to help you develop a strategy to entice social media audiences to create and share UGC.
Use a Compelling CTA and Offer Incentives.
Encourage UGC with a compelling Call-to-Action (CTA) that your audiences can’t help but click and include exciting offers.
For example, you can ask IG users to share images or reels of their Outfit of the Day (OOTD) using products bought from your store and provide discount coupons or gifts for their next purchase.
Use Relevant Hashtags.
Include branded and relevant hashtags when sharing UGC. It helps make your content searchable, drawing more eyeballs to the UGC and, in turn, your profile and brand.
Strategically using hashtags can also inspire audiences to act on your offers—from joining your contests and events and signing up for an account on your website to buying your products.
For instance, you can include branded hashtags when sharing UGC. GoPro’s shared UGC on Instagram with the #GoPro in the description is a classic example of this.
Create a content development approach that includes UGC campaign strategies. It can help boost your engagement rates and, ultimately, conversions and sales.
3. Publish Stunning Visual Content
It’s not enough to simply post images, videos, and other visual content types across your social media channels.
Your visual content has to capture your audience’s attention and evoke emotions or compel viewers into action to help you engage them effectively.
Create stunning and captivating visual content, including funny GIFs and engaging videos, with these quick tips.
Know the Basics of Creating Visual Content.
Throwing in creative aspects can make your content unique and eye-catching, but it’s also crucial to follow the general rules and standards of visual content creation.
For example, good visual content design practices to follow include using proper shape, size, and color contrasts and ensuring balance and alignment in your graphic elements.
Create a Visual Content Plan.
Develop a plan to determine your content’s topic or focus, how you will design and develop it, the social media channels where you will publish it, and your distribution strategy.
Streamline this process using nifty project task management software.
For instance, Asana helps you plan, check the task progress, and collaborate with team members on your visual content creation projects in one place.
The platform allows you to stay on top of your projects to accomplish tasks more efficiently.
Establish a Consistent Visual Brand.
Besides making high-quality visuals, ensure your social media content reflects your brand for better awareness and recognition.
Use the same brand elements, such as including your logo and using a standard font, in your designs to develop trust with your audience while reinforcing your brand identity.
Leverage the right strategies and tools to create engaging visual content that your social media audiences can’t help but like, comment, and share.
4. Respond to Your Audiences
Don’t limit your social media audience interactions to sending replies via popular Artificial Intelligence or AI customer service chatbots on Facebook and your website.
Take audience interactions to the next level by responding to comments, re-tweets, mentions, shoutouts, etc., to better engage and connect with your followers.
For example, you can post trending or fun topics and jump into conversations with your audiences in the comment section for continuous (and sometimes hilarious) interactions.
The Facebook post from Wendy’s is a great example of this.
Let your followers know you’re more than a faceless brand by responding to their comments and interacting with them.
Doing so helps make your brand more friendly, relatable, and “human,” which is great for establishing trust with your audiences, building relationships, and driving engagement.
If you use robust user story software, gain some data, insights, and perspective from customers across multiple demographics to assess how specific audience groups can use and benefit from the product.
Use the insights to start conversations on social media around your product. Leverage the opportunity to interact with and engage audiences by responding to their comments.
5. Leverage Social Media Engagement Apps
Your efforts to engage your social media audiences can take a huge amount of time and energy.
Simplify and streamline your audience engagement initiatives by equipping your team with the right tools, such as:
Video Editing Apps.
Creating stunning and engaging videos for social media doesn’t have to be rocket science with the right apps. Utilize video editing tools you already have, such as using your iPhone to speed up your videos and the built-in features to add filters, trim, and adjust your videos.
Photo Editors.
Leverage easy-to-use photo editing apps to adjust and edit your photos with ease—from adding effects and transitions to animating several elements. Robust photo editors help ensure you create high-quality images for your social media marketing campaigns to engage your audiences effectively.
Skyrocket Your Audience Engagement
Take your social media marketing efforts to the next level by following the tips above. Doing so helps you grow your audience while driving serious audience engagement.
The more audiences you engage, the better your chances of encouraging them to act on your offers and, in turn, convert them into paying and loyal customers.
Kickoff your efforts with the tips in this guide, and you’ll be driving an insane amount of engagement (and conversions and sales) in no time.
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