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3 Tips to improve your social media engagement

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Do your social media posts leave you feeling like you are shouting into the abyss? Are you posting regularly, yet not attracting the type of engagement you expect? Posting alone is not enough to get growth in followers or increased profitability. If you’ve realized this, read on for our tips for improving your social media engagement…

1. Be Authentic with Local Content

  • We believe followers are more likely to engage with local and authentic content. If you’re having a sale on a skin care line, take a selfie with the products or record a video talking about why you think they’re superb for patients with sun damage. Explain and highlight the deal you’re offering. When you, as the owner or manager, speak, your followers will pay more attention.
  • While not every post can contain the world’s most creative custom videography, do avoid using obvious stock photography. That stock photo of the woman in a field of daisies has been used by thousands of other companies. Chances are, your followers know it’s fake, feel sold, and lose interest in your brand. Indeed, as buyers become more sophisticated and social media marketing guru volume grows, the barrier to entry for acceptable posts of self-respecting brands grows. Clients simply only follow and purchase from brands that differentiate, entertain, and stick to their authentic truth.
  • The concept of brand ambassadors is not new. Even the idea of hiring social media influencers, in our rapidly changing social media landscape, has gone from cutting edge to mainstream. In a half cutting-edge, half throwback way, featuring real happy customers talking about your services or products who are not influencers and are simply true raving fans is just the dose of old school authenticity many social media feeds need.
  • Utilize local content, hashtags, and hat tips (even if not directly related to your business). Whether it is a picture of the leaves changing outside of your office, a boomerang of you eating at your favorite lunch establishment, or a post congratulating the local high school on their big win, people like engaging with local flavored content. While some with a million followers sit on their pedestal writing books about social media that preach not to over-utilize hashtags, it has been our experience at iScreamSocialMedia that more hat tips and hashtags, if done tastefully, add to viewership and exposure, followers and sales.

2. Quality over Quantity of Social Media Content

Re-posting immediately is so temping, isn’t it?! It’s Tuesday and your creativity has been wiped out after an argument with an employee. Just then, you phone dings. One of your customers is a model and just texted you a selfie wearing the new dress they just purchased. Don’t post it, yet! Ask yourself key questions. Is the photo nicely framed? Is it in beautiful lighting and high-resolution taken with a quality camera or iPhone? Would you buy this dress based on seeing this photo? If that grainy, pixelated mess is doing nothing for the aesthetics of your feed, simply ask your customer to take another shot in better lighting, to send it to you in a different format to avoid further reducing quality, or just thank them but don’t use the photo at all. Staying true to your brand and presenting your products in their best light is more important than turning your feed into a photo sharing app for your customers. In most cases, you can get a better photo by simply saying “Thank you so much! This made my day. I’d love to post a photo similar to this for social media and I’ll be happy to tag you if you’d like. At the risk of asking for three minutes of your day, as the photo you sent in came through a bit grainy, would you be kind enough to take one more photo or a few more with great lighting and a solid backdrop. I just want to ensure our followers can see how amazing you look in this piece!”

3. Respond to Comments and Messages Within 24 hours

Chances are that user who asked a question in the comments or “slid into your DMs” on Facebook or Instagram seeking a breast augmentation or information on that vintage Porsche you are selling is messaging more than one business. On the unlikely chance they aren’t, they definitely will be when you don’t respond for a week. Have one of your employees respond to direct messages (DMs) and comments AT LEAST once a day. Better yet, have a phone in your office logged into all your accounts with notifications set up in order to respond immediately. You wouldn’t ignore a phone call from a customer for a week, so why would you ignore an Instagram comment? As social media becomes a go-to source for information, research, and e-commerce, it is important to treat every comment as a new lead.

Gaining engagement from your followers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and other social media feeds is an in-depth process. By focusing on authentic, local content (yes, professional companies have secret ways to make it local even if they create your posts) that represents your brand well and is followed up on expeditiously, you can differentiate from the competition and make your social media profitable.

To learn more about how we can help grow your social media engagement reach out to us at GetTheScoop@iScreamSocialMedia.com.