5 ways to stay engaged on social media

The common question a few years ago, “why should our business use social media?” is now being replaced with “how can our business grow with social media marketing?”. Posting frequently keeps your customers informed and engaged - investing in social media is investing in the relationship you have with your customers. 

Staying engaged on social media is the best way to tap into the massive potential reach to increase your brand awareness, attract leads and build a community for your customers. 

Our 5 tips below will help your business stay engaged on social media:

1. Have a strategy in place

Social media is about understanding what your audience wants and providing to them in a way they enjoy and understand. Identifying your resources and goals will help you decide what to post and how often. Assign responsibility of managing social media channels to one or more people in your business and put together a social media policy to determine what tone of voice you will use and how you will respond to messages and comments.   

2. Post consistently

Posting content every day isn’t going to provide miracles - think quality over quantity. It’s good to post regularly, but not just for the sake of posting regularly. Each post should aim to achieve a goal and it shouldn't always be a sale (80% of your content should be entertaining or informing, while the other 20% can be sales focused). A variety of content that inspires, informs and entertains works well and every so often a post can direct an engaged audience where to go to learn more or to make a purchase. Your content should have consistency in tone of voice and messaging while providing variety to keep your audience interested. 

3. Create and curate 

Creating content is producing content for the purpose of being used on your social media channels and curating content is using content produced by other people in your social media channels. Sharing content from other sites to your page can be easy and often helpful, but native content is the way to go. Platforms favour showing original content on your page (ie. uploading a video directly to Facebook not linking to Youtube). Curating content works well when sharing industry news and when your business has limited resources to create original content. 

All content your page publishes should provide value to the people reading it. This gives your audience a reason to come back and gives them something to engage with.

4. Speak with your audience

It’s important to include your audience, fans and current customers in your social media content. Ask for feedback, comments and be sure to respond to any you receive, it is 'social' media after all.  The feedback you get from customers can go along way to understanding the pain points of your customers to help you provide the best possible solutions and service for them.

​5. Become familiar with the different channels

Each channel has its own features, strengths, weaknesses and methods of sharing. Spending some time on the channels as a user is a good way to become familiar with each channel. Facebook is the most known and has many options for sharing different types of content. Instagram is an image and video based platform used on mobile. It has great discoverability but you can’t share links, it’s great for brand awareness more so than traffic. Linkedin is a professional platform with a B2B audience and is a great place to share informational content. These are just three of the many channels available, others include; Youtube, Twitter, Snapchat and Pinterest + many more. Content should be tailored to each channel and the different ways users engage with it. 

There is a lot of potential on social media for small businesses to grow with relatively low resources. Staying engaged on social media is important to your businesses social media strategy and overall digital marketing plan. Applying these five tips will help your business succeed with social media. 

Don’t have the time to manage your social media on top of your day to day tasks? That’s where I can help! Outsourcing your social media management could be what your business needs to grow online. 

Reach out if you’d like to discuss further how your business can grow with a solid social media strategy.