7 Tips for Better Engagement on Your Social Platforms
Content marketing is an essential element of any marketing plan. Whether your business sells subscription boxes for housewares or software to other businesses, you need content that explains what you do and why you do it.
Some content is entirely visual. Other pieces of content include a 3-word headline. Still others are thousands of words to go in-depth about your industry to help your audience answer questions and arrive at a purchasing decision.
Social media brings together images, videos, website links and text-based descriptions. And the biggest challenge for brands is that every social media platform is different, requiring unique messaging, perfectly sized images and content that meets your audience’s needs.
Managing content and engaging audiences on social media require careful planning and strategy. Review these 7 tips to get the most out of your social media content marketing efforts.
1. Customize Messages to the Audience and Medium
2. Manage Visuals for Your Posts
3. Think of Social Media Click Throughs When Writing Headlines
4. Use Strategic Hashtags to Improve Reach
5. Recycle Existing Content to Get it in Front of New Followers
6. Allow Analytics to Inform Decision-making
7. Keep a Listing of Your Best Posts and Reuse Accordingly
1. Customize Messages to the Audience and Medium
Most of the time posting the same content across various social media platforms is appropriate. But you can’t copy and paste that content. For example, let’s say you want to bring awareness to your newest blog post. Here’s what that content might look like across platforms.
1. Start with Twitter since it is the platform with the fewest characters and therefore the most constraints. Focus on the most important message about that content. And be picky about which hashtags you use. Don’t forget to leave room for retweets so don’t max out your character limits.
2. Use the Twitter post as the foundation for your Facebook post. Facebook is another platform where links function similarly to Twitter. But here you have more freedom to write what you want, organize it in paragraphs and even add font styles to attract your users to that content or the most important aspects of it.
3. Move on to your LinkedIn post because LinkedIn also allows for longer content in similar formats as Facebook. But here your audience is likely quite different. Their mindset when on LinkedIn is one of professionalism and focus on careers and self-improvement. Keep this in mind as you tailor your content.
4. Transition to Instagram. Because you can’t have links in your posts, you’ll have to be more creative. The visual must speak for itself and you might place more of your blog’s content in the Instagram post, or just highlight content from one heading in your blog article. Then you can place the link in your profile or use a service like Linktree to help your followers find previous links, especially if you post to Instagram regularly. Consider whether the content lends itself to being both newsfeed content and content within your story.
5. Review whether the content fits with your Pinterest following. Blogs are an excellent type of content to post on Pinterest and because Pinterest is a visual search engine, you can also gain a great deal of traffic from this platform. But Pinterest can also consume immense amounts of time from your social media team, which is why some brands opt to focus their efforts in other places where they can interact with their customers more.
The most important thing to think about when developing content for many social media platforms is that you don’t just copy and paste it. Resize images so they attract viewers on each platform and tailor the message to the platform’s needs as well as the audience you have there.
2. Manage Visuals for Your Posts
When evaluating what content to post where, you can reuse the same image across various social media channels in a way you can’t reuse written copy across those channels. But the image has to be right-sized and you need a system for avoiding using the same image for different posts.
Once you’ve used an image, your audience will likely keep on scrolling because they’ve seen it before. Even if the message is different, realize that the image is what your audience will see first. That will dictate whether they stay and read on or if they keep on scrolling or skip your story.
An option for managing social media visuals is to create a Canva account and create a template with all the various size requirements for the social media channels you’ve chosen. Be meticulous about dropping your social media visuals into these templates before posting them to your channels. Right-sized images will have an impact on attracting your target audience.
3. Think of Social Media Click Throughs When Writing Headlines
You should post a variety of content types on your social media. But one type of content you should not overlook is your blogs. Social media can be an excellent way to get more blog readership.
Blog headlines are for more than SEO. You should write your headlines to attract your audience first and foremost. Then you can sprinkle in your target keyword so that your blog is both attractive to your audience and ranks well on search engines.
But before you get too creative and write a click-bait headline that doesn’t accurately describe your blog content, realize that this practice can have negative effects on your relationship with your audience.
You have to deliver on the promises you make with your headline and meta description. This is true about the people you attract with social media and those who see your content within search results. If you fail to deliver on the promises you make in your headlines and descriptions, your audience will bounce quickly and the search engine and social platform will penalize you for creating content that readers don’t enjoy.
Make your headlines interesting without harming your relationships with your audience by also making them accurately describe what the reader will learn about if they click.
4. Use Strategic Hashtags to Improve Reach
Hashtags are powerful tools for reaching your audience. People who don’t follow your pages yet can discover your content through the hashtags that they follow.
When generating hashtags for a post, consider more than just the subject matter. For example, the two areas of subject matter that this blog focuses on are social media and content marketing. But before businesses know that they need social media and content marketing to help them grow, they know that they need increased website traffic and stronger customer relationships.
Hashtag your content for both the clear subject matter and a level or two above the subject matter that matches what your customers might be looking for answers to before they arrive at the answer.
5. Recycle Existing Content to Get it in Front of New Followers
On average, developing a post for social media from start to finish takes two hours. When you stop to think about it, that’s an enormous time investment in one small piece of content.
Once you’ve invested all that time, you need to make the most of it, which means you should recycle old posts that resonated with your audience. That doesn’t mean you should post them word-for-word or that you should recycle them next week.
Repurposing old content can allow you to reach new followers who weren’t around the first time you posted it. But you should only repost the content every few months. And try to develop new visuals and highlight new aspects of your post.
And as you consider how to recycle old content on your social media channels, don’t forget to do the same on other platforms, such as within email marketing. Add the content to your “related posts” section of your next newsletter and incorporate it into your customer journey emails when you know it’s a pillar post or relevant to helping the buyer learn more about who you are and what you do.
6. Allow Analytics to Inform Decision-making
You have to be constantly learning about your audience on every social platform. Analytics are telling you something, but you have to dig in and pay attention to receive the message.
Don’t look at your analytics every day because you’ll struggle to see the big picture. But you should look monthly, quarterly and yearly to better understand the impacts your content has on your organization.
Learn more about who your audience is, when they like to consume your content and what topics resonate with them the best.
Then adjust your social strategy to match these expectations. If videos are resonating well, post more videos. On another platform, you might notice memes are really helping to drive home your message, so post more memes there and fewer videos.
It will be an ever-changing strategy, but leaving room for that change will help you reach the largest number of people with your message.
7. Keep a List of Your Best Posts and Reuse Accordingly
While reviewing your analytics, look for your best posts. Put those posts into a document somewhere so you can learn from them and include them in your reposting strategy.
It’s easy to review analytics and then forget the lessons learned a few weeks or even months later. Keeping a list of posts that attracted and engaged your audience will help you replicate that experience and draw your audience in with your new content.
At Design Positive, we help brands make new friends by engaging their audience across various platforms with engaging visuals, while doing it all in an access-to-all approach.
