As more businesses look to build their online presence, social media is becoming an even more important tool to engage with your audience.
Social media allows you to connect with your audience on a national scale, as well as locally. With a range of social media platforms, styles and content though, knowing where to begin can be tricky for businesses.
Here are our top tips on how to use social media effectively and engage with your audience.
1. Choose the right platform
With 17 social media platforms, with over 300 million users each, it can be tricky to know where to focus your time and effort. A key thing to remember is that quality is better than quantity. If you only have the time to create and maintain one social profile, then start by putting your focus there.
You should always go where your audience are. If you’re not sure where that is, start by developing target audience personas, which will tell you the platforms your ideal customers regularly engage with.
Common platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, all offer different features:
- If your business is B2B, LinkedIn is likely a great option for you to reach people and build your professional network.
- Facebook can be a great tool for engaging your audience on a consumer level, as well as building your employer brand.
- Twitter prioritises short content, with a focus on conciseness. Your posts need to be snappy and eye catching, but there also needs to be a heavy focus on engaging with others’ posts.
- Instagram is heavily image driven, and that won’t always suit every business. However, this does give you a fresh way to approach your audience with eye catching visuals and short video content.
- Increasingly popular, TikTok revolves around short video content, and it’s one to consider for those brands targeting a younger demographic, with 49% of 18-29 year olds using it in the US alone.
2. Create engaging content
On average, internet users spend 144 minutes a day on social media. While this might seem like a lot of time, social media platforms are inundated with content. You need to stand out. Rather than recycling the same content or focusing entirely on sales pitches, try to create helpful and informative content instead. This could be through blogs, polls, comments on relevant news stories or video content. By avoiding ‘pushy’ sales content, and instead drawing visitors towards you, you can establish yourself as a trustworthy and experienced player in your industry.
3. Get visual
81% of people when reading online skim it. If you have a large block of unbroken text, then it is likely you won’t engage your reader before they move on. To combat this, try to use visual content that doesn’t require your audience to make a large initial time investment, like video, imagery and graphics.
If you have lots of information to share, do it through striking infographics or image-led posts. You can easily create these on free online services, such as Canva. You can also make use of the story and stream functions on the different platforms, which are entirely image/video based. These can also add an extra layer of engagement with your audience, as they encourage interaction in real time.
These are only a few top tips, and as more features are added by developers, social media practices and trends will continue to evolve as they have done for the past decade or so.
For more guidance on how your business can use social media to better engage with your audience, visit: https://kineticpr.co.uk/social-media-services/
Or get in touch.
