With over 2 billion active users on social media, consumers are looking to engage with their favorite brands on these social sites.
Promoting your local business by leveraging social media is the best way to connect with your customers, increase brand awareness, and generate traffic to your site.
When executed correctly, the benefits to social media are overwhelming and can create amazing results in your marketing with small investments.
The good news is that it’s not hard to begin your social media strategy to bring more exposure to your business. The key is sharing compelling content that compels your audience to stop, look, and engage.
In fact, here are three big, yet simple, ways on how you can boost social media engagement for your local business.
#1 Be Clear on Your Audience
The first step to a strong social media strategy is having a clear understanding of your market. This includes knowing their pains, problems, challenges, and most impressing questions to position your content as the solution. You will be viewed as an expert as you continue to share quality-rich content that enriches their lives.
Therefore, your impulse would probably be to research your audience to publish content that solves problems, making your marketing more effective. But what I recommend is...
Start sending out email campaigns and track what they click. DOING is the fastest way to get feedback and improve.
#2 Share Your Blog Content
Social media loves blog posts! If you take a look at the trending section in Facebook or popular articles on social sites, you’ll notice that they’re linked to blogs.
Sharing your blog content on your social sites drives tremendous traffic to your site, improving your SEO ranking and expert status. If you take 30 seconds to go live and speak about your blog, it's going to drastically improve where Facebook places your content.
And if no video, be sure to use compelling images that complement your blog content in your social publishing. Images simply rock on social media so use them to your advantage! They take up more real estate, and get more clicks than posts without an image.
Share content on each platform with native video or images.
#3 Leverage Social Live-Streaming Video Platform
Did you know that people spend 3 times longer watching live video compared to one that's pre-recorded?
Using live-streaming platforms like Facebook Live, Periscope, and Instagram Stories, are great assets to your social strategy as you’re able to connect directly with your followers and catch their attention right in the newsfeed.
You can leverage live-streaming to delve deeper into a popular blog post, host a Q&A session to give your viewers the opportunity to ask questions in real-time, or take your audience backstage at a live event. The ideas are endless in using live video to engage your audience.
So what's next?
Implementing these tips will significantly improve engagement with your social media followers, keeping them in-tuned with your brand. You’ll notice an increase in shares, likes, comments, and conversions…all key elements to a working social media strategy!
If you need help launching your website and drafting monthly blog posts, learn how we can help here.
What other social media tips are you using that fosters social engagement? Please share what’s working for you in the comments below.
Originally posted at www.handshakin.com
