Everyone knows that, in this day and age, it is very important to create highly engaging social media content in order to attract potential customers and keep the old ones. Together with its popularity, social media’s usefulness in terms of marketing has risen too, making it impossible to ignore if you want the best for your business. Without doubt, social media is among the best ways to advertise a business, but how to do that in a way that will draw the attention of potential customers?
Visuals > text
As this kind of marketing leaves a lot of room for creative solutions, the possibilities are manifold. We will, however, share with you a few tried and tested methods. The first one involves visuals. Namely, people are more drawn to posts that include pictures, as most of them are put off by having to read a lot of text on social media. This doesn’t mean that you have to communicate exclusively with pictures, but what you can do is place the text within the picture.
Not only do people prefer this way of marketing, but primarily visual posts are much more likely to go viral. Empirically speaking, you will receive much more attention, quantified by more shares, likes, and so on.
However, just focusing on the visuals is not enough – those visuals will also have to be of a high-quality. Don’t forget that all the visuals you use will stand for your brand. If they are not attractive enough, or they seem cheap and amateurish, the customers will associate the same traits with your brand. While several different types of brand development strategies exist, one thing they all have in common is that none of the elements you use shouldn’t go below a certain level of quality.
If you can’t afford to design your own visuals, stock photography websites, such as Pixabay or Pexels, are a good place to look for high-quality pictures. Whatever you do, don’t just pick images you’ve found on Google, because they are protected under the copyright laws and using them might get you sued.
Share positive reviews and testimonials
Another way to create engaging social media content is to share positive reviews and impressions. If you’re wondering how to increase customer base, you should know that customers have a tendency to trust the reviews they’ve found online as if they were coming from the people they know personally.
So, use this to your advantage! If you’ve recently had satisfied customers, you don’t have to wait for them to post their positive experiences on their own; you can ask them to write a line or two if they have the time. A lot of people who were satisfied with your services will happily oblige, attracting you new customers in the process.
If you think that you have been providing a high-quality service for an extended period of time and that you’ve had many happy customers, you can even organize a campaign and ask your followers to share their thoughts on your business. Provided that they’ve had a positive experience with your company, many of them will praise your business.
Organize giveaways and coordinate your email and social media campaigns
Having mostly visual posts and sharing customer reviews, however, is not enough if you want to create engaging social media content. The next thing you can do is run contests and gift free things that are related to your brand, such as t-shirts with your business’ logo printed on them. Or, you can offer discounts or even free services to the lucky winners.
A good way to set up such contests is to ask the people to like your page/profile and provide their email addresses. In fact, about one-third of all people who have liked a page on social media have done so because of an opportunity to receive free products and/or services.
This means that you will definitely attract plenty of new followers this way, and more followers mean more potential customers. What’s more, you can later use their email addresses for different kinds of marketing too.
And while we’re talking about emails, when connected to social media, email marketing can be a very valuable tool as well. When you’re sending emails to your subscribers, adding social media buttons to those messages will drastically increase your brand’s social media popularity. What’s more, sending emails whose purpose is specifically to attract new followers is also highly recommended. If you ask your subscribers to follow you in a nicely designed email (remember, you can use visuals in emails too), you can be sure that many of them will be happy to do so.
Implement hashtags in your overall social media strategy
Finally, you will also need to learn how to use hashtags in a way that will complement your efforts to create engaging social media content. Giving sufficient thought to how you are going to use your hashtags is a must, as using them somewhat randomly won’t do you much good.
Focus on coming up with creative hashtags that will set you apart from the competition. Having memorable hashtags will get you one step closer to having a memorable business. At the same time, you will need to know exactly which aspect of your business will the specific hashtags market. Having memorable hashtags isn’t enough; they also need to have a purpose in your social media marketing campaign.
However, in an effort to create an interesting hashtag, make sure that you don’t go too far – hashtags should be simple and concise. They also shouldn’t have any punctuations nor spaces, and there shouldn’t be too many of them in one post. Basically, be creative and put in as much effort as you can, but also be careful and always keep things simple.
Additional tips on how to create engaging social media content
We’ll conclude this post with some quick tips & tricks:
- Even if you’re not accustomed to using emoticons in your private conversations, they can be a great way to connect with the potential customers, especially if they’re younger. Emoticons can also make your posts more interesting and lighter.
- Don’t just use photos – you can also add gifs, videos, or even memes to your posts. Varied content will certainly be more popular and you’ll avoid being predictable and monotonous with your posting.
- If you can’t achieve everything on your own or you need some help for different reasons, you can hire outside help. Freelancers found on websites such as Upwork can be of great assistance.
- The last but not the least, the more regularly you post, the more engaged will your audience be. Of course, the quality of your posts is extremely important, but if you want to get the best results, you will also need to post such content consistently. Determine what’s the time of day when most of your audience is usually browsing social media, and post updates at that time regularly.
