How to Make Engaging Content with Social Media

Engaging isn’t just about posting as many updates as possible then sitting back and waiting. You need to come back to your pages and help drive discussion. Find out what your audience is interested in, relate to your brand and consider how you can get them thinking and wanting to add their thoughts to the discussion. Being able to convert semi-interested users into followers and mini-ambassadors can have priceless long term results. We show you how to sow the seeds and how to avoid blockages.

From Beginning to Engaging

Be Up to date – Know your current events and interesting news updates related to your business. It’s good to show that you know the relevant news circulating within your client’s area of interest and that your input is solid. Be sure to post about news shortly after it has happened and when your users are most likely to be online. See Twitter trend search advice.

Open Ended – Try not to have the ‘be all and end all’ opinion or answer in a post. It’s fine to add some of your thoughts but avoid choosing sides or finishing off your own question otherwise you’ll leave no room for others to join in. Even something as simple as “Thoughts?” will work better than “do you agree or disagree with this?”

Humour – A great way to invite interest into what you’re posting is if you can be funny. By opening the door to comedians whilst still being relevant, you can potentially have an endless list of replies. As long as what you’re posting is seen to naturally come from your business it should fit in nicely.

Ask Questions – This isn’t just for inducing a response in general to give your pages purpose, but can give you some valuable information to use later. Things like “Did you pick up something nice from our sale?” or “What do you guys think of this new Xxxxxx on our site?” is very inviting to people who love to put their 2 cents in whilst being friendly at the same time. Remember though, not all your posts have to relate directly to your core business function.

Here is an example of an open question with an up to date news article.

Spotlight – This involves highlighting related achievements of your customers. Did someone take a picture of themselves at your workplace? Has someone completed some sort of challenge you laid out or won a competition? Be sure to post on how excited and glad you are that they did this, encourage the sharing and how happy you are to have them as a customer.

Simplicity – Be to the point. Around 80 characters is ideal. Balance out image use, links and occasional text only posts. Images get a lot more space in a user’s feed, but that isn’t an excuse to put in something irrelevant to the message you want to communicate.

 

Blockages to Engagement

Negativity – The need to avoid leading or allowing negativity can’t be stressed enough. A huge part of posting and also Community Management is keeping up a mood and attitude that represents your brand and the way you want people to respond. Don’t make complaints (even about competitors), don’t argue or highlight the wrongness of your audience. If it seems hard to avoid, think about what Mum always used to say; “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” :)

Ego – Never go into too much detail when posting anything about yourself on a company page. Remember, you’re representing your brand and that’s your starting point for getting people interested, replying and going where you want them to. Even if your company is named after a figurehead, that figurehead still represents a brand and a set of ideals not an individual.

Forcing – Don’t push people to join a conversation, if they’re not interested you need to leave it, learn from it and revise for next time. Repeating a similar idea or conversation in different spaces or times can work fine, but annoying people will do damage.

Overselling - You will lose people if you’re always trying to push products in their face without any tie to their values or drive to find out important information. Sharing promotions and points of interest is fine but make sure this is balanced out. 

Mundane Chatter – It might be ok to update with “Eating cereal” on your personal page but for a business this is a poor look and it doesn’t give people space to converse or use their imagination. Mix it up!

For HR and Small Business

For you, inviting ‘Spotlight’ activity will be a real winner. If you can entice people to share their experiences on your site or even have an ‘attendee of the week’ type of entry where people upload their own content things should grow smoothly. Apart from helping to create a fun and comfortable environment, this kind of sharing will be imperative for new users and visitors as using your service may be a fairly large decision for them and evidence from others can really help!

Facebook – Setting up a Successful Page

With over a billion users, Facebook is not one to ignore. However many fall into a pattern of letting their page get left behind, either by not responding to questions or not updating important features. As a golden rule – to make Social Media work, you must be Social. We look over the basics and important setups that you may have missed even if you do have a page, to make sure you’re on a strong ongoing path of connecting to others!

Create a Facebook page

From an already active account create a new page for your business. Once you have created a page you can access and edit it from the drop down at the top right hand side of the window. To go back to your personal profile just repeat the same process.

 

Get to know the Admin Panel

Facebook provides an admin panel for managing brand pages. It gives you a notification panel which has all the activity that has recently been occurring, and a panel of all your most recent likes. The insights box provides you with a timeline of the effectiveness of your posts and like demographics, this can currently only be accessed after 40 likes. Hovering your mouse over the data will show the numbers of people who are talking about your page and the number of people reached by a particular post, and the dates and times of posts.

Look and Style - Tick all the boxes

If you make sure you’re satisfied with how your page starts you won’t have to constantly worry about and attempt small updates. Ensure that you make your profile look aesthetically pleasing. Ensure you are using high quality pictures for the cover photo and profile picture, Facebook can auto crop these though if it doesn’t fit well be sure to resize the originals. Fill in all the relevant information, especially in the about area and the link to your website.

 

Here is an example of a fantastic facebook brand page.  Notice the likes to talking about this ratio. Roughly half of little cupcakes fans are engaged by their page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why you should do this, vital signs to stay on track

Strategically, Facebook is great for developing your community and forwarding people onto your website and blog in a natural manner. Due to its reach potential it is excellent exposure, and with good content that gets shared it is basically free marketing.  Here are a few insights to think about when monitoring your Facebook numbers:

Likes – The total amount of people who have liked your page. It is just as important to see if this number is dropping, which could mean you have annoyed or misled people with your posts.

Talking About This – The average number of people creating a ‘story’ about your page, meaning they have commented/ liked or otherwise interacted with your posts. This is a good weekly indicator of generally how popular your output is.

Were Here – This is more of an option for those who visit your physical location, some businesses heavily reliant on foot traffic will run promotions to push the use of this so that customer’s friends can see they were there. If it is not relevant or if you don’t think people would like to post that they “Were Here” then it isn’t completely necessary.

Post Likes and comments – Don’t fret, it may take some time for these to reach a higher pattern and develop a healthy number of ‘regulars’ who might always have something to add.

Social Media – Is it worth it? How much time should I invest?

How can it help? Does it suit my business? What pages should I invest time in?

Nearly all companies without social pages (and even those with them) have seasonal discussions and arguments about the viability of this ever popular tool. Usually the end outcome is something along the lines of “Fine, make a page but don’t spend too much time on it!” or “Don’t make a page, when we see the dollar value we’ll do something then”. Unfortunately, neither of these answers really helps reach a sustainable outcome. With small and allied health related businesses in mind, we’ve put the below ideas together to help your next Social Pages discussion, whether you have none or need to improve what you’re currently doing!

How can a Facebook or Twitter page help a small business?

With a low budget, you would be stimulating and aligning current interests and social activity to your business with relevant content. This means liking pages where your audience aggregates, joining trends that link to your offering and sending out both original and interesting external material to set yourself up as an expert and reliable ongoing source of information.

Once you’re established, you have firm grounds to share updates about your website and anything else that your returning fans will be able to find value in (including using your products / services).

Is my business the right business for Social Media?

We would like to tell you all businesses need Social Media in some way but it’s important to be realistic. A cement mixing plant will find it nearly impossible to start and increase trending activity on Twitter when tweeting about the current climate of cement mixing materials. Why? It just isn’t as important as celebrity gossip or funny videos to the masses. We believe that all businesses (yes, including cement mixing plants) have a place somewhere in social media and can contribute as well as receive interest from the outside world with their content, but it’s all about relevance and commitment.

Relevance – If you’re strictly B2B, start with a LinkedIn company page and see how you go. If your advice and instructions get some traction, extending with YouTube, blogs and other newsletter materials will empower what you’re already doing, without ever needing to delve into the Twitterverse.

If you cater to consumers, no matter how niche, there is a place for you on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Getting attention from short and catchy content will be easier for you, as long as you have something to offer that stands out and the benefits of subscribing to your pages are clear.

Commitment – putting in minimum time to get maximum output

This is a goal that we all have. Ideally, we should all be spending a little more time on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (and even others) to really get the best idea of what our audience responds to and finds interesting and then build a well-backed framework that drives activity and sales through your website. Until this becomes more possible for a lot of us, we need to spend more time on our core responsibilities, but below is a basic framework you can use to get more from less!

“I have an hour a week to do Social Media activities”

Week 1 – Create Facebook and Twitter pages (B2C) or a LinkedIn page (B2B). Fill out all necessary details and make sure the links between the pages and your website are clear.

Week 2 – Now that you’re happy with how your page looks for now, start following and liking aggregated pages where your audience “meets”. Also be sure to add the link to your social pages to your website and online outgoing materials. Make a post that introduces your business and what people can expect on the page.

Week 3 – So that your posts aren’t purely about you, share recent industry news updates that’s of interest to your audience. Make note of your news aggregators, Google alerts is a good starting point. Be sure that you’re not directing users to mounds of irrelevant advertising.

Ongoing – Mix up your news posts with interesting updates or promotions from your business. If your business aligns to the advice side of content, be sure to circulate this regularly! Just make sure you don’t ever outweigh social posts with ‘product push’ updates or users will feel alienated. Keep an eye on what is getting more views, clicks and comments, and share around your updates with other staff so that they are sure to make good sense to fresh eyes!

-          Still not sure? Don’t worry, we’ll give tips on how to post well and manage different communities soon!

To Do

o   Decide which pages you will utilise or add to early on

o   Decide who will check and update these pages

o   Organise a preferred timeframe that can be dedicated to social media activities

Coming Up: We will take you through different social media options with advice on how to make the most out of each of them for your business. We will also give you that golden knowledge on how to manage your online communities as they grow to align your brand effectively!