Social Media Engagement
Grow your business
Engaging with your customers on social media, positively and regularly, can be a low cost way of building your business. It keeps you in your customer's field of vision.
The more interesting your social media content is, the wider your potential sphere of influence becomes though the sharing of that content.
Creating a strong brand presence across social media platforms is much easier with good planning and the use of social media engagement software.
As with web site design, the design or presentation layer needs to be supported by a solid software platform.
Rules of Engagement
Take time to plan what you want to communicate via social media. Research both visual content creation platforms and social media tools to make sure you choose the ones you are most comfortable with. Which social media platforms are the most important to you? How many social media platforms will you be active on? Capterra is a good place to compare marketing tools including those for crm and social media.
Social Media Branding
One of the reasons for investing time and energy into the creation of a Brand Board is to create consistency of visual design elements across all platforms of communication. Social media branding also includes the personality of your brand and its authentic voice. The ethos and values of your business will also be on display. Social media is a great place for customers to get to know your business in a much broader sense than on the web site itself.
There are a number of platforms where you can create visual media assets. You can add your brand assets including fonts and colours for easy use. When choosing which platform to use, think about you want to use those visual assets. Does the platform allow you to post directly to the social media platforms of your choice or via 3rd party social media post management software?
You will often be looking at a combination of an image creation programme, a social media post management solution and one or more social media platforms. That means you'll need them to play nicely with one another. I like Stencil, for example, as it works with Buffer as well as uploading to several social media platforms directly. Canva can also be used in with Buffer and is the go-to application for many.
Communication Style
Social media is a place where the more creative, inventive and playful aspects of a business can be used to engage with your customers. How can you make your posts so engaging that people love to share them and follow you? What articles have you found recently that you feel would be of interest to your followers? What is new and exciting in your business that your customers want to be the first to know about?
Planning Posts
Just as with your web site, break down your social media posts into categories and create a schedule for posting that ensures a regular stream of content. Use social media post scheduling software to post the content to a range of different platforms.
Videos for Social Media Engagement
Ofeo is an easy to use platform for creating videos that help increase social engagement. They also have a good overview of some of the tools available for social media management that you might like to consider.
Engaging Replies
Responding to comments on social media doesn't need to take long. You can manage comments across a range of platforms using software such as Buffer. Being able to view and respond to replies from a single platform is a huge time saver. Monitoring responses to your posts also helps you spot any potentially damaging comments and deal with them swiftly.
Useful Links
https://buffer.com/library/social-media-engagement/
https://influencermarketinghub.com/social-media-posting-scheduling-tools/
