A scroll through social media platforms bring up pretty pictures and witty captions. You stop, you look, you read, you think, you comment, you continue. Interaction on social media has become a standard form of marketing engagement for businesses big and small. Clients and prospective clients expect to see you there and they expect responses.
Engagement is now considered a critical part of any social media strategy. Once upon a time the algorithms with Facebook and Instagram made organic reach difficult to achieve. They wanted to push you to run paid ads in order to have more eyes on your posts. The algorithm has since changed to get higher visibility where there has been greater meaningful interactions on a post. In other words, posts with more active and thoughtful interaction will get more reach. Engagement is key. (Don’t get us wrong, paid ads still get eyes on your posts, but now there are other ways to achieve this)
What do people want; what do your people want? They want content that is conversation-worthy. They want helpful information, they want feel-good fuzzies, they want to feel like they know you, and they want to know that you are accessible to them.
Create Content For People, Not Your Business
You’ve got a brand to maintain, we know that. You stick to your core offerings, keep things lined up with your values and interests, and keep a consistent voice going. Sure, sure, this is all good. But how well is it actually connecting with your audience? Are you sparking conversation with this approach or are you just getting a bunch of likes?
The content you put out should have the intent of conversation, not just interaction. What does this mean? You need to post things that spark; things that hit home with your ideal client in a way that makes them want to write in an insightful comment. And we don’t mean posting ‘bait,’ we mean real, honest-to-goodness content that connects.
In order to post content for the people, not your business, you need to understand your audience. Dig deeper into your client avatar and current audience base (in case they are currently different!) to figure out what motivates them, what challenges them, and what makes them feel something.
Share Content That Naturally Creates Meaningful Interaction
Take a look at your analytics pages to see what types of posts get the highest engagement rates. What type of posts are they? Do they contain text, questions, polls, videos, pictures? What time of day do you get the best results? Learn from your own actions to help you formulate a content strategy going forward that will get you big wins.
Get feedback right from the source. Don’t be afraid to ask your audience what kind of content they want to see more of, and what they want to see less of.
Create Community That Focuses on Supporting, Solving, and Simplifying
Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerburg said people wanted to see more of what their family and friends were saying. They wanted to see more about what they cared about, and less from businesses. The result of this was that business pages dropped from feeds at a drastic rate. Making it harder to work on that organic Facebook reach.
That’s why creating community amongst your followers and fans can be impactful. In terms of Facebook, you have the opportunity to create a group that you can focus on your intended audience and know that the majority of the people in your group actually care about what you have to say. But it can’t just be a group about your business; it has to be about a topic or theme that is related to your business that your people would find incredibly helpful to join. Look for ways that you can support your people, help them solve problems, or simplify systems/processes for them.
Focus on attracting your ideal client into the group, monitor what kind of content sparks the best engagement, and voila, you’ll end up with a higher engagement rate that will boost your visibility. It won’t happen overnight, but if you nurture it, the results will come.