Successfully posting on social media and engaging your audience, especially for the sake of a business, is not easy, by any means. In today’s attention-driven economy, more and more eyes are on their feeds, and more and more voices are trying to stand out from the herd. Your outreach and marketing strategies might depend on your ability to post engagingly and effectively, but how do you do that in such a crowded space? Here, we’re going to look at a few tips that can help you really hit your mark.
Understand Your Audience
First of all, you need to get a truly extensive understanding of who your audience is. Do your market research to work out the demographics of the people that you’re trying to reach, what their needs are when they’re most likely to be on social media, and what gets their attention. Tailoring your content to the interests and behaviors of your audience is vital for maintaining their interest. Of course, if you already have something of an audience, then building your data on who is already here can help you focus on what might already be working for you.
Understand The Algorithm
If success on social media was purely about knowing what’s going to resonate with your audience, then a lot of people would have a much easier time with it. However, that simply is not the case. These platforms are dominated by algorithms that dictate which posts are more likely to get promoted and to gain visibility versus the others. Learning how to make an algorithm-friendly post, in its content, hashtags, media, and other factors, can help you make use of the platform you’re on by appealing directly to it. Finding the right balance between platform-specific and audience-targeted is the key to success on social media.
Strike When The Iron Is Hot
While a baseline understanding of your audience’s behaviors is helpful, you need to be much more active in paying attention to really hit them when they’re most likely to engage with your posts. With the help of sales intelligence tools, you can not only identify the highest-quality leads on social media and target posts crafted for them, but you can also improve your social listening, tracking conversations with real-time data that allows you to engage at just the right time, showing your brand as being on the ball and relevant to their needs.
Focus On Value, Not Just Promotion
People have a keen eye online for when they’re being targeted for marketing. When they suspect that you’re trying to sell them something, then their defenses are naturally going to go up, even if they’re not entirely aware that it’s happening. As such, you need to make sure that your content isn’t just purely promotional (unless it’s a paid post for the purpose of driving sales). It should also have value to the reader, whether it’s entertaining, educational, inspiring, or helpful. You need to give people a reason to follow and engage with you. There has to be something in it for them and, no, the prospect of buying something doesn’t count the majority of the time.
Engage With Your Audience
Don’t make the mistake of believing that social media is just a broadcasting tool. It’s a communications platform with two-way reach. To that end, make sure that you’re not just posting to your audience, but engaging with them directly. Reply to comments and messages promptly when you can to help them feel valued. Ask questions, start conversations, and then show genuine interest in the answers. Engaging with your audience makes them a lot more likely to develop positive associations with your brand
Experiment And Analyze
What works for you on social media isn’t going to be what works for others. It will depend on your niche, and audience, as well as the kind of expectations you have built based on your own posts. For that reason, you need to make sure that you’re tracking your metrics and analyzing them to see what works and what doesn’t work. Try different content types, using platform analytics tools to see what’s hitting, and adapt. You should always try to monitor the trends and stay on top of them, but if they’re not working, stay flexible and stick with what does.
With the tips above, you can devise a strategy that helps you consistently post engaging and valuable content that really resonates with your audience. The approach will certainly require tweaking based on what you learn about your target market, but these steps should provide an actionable path to getting the kind of clicks, views, and replies that you need.
