Would you like to get more social media engagement?  Of course, you would, and so do millions of businesses.  The social media space is getting more and more crowded every day.  We can’t be all things to all people because that just doesn’t work for engagement.   So, what are the four key tips to help you with social media engagement?

Community

Your community will help with your social media engagement if they become loyal followers of you and your company’s brand.  Take your time to develop your own community.  How do you do this?  Map out your ‘why’.  The reason your company does what it does.

For example, Toms shoes are not just a shoe company, it is a movement.

“With every TOMS purchase, you stand with us on issues that matter.”

People who purchase Toms shoes care as much about issues that matter as they do about buying shoes.  They can buy shoes from anywhere but no other company is committed to helping others like Toms.  Toms supporters are a very committed community of buyers.

Our community, under the Fabulous Fempreneurship brand, is made up of women entrepreneurs who want to help develop the women leaders of tomorrow in the business community.  Who is your community?

Curating

Once you have found your community, the next step is to curate content.  Finding content is much easier when you know who you want to engage with.  Not all the content you develop has to be your own.  Look for other thought leaders who share the same community as you and follow them on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

The next step is to engage with these thought leaders and curate their best content and share with your community on a consistent basis.  This is the “give” aspect of social media. By promoting this curated content, these thought leaders will engage with you and share YOUR content.

Content

While you are curating content from influencers in your market space, don’t forget to create your own content!

This is pretty easy to do once you are following leaders in your industry.  You can take a topic that your community wants to hear about and spin it many different ways on multiple platforms.  Just don’t be lazy! It may seem easy to connect your platforms together ie Facebook/Instagram, but that is just duplicating content.

Audiences on different platforms do not always share the same profile.  For example, the audience demographic on Facebook is not the same as Instagram.  The younger community that hang out on Instagram definitely do not have a Facebook profile.  They have no interest at all in Facebook.  If you have a teen to early 20’s community, they are more likely to have a Twitter account than a Facebook profile.

If your community is B2B or leaders in the business community, then producing content to post on LinkedIn is important.  Content for this platform is not the same as the material you necessarily post on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.  It is a business platform so leave out the very personal stuff, it doesn’t fit this platform.

How do you produce your own content for a variety of platforms without sucking up all your valuable time?  One of the best ways is to create a content calendar for the month for each platform.  This could be in the form of 4 blog posts that can be geared to twitter and facebook audiences, plus 3 videos for IGTV, & 4 videos on YouTube.  Add in a couple of podcasts and you have a variety of material that can produce a month’s worth of content for all your platforms.

And, let’s not forget photos.    Video and photo content can be produced easily on your smartphone because your community will enjoy the personal side of your content as much as the professionally edited content you produce.  It will be more real for your community and show your brand personality.  But, if  YOU are your brand, then it is worth the investment to get a professional brand photographer to give you a variety of shots in different settings to showcase the brand ‘YOU’.  If you live in the greater Toronto area, then check out the brand photography of Rita Zietsma Photography.

You can show the raw side of ‘you’ by hosting Facebook lives, or Instagram lives. There are a variety of ways to engage your community. If you are the face of your brand, use your own personal timeline to inject some personal stories to expand on your ‘why’.

If you aren’t sure what kind of content to develop, search platforms such as Buzz Sumo or Quora or Google keywords.  These sites will give you ideas of what a community like yours is interested in learning about and what are the trending topics.   If you have a Facebook group you can poll the group to find out what they need help with the most.

Once you have developed your content you can schedule it to disperse, rinse and repeat many times over with a scheduling tool.  My favorite is PromoRepublic, a cross between Canva and Hootsuite. I can use their content suggestions, alter it, select one of the graphics and schedule across multiple platforms all at the same time.

You can always update historic content by adding more relevant news, videos, quotes, and photos to make it new again.  If you devote one hour a month to updating existing content, you have created brand new content in a matter of minutes.  This will help boost your Google ranking.

Connecting

Once you have posted your content on a regular basis, don’t forget the most important part which is connecting.  Respond to your community by engaging with their content, answering their comments and taking note of what your community is adding or responding to. This is the listening part of social media engagement.  The comments and concerns of your community will help you with increased engagement.

Social media engagement is your online marketing strategy which combined with in person, traditional marketing will boost your brand awareness and lay the foundation for selling products.

If you are interested in learning more about social media engagement, connect to schedule a 30 minute complimentary call with us to continue the conversation.