Social media is a significant force in boosting your brand awareness and building a massive pool of loyal customers. If you want to convert followers on your Internet platforms into customers, you’ll need to improve and enhance your engagement on social media.
Increasing engagement and creating sharable content is easy when you have a social media marketing plan in place that makes use of the free features of social media. These free features enhance engagement and don’t involve any development work or money being spent on paid likes.
Below are three simplified methods of enhancing your business’ engagement on social media to improve conversion rates.
Utilize Hashtags
You must have come across hashtags on different social media posts. Businesses like yours are leveraging hashtags to bring together people with common interests on their social media page.
Chances are good you’re already using hashtags, but are you using them effectively? The key is to use hashtags in every post you create and look at analytics to see which hashtags are having an impact on your marketing strategy. While hashtags first emerged on Twitter, you should be actively using them on Facebook and Instagram as well to significantly boost your company’s visibility.
If you are hosting a particular challenge, you can come up with a unique hashtag to give your audience the chance to keep tabs on the event on social media without falling behind.
I have come across several businesses utilizing the hashtag on Instagram and Twitter, but not many firms are using this feature on Facebook. Facebook is a useful channel for getting a lot of traffic, and if you are not utilizing hashtags on your posts, you are greatly missing out on engagement with your product and service.
It’s essential to have a clear plan in mind when using hashtags. For instance, it’s not advisable to post something on social media and attach a hashtag like #itsanicedayoutside. That hashtag is very long, and it does not even add up unless you are dealing with photos of outdoor winter scenes. No one will search for those words.
Instead, you may want to use hashtags that will be directed towards your ideal audience and consumers. For instance, if you are operating a travel agent firm, you can post with hashtags such as #travel, #exotictrips, and #getouttatown among others. Look at other hashtags that are related to your posts, especially hashtags that are trending on social media. Twitter updates trending hashtags daily.
Try checking on the web, specifically on Twitter and Instagram for items that you wish to purchase or for a location you would want to visit and see what comes up. This will give you a better insight of what people are searching for and give you ideas when dealing with your business’s online visibility.
Use branded graphics
Graphics and memes are very popular on social media pages and usually bring more engagement on social media posts with text only. This trend is picking up steadily and deserves some little effort from you.
The benefits of posting pictures regularly on your social media platforms are well known, but making them branded can garner more benefits for your firm. People have a thing for visuals, and if you tweak your graphics to contain quotes, quick facts and other important things regarding your company and make use of consistent fonts colours and styles for every picture, your followers will get accustomed to the visuals and identify your brand whenever they see the images.
Branded graphics are simpler to share, repost and retweet from social media so if you own a blog or post articles regularly, make sure that you have customized graphics designed and added to your social media pages.
Stick to a posting routine – and be consistent always!
Consistency is paramount. You should design a realistic posting schedule that works for you and one that you can commit to. If you decide to post four times on Facebook for an entire week and then desist from posting anything for the rest of the month, some of your audience may lose interest quickly. However, you must also be consistent and creative at the same time. Try to uphold the quality standards of the content you post all the time.
If you abide by your schedule, people will start noticing your trends and expect your posts on designated days and times.
For instance, if you settle on posting motivational quotes every Monday, usual business updates on Wednesday and useful guides on Friday, then your followers will get accustomed to your post and know when they should head over to your social media page for the content.
To simplify all your operations, you can make use of some social media planning tools that will help you to schedule all your updates beforehand and make sure that you are not taking some time out every day to be on your social media profiles.
Here are a couple of social media planning tools to utilize on different sites. A good number of them are free of charge.
Twitter – Hootsuite, Buffer, Tweetdeck.
Facebook has a built-in planning system that contains analytics for Facebook pages, which is very useful. You can make use of Hootsuite and Buffer to plan updates as well.
Instagram – Schedugram (paid service) and Later.
Pinterest – BoardBooster and Tailwind (both paid services).
Google Plus and LinkedIn – Buffer.
It’s all in the strategy
One fact that most users are not aware of is that social media is not all about sharing videos and entertainment purposes. When you understand what social media can do for your business with a thorough implementation of an effective strategy to enhance engagement, you’ll get rewarded for your additional effort.