Ideas for Building Social Media Engagement with Your Customers

Social media can be intimidating for many small business owners who know how to do their jobs and run their businesses but don’t necessarily know how to explain or promote it to other people. Maintaining a profile on preferably more than one social media platform is important for reaching your audience and for ranking on Google searches. Often business owners are stumped for good ideas to use on social media, however. If that’s you, here’s some help:

Use hashtags when you tweet – Believe it or not, people do search Twitter using those keywords, so if your main audience misses your tweet the first time around, adding hashtags can give them another life or two and make the time you spent looking for content to tweet about more valuable. People often use hashtags to convey humor or make social connections too – all of which help you build a relationship between your brand and your customers.

Ask questions – If you want more engagement and more excitement from your customers, find a way to tie in a topic people are talking about with your products or services. This could be a sporting event, a meme, a fad or a trend. Don’t be afraid to make it humorous by incorporating visual gags or reworking memes. Keep it light, though. You do not want to provoke a malcontent into bashing your brand to an engaged audience.

Post positive customer feedback and tag – People who send you pictures or reviews of their good experiences or successes with your products already have positive feelings about your brand. That’s great advertising. Tweet or blog about it and make sure to tag them in the post or tweet to give them both the credit and a public thank you.

Post your sales – Make sure your customers know these promotions are limited time offers, though. It’s better to encourage immediate clicking through, because as soon as they scroll or surf on, you’ve lost them.

Share helpful and interesting articles – If you find something online that you think is fascinating or useful, share it. People following you will likely be interested and happy to see that your social media is about more than just promotion or public relations. Caveat: do not share articles about polarizing topics like religion or politics, no matter how fascinating the content.

Announce company news – If you have a new product coming out, a new employee in an important position, or an initiative your business has taken on (like a project in the community), by all means share it. Most people will not read press releases, but they will click on interesting tidbits of information if it catches their interest.

Use images – This one is simple: everyone likes pictures. The more of them you incorporate into your social media, the more eyes you’ll grab and the more clicks you’ll get.

Social media doesn’t have to complicated or even especially time consuming, but it does have to be social. When using any of the above tips, remember to take time to interact with anyone who responds. That’s how you build your audience, trust in your company, and interest – by interacting one on one with individuals in a fun but respectful way. If you’re still stumped and would like more help with this, Corporate Conversions is available to help establish your business on social media, so please contact us today.