Here's how to create social media posts that drive engagement
Social media is evolving along with us. The way we interact with it changes as well. To stay relevant and be enticing to your target audience, personalization is absolutely imperative since it is one of the essential factors of a successful campaign that drives engagement through the roof.
And you may be thinking: “How on earth do you personalize your social media presence? Social media platforms aren’t offering this option!” And you’ll be totally right about that. However, what platforms do offer is a massive database of information on your target audience. In this article, we’ll look into various ways you can use this valuable information to personalize your social media presence and thus considerably increase your customers’ engagement.
Leverage the power of polls
There is a host of successful companies like Starbucks and Coca-Cola that use polls to understand their customer preferences. Surveys have started slowly losing traction back in 2013 since they were too invasive and time-demanding. Whereas social media polls are quick and don’t require users to go to another page.
Polls provide companies with valuable insight into what their customers like, often beside their product. This information is the key to their customers’ hearts.
Let’s say you’re looking to put a webinar together for your audience. Naturally, you’re going to create a poll to know what resonates with your followers, but that’s not all. All the answers in the poll are an excellent way to segment your users into various categories; by extracting information about what they’re most passionate about.
Mind your language
Despite the fact that social media platforms generally serve a common purpose, they speak different languages. Adapting to the standards of a particular website is something we often forget to personalize for. Adjusting the language for specific platforms will increase the users’ engagement with the content.
Writing for Twitter:
Despite recently raising the character limit for their platform, Twitter’s posting style remains very laconic and minimalist. So if you’re looking forward to cross-post between platforms, it’s most probably the case that you’ll have to boil it down, so that it fits into the 280 characters.
It is also a great idea to use retweets as a way of adopting a more common language, specific to your customers. Given the character limitation of Twitter, people don’t retweet just because it’ll save them time to type 280 characters, but rather because someone else has done it better than they would.
Writing for Facebook:
Considering a lack of limitation regarding character count, Facebook is a more liberal place to write for. Here, you have the liberty to write longer trains of thought.
Furthermore, Facebook users are pretty fond of images, reports suggest. Using a relevant picture with your text on a Facebook post will bump your engagement by 37%.
Writing for Instagram
Instagram is tricky as well since it is an “image-first” medium. The visual element has the spotlight here, and the text has a secondary role there.
Instagram is very much about who you are and how exhilarating one’s life can be — this is why this platform typically features a more “inspirational” language, compared to other platforms. Instagram likes adjectives and using many first-person pronouns, such as “me” and “us."
Writing for LinkedIn
This is probably the most niche platform of the ones mentioned above. Since this website is focused on productivity and the corporate world, the language used here must abide by these standards. To say the least, it’s going to be hard to engage LinkedIn users with the text you’d write for Instagram.
Opt for strong verbs that convey action and leadership like acquire, inspire, win, gain, etc. LinkedIn users commonly resonate with the corporate lingo since they’re on a professional environment, which stimulates competition.
Never hesitate to collaborate with a professional when it comes to social media. Although it does seem like a simply endeavor, it does time to get right.
Bonus points
Localization is considered to be another great way to improve customer engagement. There are currently many crash courses that provide you with a more in-depth introduction into social media text stylistics and localization, along with companies like Pick Writers that specialize in it.
If you’re not looking forward to translating your content social media presence to other languages, simply localizing it for British/Australian/American English will most definitely engage your customers considerably.
Personalized video content
This one is pretty high-tech and can be slightly pricy to pull off for many small businesses. However, it could be a pretty viable, high-return investment. It is also considered among the marketing breakthroughs that will define advertisement and social media management for the next few years.
https://play.vidyard.com/QM4sBFY4l3BodqQWolIBmA
The main idea is to use the personal public information from a user’s Facebook profile in order to create a video that will highlight their preferences and will adjust the video’s contents accordingly. This is somewhat of a shift from personalization to individualization.
The reason this could be the next big thing is that video content is currently the big thing. Social media platforms have been favoring video content for the last few years, which in return made us watch more hours of video content than ever before. Here are a few stats:
- Over eighty percent of Twitter users watch video content on a regular basis
- A half billion hours of content is watched on YouTube every single day.
- Nearly a half of people watch videos about individual products before choosing to actually buy them.
Humanizing the tone
Remembering the important holidays of your social media audience is essential. Simply because it lets you humanize your brand. Why is this important? A recent study has shown that people tend to have minimal trust for corporations and marketers. This why authenticity and brand humanization play such a central role today.
Showing your human side is a great way to suggest to your audience that your company is run by actual humans that have feelings and can empathize with the customer. This, incidentally, is an excellent way of growing your customer engagement. Today, in the age of technology, people really cherish real human interaction, or whatever resembles it, which creates the need for a more personal approach towards your social media presence.
There are some simple approaches to social media humanization that can be readily applied readily. However, keep in mind that any change that you bring to your social media should be consistent with your previous tone.
- Since we’ve previously touched on highlighting the fact that “actual people” are behind your brand, it’s always a great idea for different employees to sign their contributions to the company’s social media feed.
- This may not apply to all company’s, but most make mistakes, and it’s essential to make a cordial and timely apology. Slack is one of the most impressive brands in terms of humanization. Although this is a blog entry, here’s a great example of how Slack has approached a mistake they made. Being human means to recognize errors.
- Opt out of canned responses. Having a more uncombed language is totally fine, as long as it doesn’t descend into excessive use of slang and remains respectful. Making small detours from the corporate style is always a great thing.
Conclusion
The currency of social media is engagement. A successful social media can be achieved by creating a meaningful connection with your audience and customers. The digital infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex and it gives business owners lots of freedom.
It is only by creating meaningful interactions with your audience, you’ll be able achieve high conversions, due to high engagement. Most of the approaches in this article demand some investment in terms of money and time, but they will most certainly provide you with high return, once applied correctly.
