Marketing is a pricey and difficult world to navigate but social media is a great way to get eyeballs on your brand for relatively little cost. Setting up accounts on X, Facebook and Instagram is simple, but success lies in ensuring you drive engagement.
Success on social platforms can be unpredictable, unless you have some simple ways to consistently boost your social media following and bring traffic to your company.
Here are some tips to help you on your way.
#1 – Ask and you shall receive
One of the best ways to get people to engage with you is to see other people already engaging with you. Letting potential customers and partners see that you are active and that people actually want to use your business is one of the best ways to bring in a new buyer.
Potential customers require assurance from someone else who had a positive experience in order to feel comfortable parting with their hard-earned cash and if you can show on your social media that you can give a positive customer experience online with proven cases willing to endorse you, you will see your follower number rising steadily.
How to do it
Facebook – Ask customers to give your business Facebook account a review and engage with your posts, either by sharing or commenting and liking what you post. You’d be surprised at how many people are willing to help you in this way if you give them good customer service
X – X allows you to pin tweets to the top of your feed which can be really handy if you are selling a particular promotion or product during that time. If, however, you don’t have a particular sale going on at that time, ask your followers to tweet you with their favourite thing about your business and pin those tweets to the top of your feed. If nothing else, it will give you an ego boost and brighten your day when you scroll past.
LinkedIn – LinkedIn has one of the best ways to show off your best customer reviews with their endorsements section. This allows other users to endorse your skills and attributes in a voting system. If your product is cloud solutions, having hundreds of connections endorse you for your solution is a great way to show you’re a trustworthy expert in the field.
Instagram – If you work on various projects with a range of clients, posting images of your work can go a long way to attract new customers. You can also ask clients for testimonials and post them as an image.
#2 – Building a web of accounts
Having a network of accounts across all social platforms is extremely important to success online.
Apps like Hootsuite allow you to copy the same content across all your platforms at the same time to maximise impact and keep it all consistent the whole way through the process.
The key is to then make sure that all your accounts are linked together. Include hyperlinks to your Facebook and LinkedIn in your X and Instagram bios, share a post or picture of a particularly well-performing post from Facebook across the other platforms to sing your praises and direct traffic to other outlets for your brand.
#3 – Engage with games
Encouraging light-hearted discussion and debate is a good way to generate engagement. Many social media platforms allow you to set up polls, games and giveaways that can give you valuable data about who is clicking on your links and why, as well as encouraging them to actually engage with your posts and get involved with your accounts.
How to do it
Across all platforms, setting up a giveaway is really simple and an excellent opportunity to collect some useful data on who is clicking through and how to attract others. You can then use these giveaway opportunities alongside our previous tip by pinning the tweet/post to the top of your feed for the best chance to get people to look at your post.
X – X polls are really quick to set up and are really useful to gauge your audience. It is also an opportunity to have a bit of fun and try to find current or useful topics to generate discussion and engage with your followers.
For all other social media accounts, simply creating a post or picture on your social media with a link telling your followers about a new competition or giveaway will be a surefire way to bring in new followers to your business.
More on social media
Social media accessibility guidelines for businesses – Implementing accessible content can expand your customer reach – David Gevorkian of Be Accessible shows eight ways you can make your social media posts more inclusive
