Engage your tribe on social media

Most online business owners recognise the importance of creating good quality online content on a consistent basis, however, what may come as a surprise is that building engagement with your audience is equally important and often something online business owners struggle to achieve.

I thought it was the time that I share my proven tactics for building engagement for your brand on social media.

Ready?

4 Tips To Engage Your Tribe on Social Media!

Be Visual

I recently heard that Facebook is predicting that 75% of content consumed on devices by the year 2020 will be video. That is a huge statistic but also not that far off in the future. If you are not already using high-quality visual content - images and video - for your brand, now is the time to get onboard.

But creating engagement is more than posting a photo from your weekend or the latest product line you have available. Here are some suggestions on how you can leverage visual content for your brand:

Behind the scenes - use photos of videos and give consumers a sneak peek into your brand, or your life as the person behind the brand. This type of behind the scenes content is great for building trust and engagement with your customers. Show the process of creating your product, or your office location, or even snaps from photoshoots. Authenticity is something that consumers increasingly seek from the brands they buy from so make sure you share what is real and true for you and your brand.

Caption this! - got a great photo but not sure what message to attach? Let your customers decide. These work especially well on Facebook and Instagram especially if they are humorous.

Share Industry events - attending a conference or training event? Snap a few photos and share them to give consumers an inside scoop on what it takes to manage a business like yours. I recently attended a Business Chicks luncheon with Kate Hudson (Actress), and snapped a few candid photos and shared across social media.

Infographics - make your graphics informative and shareable by creating an infographic. Now don't be put off by this because you can use a platform like Canva which provides a number of infographic templates. Here is a great example of a super informative and shareable infographic on the power of social media.

Giveaways & Competitions

Hosting a giveaway or competition is a proven vehicle for posting engagement with your customers. I recently ran a competition for iland co and had a fantastic response. When hosting a giveaway, try to make the competition super relevant to the platform you are using the promote the competition. For example, if you are running the competition on Facebook, you could ask people to like, comment & follow your page to enter the competition.

Here is the competition post I recently ran on Facebook & Instagram:

Ask Questions

Most brands fall into the habit of providing only 'push' content to their customers. Everything is post, post, post, with no reason for a customer to stop and engage... because the brand did not ask for their engagement.

Asking questions is a fantastic way to build customer relationships and engagement with your target market. And the types of questions you ask can be wide and varied, but I do suggest you aim to keep them relevant to your brand.

Some examples that I've used in my content strategy are:

• What is one thing you could do today to move closer to your goals?
• What is the area you are struggling with right now?
• What are you reading right now?
• What are you listening to right now?
• What topic would be most useful to you?
• What are your plans for the weekend? 

Participate

If you know your target market you will know that they are on multiple social media platforms, which is why I strongly advocate keeping your profile active and engaging across all your selected channels.

And do not post the same content on each channel. This is a big no-no and kills engagement. Customers want to follow you across multiple channels because you provide value on each channel. If you cross share the same post, that is low-value content.

Here are some examples of how to tailor content to the social media platform you are posting on:

Facebook - use native video, or images, and make sure the image is sized correctly for Facebook. Play with long-form posts but avoid sharing infographics as they don't display particularly well on this platform.

Instagram - square images are ideal, but Instagram stories is a rectangle and also a great channel for behind the scenes content, industry events, promos and sneak peaks. Use hashtags (you can have up to 30) and aim to respond to all the comments that appear on your post. This helps boost your organic reach.

Test text overlays on your graphics to see how your audience responds, and aim to create 'thumb-stopping' content as often as possible.

Pinterest - infographics do really well in this space, as does any imagery that is portrait in orientation.

The above platforms are the three main platforms that work well for brand development however you may also consider YouTube, Twitter, Google+, Snapchat, and LinkedIn.