Grow your Audience with Social Media

Social Media Marketing has grown substantially over the past few years. It has evolved from a fun, easy, light activity into a powerful tool for businesses to promote their products and services. Social media is one of the most effective ways to increase exposure of your brand. Unfortunately simply having a social media presence is not enough.  You must use creativity and marketing “know-how” to make the most of your pages, posts and tweets. Where should you start to engage and grow your audience?  Here are a few tips on social media tactics for your company.

• Make it Easy to Engage – Use your landing page to cross promote your social media pages. Be sure you have easy-to-find social media buttons and ask visitors to follow you or like your page. You may want to offer some sort of incentive to get your audience to do this like offering a discount or coupon if they like and share.
• A Call to Action– Research shows that if you ask your audience to do something, they are more likely to do so if you make it obvious. For example, your tweets have a 12x higher chance of being retweeted if you ask for it, and 23x higher if you actually spell out the word “retweet.”(Source: CoScheduleBlog)
• Hold Question and Answer Forums– “Ask Me Anything” on Inbound.org, gets anywhere from 50 to 350+ upvotes. Wouldn’t you like that for your company? Q&A sessions are a great way to answer any questions that your followers may have as well as provide information to consumers that may have some interest in your brand.
• Create Contests! – Social media contests help boost engagement in a number of ways. It engages consumers, promotes your brand, and encourages sharing and liking.
• Conduct a Poll or Survey– While Americans hate phone surveys they tend to react to online polls more positively. Not only does a poll engage your viewers but it also lets your audience know that you actually care about their opinions and plan to take action upon the results.
• Quick Responses– Customers will be more likely to engage with your company on social media if they feel like you are actually there. Respond quickly to comments and most especially questions and criticisms. Show your viewers that you are active on your own pages and care what the audience is saying.
• Join in Chatting– Whenever you get a chance to engage your audience in real time – do it!  Twitter Chats, Facebook Forums and other social media “chats” can show the reader that you are on the ball.

Categorised in: Blog, Social Media