How to Connect with Your Audience on Social Media
It is increasingly difficult for a business to gain any type of traction on social media. The competition is fierce, and last year’s tactics may not be successful any more. So, what do you do when social media is an important part of your marketing strategy? The key is to forge a connection with your audience. To create and build a community.
- Create strong social profiles and pages.
Spend time creating your profile page on Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media channels that you’ve included in your strategy. Your profile needs to accurately represent your company and the benefit of becoming part of your social media community. It also needs to be consistent with your brand, your website, and your marketing message.
- Consistently post and share quality content.
Before you start inviting people to follow, create a dozen or so posts. Make sure these posts provide value to your audience. Presumably, you have a social media strategy and goals. Ensure that your posts and the content that you share support your goals and your overall marketing message. Consistency helps your audience know what to expect from you and your page. They’re more likely to engage if you are consistent with your content, message, and value.
However, consistency doesn’t mean that everything has to be the same. Mix up your posts. Share video, audio, contests, presentations and written content.
- Leverage friend-finding features.
Most social media sites provide you with tools to search for people that you know. Use these. Build your audience. Right or not, we tend to be more intrigued by businesses and pages that have a lot of followers. Build your following by leveraging your existing network and you’ll grow your reach on social media.
- Give them opportunities for more.
Provide your followers and people who visit your page with opportunities to engage with you in other locations. Add links to your top social accounts on your website. Include links to your blog on your social media profile page and in some posts. And don’t hesitate to occasionally share links to your email sign-up page.
- Add links to your top social accounts to your email signatures.
Make sure that everyone you communicate with via email knows about your social media page. Include an invitation to follow you on Facebook, Twitter and any other social site you engage on.
- Follow your target audience and engage with them.
Engage with your target audience. It’s not enough anymore to post content on social media and to expect a following. Engage with your followers. That means finding them on social media and sharing their content, participating in discussions, and providing solutions when relevant. How do you find your target audience? You can leverage trending topics, follow industry influencers and see who engages with them, and follow your competition and engage with their followers. On Twitter, you can use Twitter Search to find people that match your target audience.
- Participate in Facebook groups.
Facebook groups provide you with a unique opportunity to connect with a focused group of people. Find groups related to your niche, or create a group, and start initiating discussions and participating in them. Remember point #2 when posting content.
- Use hashtags.
Hashtags make finding your content on social media easier for your audience. They can also help brand your content, and you can leverage hashtags to increase engagement by inviting people to use a branded hashtag when they post.
Connecting on social media requires a strong strategy and a careful plan. Take efforts to set goals and to test and track your results. You’ll find that marketing on social media is still a viable way to grow your business, but it takes a different degree of effort and involvement.
