Social media is an excellent tool to use for building brand awareness. If you’re ready to jump into social networking it’s important to recognise your audience and consider what it is that they will want to see pop up on their feeds, whether you’re using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram or any other social network out there. You need to work out how you can engage your audience, what’s going to make them want to interact with you. It can be difficult to work out how to be engaging, so here are a few tips to get you started.
Target Your Audience
It’s important to work on building a community of people who will want to connect and hopefully interact with you. You can do this organically by sharing content that is share worthy and relevant to the audience you’re hoping to attract. Over time if you continue to consistently post engaging content people will find you, they’ll see their friends liking your posts or retweeting your comments and be drawn to you. It takes time, but by targeting your audience using excellent content you will gradually build up those followers.
If you want to see results sooner rather than later the other option is paying for your audience. We’re not talking about buying fake profiles from dodgy suppliers who couldn’t care less about your community or your brand. Social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, G+ and Twitter offer paid advertising directly on their networks and the adverts can be used alongside your organic efforts.
Sharing Great Content
If you have a blog that’s been running for a few years you’ll probably have a whole host of usable content that’s ready to be shared. Blogs and social media work wonderfully together, especially if there are images within the blog posts. It is important to go through all your content to check it’s still relevant today and that it will engage the audience you’re working on attracting. If you don’t have a back catalogue of blog posts you can begin creating new ones as you go along, just schedule enough time to come up with topics that will be useful and worthy of sharing with your targeted audiences.
Blogs aren’t the only content worthy of sharing. You’ll also need a supply of images that are relevant. You can use images on your website or blog, create original images of your own, purchase stock images and customise them to fit in with your brand (depending on the image licence) and share other images providing you credit the original source.
Create Your Social Media Content Strategy
It’s important to create a content strategy that isn’t linking to your products with every post. You’ll need to work out how you can reach your target audience in a way that won’t make them feel you’re pushing your services or goods on them. One way to do this is consider the things your audience is interested in that relate to your services or products. If you’re a plumber you might benefit by sharing decoration tips, how-to guides or inspirational builds and designs.
Test out your content strategy but be prepared to make changes based on the feedback you receive as you build your community. Listen to what your audience tells you through their comments, when sharing your content and posting to your walls. Monitor conversations closely, ask for feedback, ask questions and look out for popular comments from fans and react when you need to.
You can’t expect your audience to be engaged with you if you don’t take the time to engage with them. Using the advice above will help you to develop a community of loyal people who care about your brand. They’ll trust you, understand you and know where to turn when the time does come for them to seek out services and products just like yours.
