5 Best Tips to Engage With Social Media Followers

According to Statista, there are a total of 2.46 billion global social media users in 2017, and we will be seeing an increase of up to 2.77 billion social media users in 2019. Nowadays, businesses are using social media as a relationship marketing tool to keep their consumers loyal, and your business should be one of them! Even if you have less than 100 social media fans right now, don’t focus too much on the number. Focus on how you can get your current fans to stay loyal to come. In time to come, these fans will help spread the word for you - the magic of the word of mouth.

The PanelPlace team has been working hard to find out the best social media marketing strategies and tools for businesses to succeed in keeping its consumers engaged on social media. We strongly believe that before launching any marketing campaigns, it is to execute an analysis of your business’ target audience. You would need to understand them, find out what they are interested in, where they are from, their day-to-day behaviour and personality. This is something that most marketers neglect before they come up with any social media strategy or community management. Following, we will be analyzing the top social media marketing tips to avoid disappointing your social media followers!

5 Tips To Engage With Your Social Media Community!

1. Use Marketing Automation Tools

Previously, marketers have been posting social media posts manually. This is definitely time-consuming, but thanks to the many free marketing automation tools in the market right now, this issue is solved! At PanelPlace, we highly recommend businesses to use Buffer or Hootsuite - just like our marketing team. Not only do they help to schedule your social media posts, but they are also able to generate a social media report with the relevant social media metrics. These tools can help to minimize the time your marketing team takes to monitor the growth of your social media accounts.

Before you start scheduling your posts, it will beneficial for your business to do in-depth research on your industry. For example, most businesses have misconceptions that the best timing to post on social media platforms is before work and after work. That is not the case as it varies on your target audience. This is referenced from a study from Hubspot that shows that the best days to post on Instagram are on Monday and Thursday. As for Facebook, the best time to post is 1-4 p.m., when click-through rates have shown to be at their highest on average.

However, weekdays may be good for other businesses, but Fridays may work best for your business! Do a quick analysis based on your competitors’ social media pages and adjust accordingly to your business’ best performance. Most importantly, scheduled posts must be relevant to your target audience. This will be further elaborated in the later points.

2. Craft Personal Replies

How do you feel when you realize that businesses are replying you in a robotic manner? That means anyone else is getting the same reply, and you totally don't feel special at all! Using a template is a big mistake that businesses should avoid. Whenever your social media follower replies to your social media post, it will be good to have a list of replies, if you are not one to think on your feet. There are some of the common comments you will get from a variety of people, but always come up with a few variations so that the replies don't look like a template. For example, instead of replying a simple ‘Thank You’, come up with something engaging or creative. Create small conversations with consumers to create a sense of personal touch. This will feel like they are talking to a business representative, instead of robots. Also, keep a folder of interesting GIF or memes whenever you come across on the internet, you will find them useful one day! Take for example Scoot, who is known for its funny replies with GIFs, puns and memes! Their quirky replies, which resonates with its brand personality has won the hearts and praises of many!

These days, most of the consumers have been following social media pages that have funny replies just for entertainment sake, not because they are customers of these businesses. This is definitely one way to grow your fans organically and keep them loyal! A personal touch is one big way to improve your relationship with your social media followers.

3. Solve Their Problems (Articles - Internal/External)

Do take note on posts that emphasize too much on the advertisement of the business’ products or services. Try to avoid them or post only once per 2 weeks. Elaborating more on self-written articles, come up with relevant search engine optimization (SEO) articles that help your business rank better in Google search. These SEO articles enable you to gain followers organically when they find your content relevant in solving their problems and fulfilling their needs - just like this article!

In order to attract and retain social media followers organically, solve their problems and fulfil their needs. For current followers, schedule social media posts that are relevant to them. These posts may include infographics, self-written articles or external articles taken from other sites. Followers may find these contents useful if they are relevant to the business and target audience. For example, a bag e-commerce business that sells bags may post content are related to taking care of a bag or the type of bags that are trending this season.

4. Create Creative Content (Images/Videos)

Gone are the days where sharing external articles is enough to sustain social media accounts. Creating your own content is something that marketers should focus on. By creating your own, businesses are able to customize according to the target audience's liking. Your marketing team may need to create unique content from scratch that may have a sense of personal touch, virality and relevance to your target audience. Humans are visual animals, and these visual content work better than text content to capture some attention. If budget is a concern, smartphones these days are decent enough to work with. Photos and videos are great ways to showcase your products and services, share your expertise, shoot behind-the-scene details and feature customer success stories. If designing is not your forte, look at Canva - you will become a graphic designer overnight!

5. Reward Your Biggest Fans

Don't neglect your biggest fans ever, they are the one that helped you get where you are today. To thank your loyal social media followers for the support, reward them! There are many ways to reward them, such as coming up with social media marketing campaigns. These marketing campaigns include giveaways and contests that come with prizes. These prizes need to be relevant to your business and have it has to be something your consumers want. A Christmas tree may be useful for a Christmas giveaway, but is that something relevant to your business? For example, PanelPlace has monthly educational contests that reward cash prizes to our fans - because PanelPlace helps to find opportunities to learn, earn and more!

Depending on the nature of your business, you may come up with occasional promotions or coupon codes on your social media pages. This may help you to gain followers and encourage them to support your business. Such marketing campaigns will help spread social word-of-mouth and your business might potentially get viral organically.

Which Is The Best Tip?

The social media industry will be getting bigger than before in the coming years. Every business today needs to leverage on proper social media channels in the best way possible because their target audience is there! Most importantly, these people are engaging with their favourite brands through social media! Don't fret! With these tips, your brand is going to do great on social media, we promise!

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