Table of Contents
- Intro
- Cut through the brand noise – go influential!
- Utilise visual content formats to build engagement
- Hashtag your way to social visibility
- Closing thoughts
Intro
Social channels offer numerous touchpoints for you to engage your user. These touchpoints, when used effectively, help you unlock social engagement and reap benefits from it – be it increased conversions, a better online presence or simply more user interaction.
However, when targeting your audience, it is crucial to keep in mind that these touchpoints are “social” in nature. So intruding your users’ feeds with advertising content is a not always a good idea. Sometimes, you have to utilise different techniques – those that tap into the power of influence or the ones that build upon the engagement value of visual content.
Let’s explore some such hacks here:
1) Cut through the brand noise – go influential!
Influencer marketing is slowly emerging as brands’ favorite marketing technique, especially with the social changes that are taking place. Whether you look at Facebook’s algorithm boosting content from friends and family in the news feed or the rollout of GDPR which has caused concerns around data protection, multiple online changes are affecting the social landscape and filtering the brand noise.
Influencer marketing, in this scenario, comes as a blessing. Influencers can help you reach your audience without getting skipped or blocked. Since influencer posts blend into social media with other content, they are embraced by your audience. Also, influencer posts are more likely to mimic the peer recommendation effect and positively impact your buyer’s decision.
Another effective influential technique is creating content around influencers. By mentioning them in your social posts, you can encourage them to share it and thus make your content stand out from the rest.
2) Utilise visual content formats to build engagement
Visuals are helping brands expand their reach and increase engagement, be it videos, images or infographics. In fact, 65% of senior marketing executives back the claim that visual assets play a pivotal role in the communication of a brand story.
Social channels offer a variety of such visual formats to engage users at different levels. These content types reduce the information delivery time and engage the user quickly, the reason why major content consumption is “visual”. Don’t believe us? See these stats–
Facebook posts with images see 2.3x more engagement than those without images.
Snapchat users watch 10 billion videos per day.
Infographics get 3x more likes and shares on social media than any other type of content.
So make your social reach more effective by incorporating visuals in your strategy. Extract key takeaways from your blog posts and turn them into infographics. Or shoot a live video using your smartphone.
3) Hashtag your way to social visibility
On social media, hashtags are your allies. Not only can they help you get visibility, they can also help you earn the viral status for your social content. But how exactly can you make these hashtags work for you?
On Pinterest, contest hashtags work effectively in boosting your presence but the platform frowns upon the use of multiple hashtags, so sticking to 1-2 tags is best. Instagram offers a more relaxed environment in terms of hashtags as you can use upto 30 per post. To find the most popular tags, you can simply do a search in the app and find the number of posts made for that particular keyword.
Closing thoughts
Social engagement is more than advertising. To make the best of social platforms, you must make use of influence and utilise the content types which hold your user’s attention for a longer time. Also, don’t forget to use hashtags.
