Swift Six: How to engage your social media audience

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Hello, welcome back to the 123-reg Swift 6! This week I am going to be talking to you about six tips to engage your social audience, tips to engage your followers, fans and people on social media.

So, to start with, follow and engage people that are talking about you and your business. Here you are trying to create a relationship with people in social media. And I think the best way of doing this is to use a tool like TweetDeck. There are many other tools that you can use that are like TweetDeck and set up a search for your brand so that, as soon as somebody mentions your brand, you immediately know about it and you can start engaging with that person. And by engaging I mean interacting with them, sending them a message, responding to what they’ve said even if it’s bad. It’s actually a really bad thing if someone doesn’t say anything positive about you that you just ignore them entirely. Far better is to try to engage them, try to turn them around and show that there is a person behind the brand and that person is you.

The second thing – social media is 24 hours, it doesn’t go from 9 o’clock in the morning to 5 o’clock in the afternoon, which is when you might be in the office. So schedule posts to be published after hours and then monitor how popular those posts are. So what you are trying to do here is give the impression that social media for you is not just a job. You know, that it’s something you really enjoy, it’s your life, that it’s not something that is just a function of what you do when you’re at work. So, if you don’t want to actually post out after hours, you can use a tool like Buffer, in order to make sure your posts are appearing when you are not in the office. It might be that the posts that you do that are published around 9 that night get a lot more engagement and a lot more interaction than the one that you do at two in the afternoon even though it could be the same post.
OK, the third thing is to create promotions and competitions about your brand and your products. So there are two big reasons why people follow brands on social media. The first one is to get discounts, and the second one is to enter competitions. So you might not want to give a discount to your product, but create a competition about your brand or about your product, and – why not? – as part of that competition, make people enter by tweeting about you or by making a comment to a post or making a status update around your brand. That way, you’re getting entries and interactions with your brand and your brand message is being carried to all the followers of the people who are entering.

OK, so the fourth thing is to be authentic, to create unique content for your brand and about your brand. And by this I mean don’t just re-tweet or post news that you’ve read on a popular news site. Try to create something that no one has heard before or, if it is about a bit of news that everyone has heard, try to come up with your own opinion on that news topic. So just try to not just be vanilla or part of everyone else says, but to do something which makes you and your brand stand out in people’s memories.

The fifth thing is to promote content on social media that isn’t just about selling your products. Yes, you can make status updates and promotions around your product but, actually, what’s more interesting is to promote content that helps people out and that solves their problems. So you’ve created your business to solve someone’s problems by providing a service or by selling a product. So how else can you help your potential customers out? Can you create a blog post that solves the problem for them? Why not do that and then promote that blog post on social media?

And then lastly, don’t spam. By spamming I mean don’t relentlessly push the same message all of the time. Space out your updates, look to make perhaps no more than six to ten updates a day, a lot less is fine. You don’t want to appear repetitive and monotone in the eyes of your users.

So that was it – the 123-reg Swift 6 on how to engage people on social media. I’ll see you next time.