Today, our Senior Manager of Content & Promotions, Anne Marie Robson, answers another common question that we hear from clients looking for ways to boost online engagement.
What recommendations do you have for creating compelling social media content?
Anne Marie: That’s a great question, and it’s one that I hear quite often. In fact, it’s such a popular topic that we recently presented a webinar with Triton Digital on the use of social media to increase your website traffic. I’ll boil down the presentation into three main points:
- Start by establishing goals for your social media strategy. Determine what type of end result is your top priority, such as growing your email database or increasing traffic to a featured page or promotion. Then identify your KPIs. On the surface, you may think that striving for an increase in likes on your posts is an important metric, but consider measuring actions that yield more valuable conversions, such as post shares or link clicks. These type of interactions spread awareness of your brand and can bring drive new traffic back to your site. Knowing the actions you want followers to take will make it easier to create the right type of content to compel that behavior.
- Once you have your strategy in place, build a content plan to support it. If you want more post shares on a channel such as Twitter or Facebook, ensure that you are providing a wide variety of content on those networks on a regular basis. Frequent, new material on varying topics will hold your audience’s interest. Create an editorial calendar for your social profiles to highlight key events, holidays, or campaigns that you’ll want to post about. Research your target demographic and learn their peak activity times on each social site, and aim to publish your posts during those times. You can even schedule your content ahead of time with social media management tools like Hootsuite or Buffer.
- One of the most important ways to compel action through your social media content is to ensure that each post is optimized for the channel it’s posted to. Networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn each possess their own character limits and image size specifications. This means that, while you’re likely to share the same contests, promotions, or website links on each channel, your graphics and messaging on each will be slightly different. Our social media webinar covers the character limits for several major social media networks, and you can easily use a free tool like Canva to resize your graphics for each channel.
Taking these points into account when refining your digital strategy will boost your potential for increased site traffic, brand awareness, and audience engagement.
For more easy tips for marketing your content and events on social media, check out this recent blog post.
