With spring in the air, we think it’s to focus on how your brand can feel fresh with fans through social media. To help you increase your reach and build new relationships, we have created a guide to increasing the shareability of your social content.
According to Social Media Examiner’s 2014 Social Media Industry Report, 97 percent of businesses use social media for marketing purposes, and 92 percent feel that it’s important to their success. To get the most out of your resources invested in social media and community management your brand must focus on delivering valuable content and keeping customers engaged.
Encourage Sharing
The best way to increase the shareability of your content is to make it interesting and easy to understand at a glance. Visual content is the most shared content on the Internet, largely because the human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than the time it takes to decode text.
Sharing bite-sized content that is quick to read and easily digestible can help increase engagement across all social channels. Condense lengthy content into more sharable media by leveraging infographics or tools such as SlideShare.
Within your existing content, including social sharing icons such as a “pin it” button to visual content, can increase your chance of going viral by 700%. Optimize social sharing icons to enhance content posted to social networks. Include strong calls to action in your content and social postings to encourage users to engage. Don’t be afraid to be direct and ask users to share, like or comment on your content.
Leverage User-Generated Content
Social networks are personal by nature, so leveraging user-generated content can help add character, trust and value to your brand.
Studies have found that brand engagement increases by 28% when users are exposed to both professional and user-generated content. Leverage reviews and find creative ways to keep you users included in your social activities. Promote contests that encourage users to get integrated with your brand and submit their own content to increase sharing and create buzz.
By getting users more involved they will become invested in your brand and develop quality, long-term relationships.
Keep Audiences Engaged
Nurture your social relationships by paying close attention to how users interact with your content. By increasing visibility through posting at optimal times across individual social networks, your content will generate more engagement organically. Monitor all your content to track engagement and respond to any user outreach. Respond to all comments, both positive and negative, within a 24 hour window to keep conversations going.
Make Content Unique
Your fans follow your brand because you offer unique benefits that your competitors can’t. Leverage this by developing personalized content and a tone and voice for your brand that helps it stand out amongst the endless flow up social updates and digital noise. Analyze competitor content strategies to identify opportunities and gaps in your industry. To establish thought leadership and increase sharing, create content that is bold and occasionally disruptive.
Specify Content By Audience and Platform
To increase user engagement with content, personalize your focus to speak to the unique interests of your different target audience segments. Analyze your audience to identify behaviors and interests that influence interaction.
You will find that individual audience segments may behave different across social platforms, so create custom content strategy plans for each network where your brand establishes a presence.
Increase Visibility Through Paid Media
Whoever said money can’t buy love clearly doesn’t understand how to optimize a paid social campaign. Promoting your page through paid ads on social can help grow your fan base and get more eyes on your content. If you are looking to increase exposure to individual social updates, boost posts to targeted audiences who are more likely to engage.
Paid campaigns such as Facebook ads or Twitter cards offer an ability to increase your visibility without the need for organic traffic, and often can be defined to only charge when users engage. This allows marketers to carefully monitor how content is being shared and get the most out of every advertising dollar spent.
Stay Organized And Consistent
Keeping users engaged requires constant and consistent updates on all social platforms. As users get to know your brand they will develop expectations for content schedules and will lose interest in your brand over time if those expectations are not met. Develop a content calendar that helps organize and regulate content.
Use your content calendar to plan out content focus and to hold your team members accountable for delivery and consistent quality. To help ensure consistency in publication, leverage post-automation to schedule updates. Continue to monitor and keep a personal touch on scheduled content to avoid gaps in communication and engagement.
Conclusion
Social sharing is influenced by the quality and delivery of your brands content combined with its ability to keep users engaged through consistent communication. Boost your engagement and social sharing by monitoring how your individual audience segments engage and creating personalized content plans that speak to unique interests and brand expectations.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Spring Has Sprung: Staying Fresh Through Social Sharing
More Digital & Social articles from Business 2 Community:
- What the Pending Demise of Google+ Means for PR and Marketing
- 115 Social Media Marketing Tools for 2015
- 10 Essential Rules For Effective Facebook Marketing In 2015
- 10 Rookie Social Media Mistakes You Should Avoid
- 8 Quick Ways To Boost Your Social Marketing Strategy
