With over 30,000 posts being made every second of the day on social media sites around the world, the eternal question for organisations is how to get your handful of daily posts noticed by the right people. The answer simple: be engaging! Predictably, however, the practice of making other people want to engage with you and your content is easier said than done, but some key tips will help give your posts the best possible chance of attracting attention.
Your time to sparkle
The most effective way to stand out on the likes of Twitter and Facebook is the creative use of media. Videos are the most clicked form of media on social media, but it isn’t a golden key to engagement: you have to take care to ensure the video is suitable. It has to be long enough to cover all your points, but ideally below 2 minutes to ensure viewers don’t drop off – and to prevent them from watching in the first place. The scene has to be captivating without being distracting, and the lighting and audio have to be a high quality for the best viewing experience.
Photos and logos can be a great of way of drawing attention to your posts while also showing off aspects of you and your client’s works. Statistics and reports aren’t the most social media friendly documents, but infographics can be a great way of getting across results and information in a colourful and easy to read way.
Different content – from videos, podcasts, blogs, and imagery – give your posts a necessary and compelling variety. But never overuse the same image or film clip; that could put off your audience. Be creative.
Your friends are your friends
Does your post involve another person or organisation? Tag them! Tagging people is a great way to get them involved in your content, providing an easy way for them to find and engage with your posts. When you tag someone, you open up your audience to the story involving them: they will often then share that story with their audience – greatly increasing how many people see your post.
Engage with the community
Always banging on your own drum will quickly put people off your content on social media – that’s what your website is for. Social media is your chance to get involved with the wider community, and interacting with other content allows you to provide valuable industry insights, raising the profile of your account and content in the process.
It’s also important to get the wider community to interact with you. As well as tagging, using hashtags on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook group your posts with other posts, making them much easier to find and be discovered by users that aren’t already in your audience.
This activity can and should reflect brand values for example by highlight innovation or people-focussed stories, ensuring your audience has a better understanding of who you are.
Pick Your Time
With so many posts going out on social media, it can be quite easy for your content to get lost in the torrent, but picking the right times to post can maximise visibility. Everyone’s audience is different, and there are many factors that will determine the right time to post on the various platforms.
To get it right, you need to pay attention to your analytics, which will tell you how well your posts are performing and give valuable information about your audience. You can use this information to work out when the majority of your audience will be online. Post around that time and use the analytics to track the progress of those posts, experimenting with different times if you’re not getting the results you expected.
Don’t overdo it
It’s always important to avoid “spamming”. Spamming on social media can mean one of two things: overuse or irrelevance. Posting out very similar things repeatedly in a short timeframe may seem like a good way of ensuring users see at least one of your posts, but in practice, all your dedicated audience will see is post after post of the same thing, which will very quickly put them off your content, and an ‘unfollow’ will quickly materialise.
Tagging people and using hashtags is an integral part of life on social media, but tagging accounts or using hashtags that have nothing to do with the post in question will irk the people you tag and your audience. People will find your content while looking for something entirely unrelated and become annoyed that it has nothing to do with what they searched for. Worse yet, many platforms have rules against spamming, so you could find your accounts blocked!
Use as many tags as possible, but keep it measured: keep your tags and hashtags relevant to your content, and you’ll find the people you tag and their audiences much more willing to engage with you.
Your organisation online
Social media is a fantastic way of reaching a large audience. Getting everything right can seem a little daunting but these basic tips can help shape your social media strategy into one that delivers valuable and engaging content for your existing and prospective audiences.
If you are looking for the tools, expertise and creative thinking to help give you more detailed insights into your organisation’s social media, and to help you plan the next stages of growing your audience in the online community, contact erith@indigopr.com .
Erith McKean
Social Media Executive
