Creating Engaging Social Media Content in 2018
Have you seen that your social media numbers have dropped lately?
Facebook specifically has been changing drastically to give the user a more “authentic” social media experience. If you’re not thinking much about what you post, you could be wasting a lot of time and opportunities to reach new people.
81% of Americans have a personal Facebook account and 80% of small businesses use facebook for their business. Most people have their own account and most small businesses run their social media pages. The problem here is that there are many differences in running a business page vs a personal page.
If you’re just running your businesses facebook page and have a hard time drawing traffic or getting engagement, don’t worry! We’re going to look at some things to set you on the right track. You should be able to grow your facebook page with no experience over time.
Strategy
The first part of every marketing initiative is planning! In order to get engagement on your facebook posts, start with a goal in mind. Some typical goals I like to start with are:
• Driving people to the website
• Grow the audience on my page
• Get phone calls or leads
• Try to get more reviews
While you may want all of those to be your goals, you should only focus on one. The content that would be geared for each goal would be different based on what you are trying to achieve. Today let’s say you’re trying to drive people to your website as the goal.
When picking a goal for your website you want to make sure that it is reasonable and measurable. Reasonable goals are something that you are likely to reach. If you’re newer, start small to see what you can expect from future campaigns. Making sure you have a means of tracking you’re your goal is very important as well. Using analytics is the best way to measure numbers of your campaigns. Having a measurable campaign is the main way you will improve over time because you can directly compare what type of campaign is working better than others.
Start by planning posts out at least two weeks in advance. This will make sure that you are posting consistently and give you time to think about your post before you have to post it. Find a good rate for posting to your audience, the typical frequency I stick to is 2-4 posts/week. It will depend based on your industry and audience.
Once you have a goal and a posting strategy, it’s time to start thinking about how you accomplish the goal.
The Content
Engaging content is tough to master. It takes time to understand your audience and their likes as well as using their likes to fit your business goals.
When creating content, it is very important to remember that you’re not posting on your personal facebook account. Don’t just post a picture of your food with no caption, also don’t just type up a post with no picture or supporting media. There are few times when they would be acceptable, but for now get in the habit of putting a picture or video with a caption for the majority of your posts.
Let’s stick with our previous goal of driving people to your website:
We want to make sure that our posts are going to catch our readers eye and accomplish our goal. If we run a restaurant we can post a picture of our weekly lunch special and then in the caption, post a link to the full menu on the website. The post could read something like, “This week’s special is a chicken taco with nacho combo! Tag a friend who owes you lunch. If you’re not into tacos, check out the other items on our menu here: www.website.com”
This accomplishes our goal because the picture of the food should be captivating enough to get your customers to stop and look at the delicious food. Aside from them looking at the picture, they’re tagging a friend who will see the picture as well and includes a link to the website as a final CTA.
While this is just one example, the concept should be applied to your certain goals. Make sure that you are creating content that they want to see. Keep it original as well. Try to avoid sharing articles that aren’t relevant to your business just to post them. They don’t drive action and get lost in newsfeeds quite easily.
Summary
Keep things planned and relevant. If you wouldn’t look at it in your personal newsfeed, odds are no one will. Take the time to plan out what you want to say and accomplish. Once you give it a shot, take a look and see how you can improve your ads even more.
It won’t happen overnight, but if you stick with it you will grow. For help managing your facebook or any social media account, contact us! We’ve specialized in organic and paid growth for social media. We’ve seen success and we’d love to help you meet your goals.
