Tips On How To Engage Better With Social Media

Tips On How To Engage Better With Social Media

Have you defined what you want from social media? Most folks post something on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn and they want tons of people to click and read it. Is that your goal? Social media is a way to promote the work you have spent hours perfecting and attract people to it.

 

The hidden challenge is that you can’t just link your social media up to your content and have thousands of likes, shares and tweets flooding the screen. All social media are different just like people and they have different audiences. That is the number one rule that must always be remembered.

Another rule is: Content is King and Relevance is Queen. It may sound a bit confusing but consider a search for "nuts and bolts," if the user lands on a page about "peanuts," they are gone in a flash. Knowing the audience you are going to share your content with  allows you to optimize your writings for each social network.

Consider the typical audience of each social network. Stop and think of it for a few moments. The fact is, not all of them are equal. Let’s take a look at today’s most popular social media:

Twitter is like a busy street with everyone talking at once. A very impersonal setting with only a vestige of personal contact.

LinkedIn is like a business arena where everyone comes to share their resume with like-minded people and develop groups for their interest areas.

Facebook is like a big party where you find your high school and college associates, re-connect with old friends, make new friends and keep up with family members who live far far away.

With this in mind define the social media group you are connecting with. You will see that your perfect post will look different for each social network.

Let’s look at some ideas you can use in each network.

Twitter:Twitter is easy right? Only 140 characters, but a very important social media network and one you don’t want to mess up with. Since there is very little personal content, people on Twitter can be fickle. 

• In Twitter your best friend is the #Hashtag: The hashtag helps lead readers to your content. The key is to not over use them and/or turn them into spam. Two thoughts on hashtags.
•  Hashtag only those things that relate to your content directly. Remember the Queen mentioned above?
• Try to use only one hashtags per post. Multiple hastags confuse the audience about content.

Images can be a friend as well:  Images tell a story. Use an image with your tweets and it will attract the eyes and the body will flow naturally in that direction. Just make sure the image is related to the content. (Sigh; its the Queen again.)

Linked In:  What makes LinkedIn so special is the business nature of it. In it’s evolution the platform has become similar to Facebook but much more reserved. Your primary process in LinkedIn is to find a group for an interest area.

Find a group that you like and join the group. Be Active in the group more than once or twice. Do not be afraid to engage others in a conversation. Networking in social media is all about building relationships and the group is how you do that in LinkedIn.

If there is no group that appeals to you, define one and ask selected associates to join in to share their ideas. It may take some time to develop, but the feedback will be solid, and your content will reach a target audience. Your partners in the group would be People who would compliment your goals or who would want to see that content.

Don’t ignore seeking out and giving recommendations, both inside and outside of your groups. Always reply to comments, people need acknowledgement. Ask for feedback on your comments so people can engage with you. Make sure your postings to a group are not duplicate content. That makes them spam.

Facebook: Here you can post with text, images and video or a combination of all three. Links can be inserted into the text or image to lead people to other areas of interest.

Link Posts in Facebook capture the image and short description of the URL you are sending folks to. That way they can judge in advance if they want to go there. You can edit out the text or the image. Your social fans might respond better to something different.

Try to make sure your posts stir some emotions and catch attention by using a strong headline designed to attract this type of audience.

Think about doing image and video Posts. A picture is worth a thousand words. Need more be said? People are naturally visual and this can be used to attract attention. The rule is again the Queen, make it relevant to the content you are sending them to.

Keep your image size within the limits. The Facebook Image displayed on user newsfeed dimensions are 472px394px. Other images will never be cropped, instead they will be scaled down. So actual ratio is 236x197px.

Sometimes videos work much better than images. Try the video upload feature provided by Facebook instead of a link to YouTube. This lets your audience watch the video inside Facebook without being sent to another website.