How do you really get engagement from your business social media posts?

Engagement is the golden ticket for visibility on social media. Yes, it is correct that the algorithms for each platform are complex and consider many aspects of an account or post when deciding how many people to show it to, but engagement has a huge part to play on all platforms. If a post receives likes, shares and comments, it will always do better than one that doesn’t have any interaction at all.

However, Business to Business content can be a little more tricky than consumer-targeted content, because, let’s face it, we all have our "Work" voice and a different "At Home" voice, and the way we interact with businesses as our business or brand is fundamentally different.

Some might argue that LinkedIn doesn’t reflect this sort of attitude any more, however, it’s still a very divided platform and plenty of profile owners have been accused of over-sharing or being called out for posting holiday snaps or “acting inappropriately” by more introverted characters. So, we need to be careful about how we post, when we post, and what we post in order to get the balance right.

Case Study: The Replace Base

An online retailer of mobile device repairs and replacement parts

Twitter and Facebook still have a part to play in B2B social media, and Instagram shouldn’t be forgotten either, particularly if your target customer is a sole trader or small business owner. The following are worth taking into consideration when your marketing team crafts posts:

Consistency is key and repetition is not risky

Keeping up appearances on social media is not only good for showing that you’re open for business, but regular sharing is likely be rewarded with a better overall profile ranking. As well as feeding the algorithm, regular posts will help your audience feel more in touch with your brand. You’ll become familiar to them, a little like their favourite soap characters. They’re more likely to interact with your posts if they understand your tone of voice and can feel confident they can match it and won’t be ignored.

Posting daily doesn’t mean that your marketing team needs to spend hours and hours creating posts and researching content. It’s ok to repeat posts, particularly your best performing posts. If you have a clever scheduling tool available you can retrieve old evergreen content, re-work it and cycle it through your accounts sporadically – so long as you tailor the words and #s to each platform.

Think about posts that didn’t perform too well either. They could perhaps have been posted at the wrong time of day, meaning only a small proportion of your audience saw the content – in which case, let it have its fair share of visibility and post it again at the right time.

There will be key sales messages too that you need to share regularly, and it’s ok to repeat these. You can automate and alternate the image that runs through with this content, again, if you have a clever scheduling tool.

User generated content is the best type of content

Any time you ask your audience to contribute to the conversation on your social media accounts, you’re encouraging user generated content. This might simply look like asking people to nominate their favourite local shop by tagging them in, send praise to a friend or colleague, or share pictures of their workspace, pets, garden, or anything relevant to your audience.

As a spin-off from the content submitted, you can then create posts that resonate with the audience. If someone has shared a fantastic photo, share it to your entire audience (after checking permission with the person that submitted it) and you’ll more than likely find that the likes and shares flood in as that person’s friends get excited by their 15 minutes of fame.

Be human

Use language and personality online that you’d use in offline life too. Having a sense of humour, sense of empathy and finding things in common with others is part of human nature. There’s no harm in sharing the odd humorous post, relating to homeworking, work-life balance, being excited about seasonal changes, or showing kindness and empathy to life challenges or charitable causes. Just be aware that political content can divide opinion, so be careful about what you share, and be wary of anything that could be offensive to minority groups including positive discrimination.

Anything that you can do to encourage community spirit and kindness is always going to work well and is even better if it’s relevant to support your most local community. An example of this is using National days such as National Pet Day or National Kindness Day to send surprise gifts to someone nominated on your page or supporting campaigns such as improving local play spaces.

There are some large national charities that do all the above very well given their kind and caring nature, so charity pages are worth checking for inspiration no matter what your industry is. It’s also good practice to have regular content inspiration creative meetings with your wider team or marketing agency on at least a quarterly basis.

While I’m here I’d like to recommend a few marketing support services we offer that might help you:

• Creating a 3-month content calendar – our team can specify day by day for 90 days which content you should be sharing when – meaning all your social media team need to do is write the posts up and find some images
• Supporting your creative meetings – Our consultants can join your team creative meetings to offer advice and help get the conversation going, and help you create your content plans and campaign strategies
• Campaign management – we can help support user generated content campaigns by creating the copy and images to support this, spreading the message far and wide, and managing the comments and replies
• Our super amazing scheduling tool can be programmed to cycle and vary content for you throughout the entire year….. meaning you can fill in the gaps with trending news as and when you wish without having to worry about creating new content too regularly
• Training on social media best practices and technical set up – 1 to 1 and group sessions at our place or yours

Prices for the above start at just £75, so why not give me a call if you’d like to explore these options. Happy posting!