Social Media is a powerful platform that can be used to help improve business sales, advertising efforts, and improve interaction between your business and your customers. Social media advertising is probably one of the top advertising portals that is used to help businesses increase their revenue. When combined with other marketing efforts you can create a powerful digital marketing strategy that is effective and gets you the results that you’re after. If you’re hoping to improve your advertising efforts through social media, here’s some of the best tips you can use to help boost your follower engagement.

1 . Be Visually Appealing

Social media and its content go hand-in-hand when it comes to generating more follower engagement. It’s estimated that the power of images can help to increase social media interaction by 87% on platforms like Facebook and 35% on Twitter. This is why it’s crucial to add some visual appeal within your posts when you’re advertising on social media platforms. Here’s just some of the ways you can offer a more visual appealing post on respected social media platforms and still gain interaction from your audience.

  • Asking for a caption to an image.
  • Highlighting team members who have done a good job.
  • Behind the scene footage of a new product that hasn’t been released yet.
  • Creating an infographic on a certain topic.
  • Create collages that represent your company and your mission.
  • Sharing images from your business or industry event.

These are just some of the ways you can be more visual to gain more follower engagement. Remember not everyone wants to read a comment.

2. Be Simple; Ask Questions

While it may seem simple, still not all companies do it. When you want to boost your follower engagement ask random questions at random intervals. People like to know that you’re thinking of them. Even just a simple question such as:

  • ‘So what’s your plans for the holiday season?’
  • ‘When is your next day off?’
  • ‘What do you prefer, black or white?’

It will help to improve interaction between you and your followers greatly and if you ask the right questions you may even be able to gain better feedback on your own business and upcoming products for better marketing solutions later.

The more random your questions are, the more you will get responses. It’s important though when asking questions to never get too personal or to never come off negative. This can damage your reputation greatly and will give the opposite effect to what you’re trying to achieve.

 3. Hold Contests

Everyone likes to try and win something. Holding a contest is a great way to help build brand reputation and to boost your follower engagement. When hosting a competition, it’s advisable to have one main prize and 2 to 3 runners up as this will give additional hope to those who enter your competition. When preparing your contest, make sure it’s something that your audience can relate to, can complete and most importantly can have fun with. Some contest ideas include:

  • Caption this photo
  • Photo competitions
  • 50 words or less
  • Guess what this is competition
  • Name and email address competition

These are just some of the type of competitions that are common and that get people’s attention. You’ll find that the better your prize is the more people will enter and interact with you.

4 . Trigger Emotions From Your Posts

To help you gain more interaction from your follower while building brand awareness, don’t be afraid to share happy, inspiring or passionate posts. Social media platforms such as Facebook have now introduced new ways to react to different posts which include Like, Love, Haha, Sad, Angry and Wow.

With the introduction of these new icon reactions, it allows people to better share the way they feel when seeing your post. This allows you to gain better feedback on the posts that you’re sharing so you can tweak them better towards your audience.

Sharing happy, inspiring and passionate posts can help businesses to make their audience feel happy and passionate about a cause that you’re passionate or happy about. Happiness is one of the most powerful emotions you can trigger and can leave your audience feeling happy and complete for the rest of the day.

Happiness can be triggered by sharing funny stories, bad stories that end well, or just sharing posts that help to motivate and inspire. By triggering your audience’s emotions you will find that you will gain a lot more likes and shares in return. Ellen DeGeneres, does it well as seen below:

5. Build Anticipation

If you’ve got an upcoming product release scheduled and you want to generate more follower engagement around this release, it’s a good idea to build anticipation. Building anticipation can help to build better brand and product exposure. To build anticipation you simply have to intrigue your audience and catch their attention.

This should only be done within the 2 months leading up to the product release, otherwise it will lose effect. You can do this by simply posting on your social media pages something like: It’s Coming! This will get your audience intrigued. What’s coming? When is it coming? As you get closer, you can start to offer more information and a date of release. If you haven’t had much chatter in your social media circles this will get everyone talking.

Conclusion

Social media is powerful and can really improve your ability to advertise and market your brand better. By understanding how to build better follower engagement you can really improve your chances of being a success on social media. The more followers you gain, the more brand exposure you will have through a higher level of possible likes, shares and comments. Remember though when responding back to any comments, especially negative, you need to respond in a polite and helpful manner. This will look better in your followers eyes and will also keep the trust of current and future customers as well. So, are you ready to improve your social media interaction?

Aaron Gray

Aaron is the co-founder of Studio 56 and is a passionate digital marketing expert who has worked with some of the largest digital marketing agencies in Australia. He has been working in the digital marketing field for ten years. Aaron loves to travel the world to not only enhance his cultural experiences but learn and enhance his skills in the digital marketing industry. He is dedicated to helping others reach their online marketing goals.