Social media management entitles more than just attracting Facebook “likes.” While a large number of Facebook likes are indicative of a strong social presence, there are other signals that small businesses shouldn’t overlook. Diversifying your marketing efforts to include a variety of social signals will enhance your brand’s presence while attracting more followers in the process.
Comments
Don’t underestimate the value of visitor comments on social media. Whether it’s Facebook, Google+, Instagram, etc., comments are a direct result of visitor engagement, meaning your audience is interested in your social media content. Even if the comment is nothing more than a “Keep up the good work!” it will still strengthen your social media profiles. For this reason, it’s recommended that brands and business owners encourage their followers to comment.
Shares
Another powerful social signal that shouldn’t be overlooked is shares. When a member of your target audience sees a particular piece of content that he or she likes, they may choose to share it with their friends and family. And once shared, those people may choose to share it with their friends and family. This can create a viral effect in which users continue to share the content with one another, resulting in HUGE amounts of traffic. Just check out some of the top Facebook pages, such as Coca-Cola, and you’ll notice they often have hundreds or even thousands of shares. Social media management isn’t an easy task, but shares will go a long ways in establishing a strong presence on these networks.
Retweets
How may retweets do you normally receive? Twitter, the world’s most popular 140-characters-or-less social media network, is a powerful marketing tool. In order to use it to its full advantage, though, brands must encourage their audience to retweet their content; otherwise, the content will fall into the abyss where it’s never seen or heard from again. Whenever you tweet content from your Twitter account, tell your followers to retweet it. You can’t expect everyone to retweet it, but just a handful of retweets from active users can make a significant difference.
Google +1
For Google+, brands should encourage their audience to +1 their content. This is essentially Google’s version of Facebook’s likes. Users can simply click the “+” button to indicate that they like the content.
Social Media Management: Choosing the Best Content
So, what’s the best type of social media content to promote visitor engagement? As the saying goes, an image is worth a thousand words, holds true. According to study conducted by SocialBakers, 93% of the most engaging Facebook posts made by the top 5,000 brands were images. Social media users are inherently more likely to comment, share or otherwise engage with photos than other forms of content. Does this mean you should only publish photos to your social media accounts? Not necessarily, as diversifying your efforts with text, videos and links will also prove useful in generating traffic. However, photos yield the greatest results in terms of visitor engagement.
