Using social media to attract new customers and market to your existing clientele has been a growing trend over the past decade.  When MySpace was king, big businesses were using that platform to reach out to their customers and it worked great.  Fast forward to today and you will see that using social media for business purposes has grown significantly.  While MySpace is no longer a dominate force, many other social media platforms have popped up in which businesses and marketers are using to reach millions of people each and every day.

When it comes to your social media properties (yes, I said properties, as in multiple destinations), it is important that you not only have great quality content for your fans to check out, but you need to also engage your audience.  While this seems blatantly obvious, a lot of people are totally missing out.  If you just post an article without asking your viewers to like or comment on it, the viral effect of social media is all but lost on your hard efforts.  If you miss out on the viral liking, sharing, and commenting, you are basically only reaching a small handful of your potential audience.  Getting user engagement is critical to the success of your social media optimization campaigns.  This is why I’ve put together the following list of five methods of increasing your social media engagement.

1. Use Awesome Images

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but images, especially infographics, memes, and inspirational quotes are some of the most viral content on all of social media.  Using good quality content in terms of images has major pluses when it comes to social media.  Research has shown that the right types of images can generate huge interaction rates on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

You might be thinking to yourself that you do not have a lot of talent to create a visually stunning infographic, a funny meme, or an amazing quote image.  One way around that is to just find something already being shared online that is relevant to your niche and share it with your target audience.  Alternatively, their are products online that can greatly make the process of creating memes and quote graphics done in a matter of minutes.  A quick Google search will turn up plenty of options.  Lastly, you can pay to have someone generate some unique content that fits your niche.  Depending on the type of work involved, these images can become pretty costly.  If you are on a budget, we highly recommend you check out Fiverr as you can get some pretty decent work done on the cheap by hiring someone from that site.

2. Hold A Giveaway

Giveaways, contents, and sweepstakes have huge engagement so long as what you are offering is of value to people.  Having people comment, like, and share your posts in order to qualify for the prizes is an easy and quick way to build huge engagement.  Other examples of ways to enter a contest would be to have contestants post on your social media page based on a topic of your choosing.  The post that they make will be shared amongst their friends on the social media platform which not only can help boost your engagement, but also the number of people you reach online.

3. Interact And Participate

You don’t want to just post the same old articles on your social media sites that you would normally host on your blog.  While we encourage syndicating your content from your website to your social media properties, you also want to interact with your visitors.  Post about what is going on in your business and any upcoming events or deals that you might have in the works.  If you see people are posting on your social media pages, be sure to engage your visitors and respond to inquiries or comments.  The more interaction you provide on your social media pages, the better engagement you will have due to the relationship building that occurs.

4. Ask Your Audience

I touched on this a bit earlier when I mentioned the viral effect of social media.  If you ask your audience questions, it is a great way to gain engagement on any topic you post.  Whether you are asking for advice, ideas, what they like about your product or service, or even just a random question about their day, any  content they provide as a comment helps increase your engagement and reach.  Some companies in the past have help question and answer sessions online using Google Hangouts and Twitter.  By doing this, it allows for customers to talk directly to a business in an open forum.  The only drawback to this type of engagement tactic is that you might get some negative people attacking you in an open place that you have no control over.  Whether it be jealous competitors, or just haters of your product or service, these people can ruin a question and answer session by spamming negative things throughout the session.

5. Use The Right Content

Depending on which social property you are working with, you may want to post different types of content.  The people who frequent Facebook might not be the same type of people who like to use Twitter.  Tailoring your content around the types of people who use the different social media platforms is key.  Throwing the same content up everywhere might not be the best idea, as it might work really well on one platform, but totally bomb on another.  Obviously images will work great on Instagram and Pinterest; however, they might not work as well on Twitter.  As an example, you could create a great list on how to do something related to your niche and post it on Facebook, and then convert that same list into an infographic and post it on Pinterest and Instagram.

If you want to really increase your social media presence we would appreciate the opportunity to assist you.  You can reach out to our Social Media Optimization group by calling us at (916)800-4950, or visit or contact page and fill out our form and someone will get in touch with you as soon as possible.