It takes a lot of time and effort to put together a social media campaign and execute it. In many cases, the results of your campaign don’t come close to your expectations in terms of:
- likes
- traffic
- shares
- engagement
This could be because of outdated outreach techniques or because your posts are too “salesy”. In this article, let’s look at a few social media tactics used by successful brands that you could learn from.
Use Images to Trigger Emotions
Images add life to your social media posts. Those images tap into your users’ emotions a lot better than a wall of text does. People buy for emotional reasons, so using the right images can trigger higher conversions.
According to a report by Adobe, social media posts with images create 650% more engagement [pdf] than text posts.
And Hubspot reports that people retain 6.5% more information three days later when an image was part of the post.
In fact, more is better. According to Facebook, images in albums get 12.9 times more clicks than single image posts.
I often add images to blog posts and sales pages with the main goal of increasing social media engagement.
It doesn’t matter what social media platform you use to reach your users. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat, make sure to use the right images to trigger the emotions that will pull them in.
Etsy does a great job with highly engaging pictures from their DIY fashion marketplace. The results are astounding. Etsy has 1.4 million followers on Instagram with each post getting several thousand likes and shares.
Don’t sell, Educate
Consumers have evolved in how they discover new products. These days, they like to engage with products before deciding to buy. The last thing one would want to see on their social media platform (or website for that matter) is a sales message pushing the user to buy. In 2017, no pushing allowed.
A good way to get high conversions without aggressive selling is to follow a two-part process:
- Focus on understanding the customer and what he or she is looking for.
- Educate the customer about how your product can help.
Education is about “how to”. As long as your product is within reach when the customer decides to buy, they will put their money down.
Social media is an excellent venue to educate customers about trends and news from your industry, as well.
Shopify does this extremely well. The popular eCommerce platform does not explicitly sell their service on social media. Instead, its posts are filled with useful information. Everything it posts is about what small business owners need to know, not just about its own services. That’s because small business owners are its target market.
The links to the company’s sales pages are often placed contextually within guides and research reports. This way, targeted users are warmed up to the need for the product before they actually land on the Shopify sales page.
Listen to your customers
Starbucks takes “listening to customers” to a new level with the My Starbucks Idea. It is sort of a “suggestion box” for the global coffee chain’s 150,000+ members. More than a suggestion box, it’s a community. Starbucks members interact, discussing each other’s ideas.
In the last seven years, My Starbucks Idea has led to nearly 300 innovations. A few examples are:
- free wifi
- digital tipping
- peach green-tea lemonade
When you give your customers so much attention, they connect with you. They write about you. They tell their friends about you. They do your marketing for you.
User Generated Content (UGC) is the king
User Generated Content is arguably the best way to gain customer loyalty. That’s a second lesson from My Starbucks Idea.
On top of that, UGC gives you free word-of-mouth marketing. Your strategy should be to gently nudge your customers to create content. Once that’s done, you are on your way to getting visitors like never before.
For example, GoPro is expert at attracting UGC through social media. Its product is literally a content creation machine. GoPro’s audience enthusiastically takes it upon itself to promote the brand. This gives them an enviable level of engagement and customer loyalty. Customers from around the world share images and videos taken on their GoPro device. They use the #gopro hashtag on Instagram and on Twitter. GoPro then retweets the best ones.
As Paul Crandell from GoPro says, their product is not just a camera anymore. Rather, it is an enjoyment platform.
Creating social media content that engages and converts customers takes trial and error. But a peek into what successful brands do can mean a few less trials and a lot less error. Have you tried these tactics on your audience?
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