7 Ways You Can Encourage Interaction on Social Media

If you have a social media presence, and you should, make sure you are presenting your business in a way that will encourage interaction. Follow these seven steps to get started.

You social pages and profiles should be beautiful and professional.

Remember, your social media pages are very likely the first thing your target audience will see. It is the “face” of your business. If it looks unprofessional people will not have a very good impression of your company. If you, like many entrepreneurs, don’t know how to set up your page, consider hiring a social media manager.

Create a page design that communicates what you do for your target audience.

Your page design should tell the story of what you do and how you do it. Avoid choosing a page on your personnel tastes. For example, an adoption coach should choose bright colors and pictures of happy children and families. A business coach should feature conservative colors and pictures of business people.

Post on a regular basis consistently.

Your followers will expect to see something from you on a regular basis. If you don’t post regularly, they will lose interest. So what is a regular basis? This differs for each social media platform. Buffer has a great article that recommends best times for the most common platforms. Check it out here. Take note that you should also consider the time of day you post. While there are suggested times, check your stats and see if your audience differs from the norm.

Always respond to questions. Do not ignore your followers.

You want people to interact with your posts. This encourages positive feedback and shows your audience that you are a real person and care. It increases brand loyalty and creates brand ambassadors. Samantha Kerstetter, has an outstanding post about what a brand ambassador is and a step by step plan to recruit them from your social media followers.

Use a multimedia approach.

People learn and interact with different forms of media. If you only post text, it will be difficult to create the interaction you need. Take a look at these stats:

“Visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content. Tweet this stat!” (Source)

“Articles with an image every 75-100 words got double the number of social shares than articles with fewer images.” (Source)

As you can see it makes sense to include images and video in your social media plan.  Here are a few tips on creating attention grabbing images.
Your image should be related to the text of your post. For example, I observed a post about parenting teens with a picture of toddlers. If the post had a picture of teens, at a glance I would have had an idea what the post was about and, because I have teens, it would have received my attention.
Your images should include legible text. Doesn’t it drive you nuts when you have to decipher the message on an image? Fancy fonts might look great but if you can’t read them it doesn’t matter how interesting they are.

Know what size image works best on each platform. If your image doesn’t display correctly, it will lose some of its effectiveness. Hubspot has a cheat sheet for best sizes on all social media platforms and downloadable templates.
Your image should be branded. This can be your logo or simply your url (such as HITVirtual.com). The primary purpose is if your image is separated from your post, your brand will still direct people back to you.
Videos can feature you discussing topics related to your business market. Viewers become more familiar with you and what you do. Videos can also feature just your voice-over expertise with the use of a slideshow or animation. You might also add music in the background and fancy visual effects. Learn more here.

Change page themes from time to time.

If you get tired of seeing the same cover photo month after month, your followers definitely feel the same. One way to do this is to follow the changing seasons, i.e. Christmas theme, Thanksgiving theme or Halloween theme.

You need more than a logo.

Upload more photos related to your company. This may include pictures of you at work. If you recently hosted or attended an event, post photographs of it. When your audience sees these photos, they feel like they know you and will be more comfortable investing in your product or service.
Incorporating these tips in your social media plan will increase your audience and their interaction. Try them today.