Social Media: Are You Engaging Your Fans?

A question for you: How’s your social media marketing working out? Do you feel like it’s an effective tool that’s helping you build your brand and increase top of mind awareness among your fans and followers? Is it driving eager, interested traffic to your website? If so, great!

If not, if you feel like all your hard work in trying to win at social media marketing is an act of futility, keep reading. I’m going to share some ideas I’m confident will help you.

Even if your social marketing is “firing on all eight cylinders” and moving along quite nicely, keep reading. There’s always room for improvement, and I have some ideas I think can help you.

Social media marketing…

It’s a catchphrase we hear all the time. The media is talking about it. Business owners and online marketers talk about it a lot.

And naturally, you see a lot of social media chatter about it. All of this is enough to make both new and experienced marketers want to throw up their hands in frustration.

Social media can be a very useful tool in many different marketing situations when used along with email marketing, SEO/SEM, blogging, and content marketing, including content curation.

Used improperly, it can lead to a complete lack of results and can even turn off would-be customers and fans.

Drowning in a Sea of Social Media “Noise”

Put yourself in your social media audience’s shoes for a moment. Think about the times you are looking at your Twitter or Facebook feeds. It can get confusing and overwhelming, right? All of those posts are there because you friended the poster or liked a page.

But how many of them truly catch your eye and capture your attention? How many of them draw you in and make you want to take a closer look? I’m guessing your answer is “Not many!”.

Sorry to tell you this, but if you aren't getting the social media marketing results you want, your posts may be getting ignored, just like you ignore most of the ones in your feeds. So what can you do to overcome this problem?

First, understand your followers and the type of audience you want to follow you. What drives them? What are their fears and hopes? What buyer persona matches them most closely?

Gain a deep understanding of your audience, develop a detailed profile, and then post content and updates that will resonate with that audience.

The Right Message to the Right Audience

Let’s say you run an e-commerce business that sells parts and accessories for high performance sports cars. You determine that 90% of your audience is made up single men under the age of 30. You decide to start posting on Facebook and Twitter in hopes of marketing more effectively to your fans.

If you start posting articles on minivans and child safety seats do you think your audience will respond favorably? Of course not! You want to give them the content that interests them.

You want to curate articles from sports car authorities and share them with your audience. Because you understand the importance of driving targeted, interested traffic back to your website, you want to write relevant articles for your own blog and link to them in your social media posts.

You sincerely hope your followers will notice and respond to your posts, but here’s the catch: if you don’t take the important steps likely to increase your click-through rates and build engagement, they probably won’t.

So how can you increase the click-through rates for the articles you share?

We've already talked about the importance of giving the right content to the right audience. You need to take additional steps to get your content noticed and clicked on in social media feeds. How? Your social media post content is very important here. You need for it to grab and hold potential readers’ attention.

Using solid, persuasive copywriting technique, write an enticing post content snippet that makes the reader burn with curiosity to find out what the article you've linked to is about. Imply that he will get some kind of very nice benefit if he clicks through and reads the article, whether it’s an article you wrote and posted on your blog or one you've curated.

Harness the power of emotion in your social media post content. This a very strong method for grabbing a reader’s attention, getting him to click through and getting him to share your article with his network. Also, pictures in social media feeds can lead to increased click-through rates. 

Like Part Of The Family

Getting your post’s link clicked on is very important to your social media marketing success. Clicks can help drive, and are a result of, social media follower engagement.

Engagement is critical to social media marketing success. You want your readers to feel engaged with you, like they are a part of your community and like they matter to you.

You want them to not just notice and click on the links in your social media posts (although this is a very nice situation to have) you want them to be thinking about you and your social media presence even when they aren't on their computer or smartphone!

You want to make such an impression on them that they think about you on a regular basis and visit your social pages because they find you so interesting.

Engage!

How do you do this? Be enthusiastically engaged with them and interested in them. Respond to their comments. Demonstrate that you are genuinely grateful for their participation in your social media world. Thank them for their input and feedback.

This is “social” media; be sociable!

Do not make the mistake so many social media marketers make; do not blast your audience with sales message after sales message. Do the opposite – post few if any direct sales message in your social media feeds. We talked earlier about using compelling content to drive social media click-throughs.

If you want to maintain audience engagement and interest once you've done this,  provide great content on the other side.

Don’t post a link with a fantastic content blurb and then show weak content once they click through your link. They've clicked through expecting something great. Don’t disappoint them. If you do, you will eventually lose their interest, and their level of engagement will plummet.

What’s Your Ultimate Marketing Goal?

So why do we do all of the hard work to build social media follower engagement? Our ultimate goal through all of this is to make more sales.

It’s a cliché, but it’s true; people buy from those they know like and trust. If you properly engage your social media followers, they begin to feel as if they know, like and trust you.

Your social media engagement efforts will build “conversion momentum”. Many followers will be predisposed to buy from you even before they take their first look at your sales message.

But beware; that momentum can be lost instantly! It’s important that you have all of the pieces of the conversion puzzle in place. A great landing page is a very important piece.

But you don’t want just any landing page software. You’re committed to setting up a high-converting landing page with persuasive copy and design. You want to put it on a landing page template engineered to help you enjoy a higher conversion rate.

In short, you want Lander.

Not only is Lander designed to help you convert more page visitors into buyers, it’s super simple to set up and maintain. Lander is the “easiest-to-use landing page platform in the Universe”!

And news about the benefits of the Lander platform is spreading like wildfire – 2,000 online marketers and business owners just like you register for a free trial of the Lander landing page platform every month.

Why don’t you join them? Why don’t you experience the same ease of use and out-of-this-world benefits they get to enjoy?

Click here now to register for your 30-day free trial, no credit card required.

Happy Marketing!