When it comes to small business marketing, quality social media engagement can give your small business a competitive edge over big name brands. In fact, 74 percent of customers rely on word of mouth as the top influencer for purchasing decisions. Proper social media management is crucial for brand exposure and gaining a larger customer base. If you don’t already utilize social media marketing, now is the time to start! Here are our top tips for increasing your social media engagement!

Get Personal

Make social media a personalized experience for your customers. People want to talk to other people, not a brand. Interact with your customers as much as possible. It can be as simple as liking comments if you don’t have time to reply to all of them. Just let customers know they are being heard.

Don’t forget to get your customers involved! Ask questions and invite them to discuss their answers with other customers. Create interactive hashtags unique to your brand that allow customers to share and be involved with the brand. You want your brand to give customers a feeling of belonging. Emotional marketing can create lifelong customers.

Utilize “disappearing stories” to share organic content that takes customers behind the scenes. On platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, users can post content that expires after 24 hours of being posted. Use this function to show that you and your staff are, in fact, real people who do real work every day.

Share Different Types of Content

There are 3 different types of content you want to share a majority of the time:

• Your own website or blog content
• Custom branded images
• Other people’s content (articles, blogs, images)

Take advantage of visual marketing! Statistics have shown that Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more social media engagement than posts without images. Create branded quote images. Pull tips from your blog, and put them on images. Use imagery to cultivate a look that fits your brand.

Why would you want to share other people’s content on your brand’s social media pages? Sharing other people’s content that will be valuable to your audience shows that you value your customers over gaining a profit. However, avoid sharing content created by brands you are competing with. You don’t want to advertise your competitors.

Post As Often As Needed

You’re only posting once a month? Commit to posting multiple times a week (we have a few options available, click here to view our packages). If there is a positive response, continue to post more frequently. People only respond to image posts? Post more images. Try posting at different times of different days, and pay attention to the results. Patterns will start to emerge. Experiment with posts and learn about your audience.

You might find articles online about the best days and times of day to post. Although that is valuable information to have, not all of it may apply to your audience. Learn how your demographic uses social media. Make sure your Instagram and Facebook profiles are business pages; this will allow you to use the free insight tools offered by these platforms.