In the last post we talked about your social media handshake, or how to approach new social media followers and friends.
This week we are going to talk about content creation and how to draw followers and friends to your profile and get them to engage you and share your content. See social media can be a great place to meet people who are interested in your business but the fact is 9 of 10 people you meet in your first 30 days will not be right for your business or ready for your product, but they may know someone who is. Interaction with your product is social media engagement.
Your Social Media Handshake Should Be Firm
People do not pass along advertisements to each other with Social Media Engagement.
People do however share thought provoking questions, informative quotes, amazing stories, funny meme, photos, music, and feedback on current events. Finding the interest of the people who connect with you can take time but in finding their interest and feeding their needs they will share your content with their other friends.
When the right items are shared before anyone else has them you may even get enough like, shares, views to go viral.
Going viral is done when original social media content is consumed by your contacts, shared to their contacts, who share it again until a large number usually 2,000+ people have taken interest and performed some type of engaging act with it. If you’re a blogger it could be sharing your latest post on what the cat’s were doing Tuesday, or that picture of your spouse trying to clean the gutters falling in the pool.
You never know exactly what will go viral, that’s half the fun. You need to use things like Twitter List and the likes section of Facebook friends profiles to judge what they are interested in and then write about things you think they may like. Do it with passion and regularity and you could soon have your own viral wonder.
Your odds of your social media engagement and shares going viral are increased when you do the following:
- Know your passion, be it gardening or comic books, and find people to connect to that share that interest.
- Write about your passion regularly and share it during times they are online or use an @reply or Tag to bring it to the attention of a couple of these contacts.
- Rinse and repeat, fine tune and innovate. Be bold and take chances and people will follow you home and share your content with the people in their lives that share the same passions.
- Remember the social media marketing handshake rules with all new contact and have a means to communicate with you directly.
From there it is as easy as having advertising banners in your sidebar of your blog or occasionally doing a product review and all this quality and targeted traffic will soon become buyers, referrals, subscribers, and repeat customers.
Above all create new social media marketing content several times a week. Be consistent and aim for quality where possible, then give each item time to take hold. Talk to people directly whenever you can and they will pay special attention to you. That’s the basics of building social media engagement.