This year, Content Marketing Institute discovered that 93% of marketers use social media as a content marketing tactic. In its 2016 B2B Content Marketing Report, the institute found that whilst average marketers use social media across six different platforms, only three of these, namely Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, are rated as being effective by over half of respondents. Since B2B companies are less likely to interact with their audiences in the same ways that B2C companies do, engaging with your audience can present a larger challenge. However, there are many ways for any company to improve social media engagement.
Use Visuals
Although written content is still hugely important in any content marketing campaign and widely read on social media, visual content is necessary in order to improve your brand engagement on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Using visuals on your social posts is especially important as more millennials move into positions with higher decision-making and purchasing power within companies. For example, using photos of your product in use, or even creating fun Spiel Animation videos for marketing should be a top priority when it comes to the content that you share on your social media pages.
Be Social and Share
Along with sharing your own content, it can be a great strategy to give ‘shout outs’ to your customers and clients by also sharing their content on your social media pages, even if it’s just a review that they have written about your company. Or, if you mention a client’s business in an article, don’t forget to link back to their website or their own social media page and give them a little help, which will likely be much appreciated and quickly returned.
Engage in Conversations
One of the best things about using social media for marketing and brand engagement is that it opens up many opportunities to get people talking. When you use social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, you can use the private message, retweet or comment features to converse and engage with your customers on social media on a personal level, helping to facilitate better relationships with them and build up trust and loyalty.
Market Research
When it comes to improving your brand engagement on social media, what better people to ask than your customers themselves? When using social media platforms such as Facebook, you will have the option to share polls, surveys or questionnaires with your customers, asking them for more information on their opinions and views of your company and the way you handle social media engagement. Using these options, you can ask your customers things such as what they’d like to see more of, or what they think you could remove from the content that you share, in order to get a better view of what your customers enjoy vs what they don’t.
For B2B companies, encouraging engagement on social media can be challenging. However, even if you don’t interact with your customers as much as a B2C company would, there are still many ways in which you can improve social media engagement.
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