4 PRO TIPS to Help you Get More Engagement with Your Social Media Content
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So, social media engagement is obviously a crucial component to put focus on when building a business and growing an online audience. While many entrepreneurs put a lot of their focus on increasing the size of their audience, they often fail to put enough focus on ensuring their engagement gets the same attention.
ENGAGEMENT IS EVERYTING.
Because after all, if you audience isn’t engaging with you.. do you really even have an audience? Just simply getting likes, followers and subscribers doesn’t mean you’re going to have an engaged audience.
However, if you can learn to implement truly effective engagement strategies and develop an audience that is highly-interactive with your content.. likes, followers and subscribers will not only come easier, but they will also grow significantly more quickly.
Let me set you up with this.
IMPRESSIONS BUILD THE BUYING TEMPERATURE
Let me start by making this clear right up front y’all, converting social media connections into paying clients is not a sprint. It’s not something that you can microwave cook. It takes TIME and CONSISTENCY. Statistically, the average online consumer needs to have 5 to 7 positive experience or interactions with your brand or business before they are going to be ready to commit to a next step with you.
That mean that they need to have experiences with you. Good ones! You can’t expect to drop one video on YouTube with a call-to-action at the end and expect everyone to roll in with their credit cards in hand. That’s only one experience!
Follow up and follow through are EVERYTHING.
One of the #1 problems that some of you may have with trying to get conversions in your business is that it simply takes you too long to accomplish impressions. Too much time goes by in between the experiences that your audience is having with you.
Write this down: Every experience someone has with you (if it’s a good one) raises their buying temperature. But then once the experience is finished. The buying temperature begins to fall. And it continues to fall until the next experience.
You need to have a rhythm and process for maintaining engagement, accomplishing impressions and continuing to build the buying temperature.
In my previous video I shared with you my process for how I would outline a week’s worth of content designed specifically from the paint points of my target audience. This was all while knowing clearly what my “End in Mind” was going to be, which was the “Jumpstart” program that we discussed.
This is an incredibly effective process because within a week’s time I am creating opportunity for targeted members of my audience to experience 5 informative, actionable and incredibly valuable content sessions with me.
Leveraging content and combining it with some strategic engagement posts allows me to set myself up to easily hit those 5-7 positive brand impressions in a matter of a few days. Sometimes it’s 1-2 days.
And if I’m planning to launch a program at the end of the 5-day content schedule, I’ve easily accomplished 7 or more impressions leading into my launch day where their buying temperature is high and they are primed to commit to a next step.
Now that being said, let me tackle something real quick to make sure we’re all on the same page, because I know what some of you might be thinking.
I hear a lot of marketers saying “If I could just get more followers Justin, I would get more viewers”, “If I had more friends on my friends list I would get more interaction”, “If I had more connections I would get more shares”.
Wrong.
More friends and followers is not the key to getting more views, shares and interaction. Your focus needs to be on inspiring engagement with the friends and followers you already have and in doing so, you will get more reach! More reach does not mean more engagement.
More engagement mean more reach! Write that down.
Social media is not about collecting people; it’s about CONNECTING with people. So let me give you some ideas for you can increase your impressions with those strategic engagement posts.
1) Stir Up Conversation
One of the most powerful ways to engage your prospects is to stir up conversation within your social media posts and videos. So for example, if an individual comments on my video and says something like “Such a great point Justin! I really needed this”, am I going to simply “like” their comment and move on? NO!
Those interactions are GOLD and are prime for engagement! I would immediately respond to that individual with a question.. “I’m so glad my message resonated with you today (name)! What are you finding to be the most challenging aspect of (fill in the blank)?”
A simple “like” and move on is not going to cut it. Engage with questions. Engage with comments. Stir up interactions and dialogue within your posts as much as possible. Get your audience talking to you.
One of the most effective ways to build a loyal and engaged audience of followers is to show genuine interest. Doing so will not only create opportunity for you to make great connections, but all that dialogue on your posts will significantly broaden the reach and number of views and interactions your posts receive.
Stirring up conversation is powerful, and very important to the process of selling with social media.
2) Ask Great Questions
We’re not just entrepreneurs Crew, we need to be investigators as well! One of the mistakes that many online marketers make is not taking enough time to ask questions and purge information from their audience. It is one of the best ways to gather the direct information you need to bend your products and services to target their pain points and meet their needs.
For example, I have a client that is a parenting coach. Celia Kibler, she is amazing and if you’re looking for parenting advice I highly recommend her. Celia specializes in empowering kids by empowering parents and she focuses specifically on coaching parents who have toddler aged children.
Celia was looking to stir up some engagement leading in to the launch of her new book so I encouraged her to make the following post – “Attention parents with toddlers at home! What is one of the most frustrating aspects about parenting your toddler?!”
As you can imagine, this post blew up with interaction from parents sharing their parenting struggles – a gold mine of information that Celia was then able to not only engage and interact with on her post, but even more importantly she was able to directly use the feedback from that post as key points for her book as well as for the digital course she created. Does that make sense?
Timing is also very important. If I know I am going to drop a video in the next couple days on the topic of “5 of the Biggest Mistakes that Online Business Owners Make in their First Year”, then today I could post the question, “How many of my friends are in their first year of starting a new business? I’d love to know!” Then I could even do a follow up question saying “What would you say is one of the biggest challenges you have facing getting your new business off the ground?”
I would get a ton of interaction on both of those questions, and even more importantly, I would be gathering highly valuable information that I could then use to create content to directly target the pain points that they told me they had.
Additionally, whenever you can get someone to interact with your content, platforms like Facebook will take note of it, believe that you like content from that page or person, and they’ll show you more of it!
So, when I post my video in a couple days on the topic of “5 of the Biggest Mistakes that Online Business Owners Make in their First Year”, guess who’s going to see it? Yep.
Questions are powerful. Ask them often.
3) Stir Up Emotions
Along with questions, anything you can do to stir up emotions and get people sharing details with you about what they are excited about, worried about, struggling with, planning for, praying for, working towards, grinding on, etc – the better!
For example, making a Monday morning post such as “Share one big goal you are planning to knock out this week! Let’s encourage each other!” would be a great way to get your audience sharing details with you about what they are working on and working towards. You can apply this approach in many different ways. Then frame your dialogue around their responses.
Plus, a great way to get out of the friend zone with your audience and get them viewing you as a hireable professional is to give them some direct challenges and hold them accountable to follow through!
So if someone comments on that post and says “I am planning to write one chapter for my book this week!”, you can reply back and say something like “Great goal! Can I follow up with you at the end of the week and make sure you got it done?!” To which they will likely reply, “Sure, please do!” To which you can then reply “I absolutely will!
Now what you just did was turn one single comment on your post into a conversation of multiple comments. You’ve engaged your audience genuinely. Facebook will love it and they’ll push it out to more of your followers to see.
Emotions are the driver of business results. Engage those emotions and stir them up whenever you can.
4) Ask for Feedback and/or Opinions
Lastly, soliciting feedback should be a constant best practice. Purge feedback from your clients; from your prospects; from your followers, from anyone who has engaged with you in any way. “Would you rather” questions are one great way to do this.
For instance I could post “For all my friends who follow my livestream content, would you rather catch me live at 8:00am or 8:00pm?! Thanks for your feedback!” Or I could say, “Hi friends, I am spending time planning new content for the upcoming month! Are there any topic requests that you would like me to create for you?! I want to share what you need! Thanks in advance!”
Engagement is all about identifying opportunity, giving your audience what they want and need and striking up conversation around it.
That’s what I’ve for you today guys! If you enjoyed that be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss the new episode drops every single week on Wednesdays!
Also FYI, I kicked off a new livestream schedule this week so I am now broadcasting live every Monday evening at 8:00pm EST on my Facebook business. If you’re not already following me there you can check it out at facebook.com/justincapponpro. I’d love to have you join in live and additionally, every single week I am hooking you guys up a with a brand new free resource to go along with my live of the week! I have never done this before so I am super excited about it!
You guys can go to the home paged of my website right now and check out the free resource of the week right at the top of the page! Check that out at JustinCapponPro.com.