How to Build an Engaging Social Media Presence

Building a strong social media presence is not rocket science. However, still, many businesses find it difficult to create a social media presence that their customers love because they underestimate its importance. Or they overthink their overall social media strategy. Either way, they’re moving in the wrong direction.

When it comes to finding success with social media marketing, there’s little doubt that businesses need to have a real social media presence. No wonder many small and large businesses are doing everything they can to join every relevant major social media site.

Set the Right Goals

By setting goals, you’ll know if you are making the most of your time, or if you need to change things. But without any goals set, you’re only setting yourself up for failure. Your social media activities need to be aligned with your marketing/business goals. There’s no other way around.

Know your audience well

There are countless unique social media audiences online. This means that, if you want to create a powerful social presence, you must first understand your audience.

When a brand is trying to reach a specific subset of the population, marketers start by creating a customer persona. Think of a persona as a way of summarizing a group’s demographic and psychographic tendencies. Armed with this information, it is much easier to create compelling campaigns that engage the target audience.

Similarly, as someone trying to create an engaging social presence, it may make sense to get to know your target audience first. What are their likes and dislikes? How do they prefer to consume media? What social media platforms do they use most, and what motivates them to use those platforms? These are just some of the questions to consider before building a social presence.

Study the competition

If you’re just getting started, it may be difficult to know how to best engage followers. To accelerate your social media growth, study direct competitors who have already made good use of social media. What do they do that engages followers?

Produce live video segments

According to Livestream, 80% of survey respondents say they would rather watch a branded live video than a blog post. This new interest in livestreaming explains why platforms like Twitter and Facebook have invested heavily in producing livestreaming products for users.

For those interested in creating engaging social media content, livestreaming is the way to go. The platforms tend to reward livestreaming content by alerting followers when you go live.

Interact with commenters

There is no better way to encourage followers to engage with content than by interacting with those who do. Liking or replying to a handful of comments from followers is a great way to encourage other followers to engage with content in the future. This process can create a virtuous cycle that helps to consistently increase the engagement rate. I personally built a Calendar tool to help with this, check it out.