Earlier this month, I attended Meltwater’s #OutsideInsight event with Danny Denhard from JustGiving. The event provided great insight into various social media channels, while offering plenty of handy tips and tricks to help boost engagement.
These are some of the key takeaways I took from the event along with a few tactics I am going to be implementing and trialling across a variety of accounts.
Top social media tips and hacks
Engage in conversation with your followers
We spend so much time and effort attempting to get our followers to engage with our content on social media, whether that’s a retweet on Twitter, a like on Instagram or a comment on a Facebook post. One simple way to spark a conversation on social media and entice followers to engage with your posts is to start the conversation yourself. Your followers are more likely to comment on your post if you have specifically given them a reason to do so. A quick and easy way to do this is to ask your followers a question – do they prefer A or B? or which of your products is their favourite? etc.
We are currently living in a world where we want everything done for us. By telling your followers exactly how you want them to engage with your post, whether it’s to comment or like/retweet, you are breaking down any potential barriers that may stop people from engaging.
Break out of your niche
When starting a new social media campaign one of the first things you will probably do is take a look at what your competitors are doing and what works well for them. By conducting this initial research, you will have an understanding of the type of posts that are well received and those that aren’t. This is a great place to start, but why limit yourself to your specific industry? By looking further afield you will be able to get an idea of the type of posts that work well across a variety of industries and bring this knowledge back to your own. For example, you may work in an industry where many of your competitors aren’t really using social media, or their engagement is fairly low. By bursting out of your industry bubble you could stumble across new ideas that others in your industry have never tried before.
Be different
When posting on social media it can be very easy to get sucked into doing the same things over and over again. If you are constantly pushing out repetitive content the chances are your posts will get lost in your followers’ timelines – Facebook users miss up to 70% of their newsfeed. This highlights the importance of making your company stand out and doing something different. Humorous posts are usually well received on social media, everyone loves to laugh and by showing you have a fun side people are more likely to remember your brand and engage with your posts. Posts that include images and videos are more likely to stand out in a newsfeed or timeline in comparison to text-heavy posts. Gifs and memes are also popular options that can be used as a comical response to posts to drive engagement.
However, it is important you don’t go against your brand’s core values. Comical posts filled with memes and gifs will only work for certain brands, try to find something that will make you stand out within your industry.
Embrace stories
It’s almost impossible to ignore the rise in popularity of ‘stories’ features across various social media channels. The feature that started on Snapchat has now been embraced by Facebook, Instagram, and even WhatsApp – with varying degrees of success. The popularity of Instagram stories has continued to rise and more and more users have begun to utilise the feature.
If you use Instagram as part of your social media campaign, then stories is a feature that you should definitely be using. Instagram stories are a great way to determine how many of your followers are actually engaging with your posts. Obviously seeing how many likes you get on your photos is a great way to determine engagement but if you use hashtags these likes could come from people who don’t follow your page. When you upload a story you can see how many of your followers have viewed it, providing another great analytics tool to determine how much engagement your account receives.
Find out more and give it a go
These are the key takeaways from Meltwater’s #OutsideInsight event that I am going to be trialling across various social media accounts in an attempt to boost engagement. To read all the tips and hacks that were outlined at the event, check out the full presentation here.
