The universally recognised day of love – Valentine’s Day – might have passed you by on Sunday. However, it is important that your business pages spread and receive ‘love’ on social media all year around in order to achieve digital marketing success.
Our digital marketer Nicole explains the importance of the reaction buttons on social media (such as ‘like’, ‘love’ and ‘caring’) and engagement on your posts.
Why do some posts perform better than others?
Navigating social media as a business can be confusing. You can spend hours carefully crafting content, only for it to fall short on engagement and reach. Sometimes, you throw up a post that took ten minutes to create and it’s much more successful.
This is because social media channels use an algorithm to determine who gets to see your post. You could have 100,000 followers and only a couple of hundred see your post. Once you understand this algorithm, it becomes clear how you can maximise your efforts.
Social media platforms track how often your followers react to posts, share them with their own newsfeed, click on materials within them and comment below. They use this system to decide who wants to see your posts and how relevant they are.
What type of post works best?
Video content traditionally works better across all social media platforms. It is more eye-catching, so users are more likely to engage in comments and reactions. There is also more to ‘engage’ with, for example watching the movie itself might require the user to click on it.
A single image post has little room for engagement. Unless the user wants to magnify the photo, it’s already on their newsfeed without the need to engage in anyway.
Second to video content, albums do well as these do need to be clicked on.
How can I promote engagement?
Aside from the type of content, the way you write your posts can also help promote engagement.
At RED, we find that asking questions helps to drive engagement. As a small business, posts that use a less formal tone and include faces in the images work best on Instagram and Facebook.
Posts that drive traffic to blogs, offering advice to our target audiences (like this one) work better on LinkedIn and Twitter.
The Instagram algorithm was also updated this month and now users ‘saving’ posts is one of the biggest factors in whether or not they’ll receive more impressions. Creating an infographic or a ‘how to…’ – that people might want to refer back to – could encourage this.
What next?
Now that you understand how social media decides who to show your post to, it’s time to test these best practices out. Every audience is different, so try a few different things and keep all this in mind. It’s also worth checking for algorithm updates regularly, because it moves quickly.
If you would like RED to help with optimising your digital marketing, get in touch.
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