In this day and age social media is a godsend for digital entrepreneurs. It’s not only one of the most effective ways of promoting your brand and business online, but also for engaging with your community and attracting new customers to your online store.
To help you on your social media journey, we’ve outlined some tips below on how to create and publish engaging content to attract the right audience to like your business pages and navigate out to your online store. That is, individuals who would be more likely to checkout and make an online payment via credit card, Instant EFT or any other supported payment method on your ecommerce website.
1. Create personas of your ideal customer
Before you get started posting online it’s important to have a clear understanding of who your audience is. What’s the demographic of your ideal customer base, and how can you use that information to speak to and connect with them on a personal level? By creating an ideal customer persona you’ll have a better understanding of the type of imagery and even vocabulary to use. By knowing your audience you’ll be better equipped to speak their language and provide them with the information they require to take action to visit your ecommerce store and convert into a paying customer.
2. Plan your content ahead of time
As with most things in life, when it comes to social media it’s extremely beneficial to have a plan in place to avoid wasting your valuable time trying to think of content ideas on the fly. To better plan your social media content, do the following:
- Plan your content ahead of time, for example you can have weekly or monthly themes where you feature a certain product or special offer, or tie your content to public holidays or events.
- Write social media copy ahead of time so when it comes to posting it you can quickly copy and paste it.
- Use free social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite so you can schedule posts ahead of time on your different social media platforms.
- Mix up posts about your brand with other information that will be of value to your followers, such as a trending news article that relates to your industry.
- Ask your followers questions to encourage engagement.
- Use hard selling posts where appropriate to drive traffic to your ecommerce store.
- Include relevant keywords in your social media posts so they come up in searches.
3. Experiment with different formats
When it comes to social media content there are a number of different formats you can use, such as GIFs, video and static images. It’s worthwhile experimenting with these different formats to see which type of content gets the most engagement, whether it be likes, comments, resheares or click-throughs.
Just remember to make sure that your content is optimised for the different social media platforms. For example, share creative content on Instagram and more professional posts on Linkedin. You can also adjust your posting frequency depending on the platform, for example it’s recommended to post at least once a day on Twitter to show up in people’s feeds.
It’s also important to optimise your content for mobile phones, as in size, format and length of videos. Videos should ideally be under 20 seconds, where your main message is conveyed within the first three seconds, and should have subtitles or make sense without any sound. Check out the Facebook Video Ads Guide for design recommendations and technical requirements for ads on Facebook and Instagram.
4. Post content consistently
When it comes to social media, posting consistently is key if you want to have an active and engaged following. It’s therefore recommended to post at least three times a week, at the same time of day, so your audience knows what to expect. While generally posting in the morning gets the best engagement, you can experiment with different time slots to see what works best for your followers. Posting consistently will also boost your brand awareness and help you stay top of mind of your social media followers.
It’s also worth remembering that you can reach a wider audience by boosting your posts so that a predefined targeted audience will see your content in their social media feed. But we’ll talk more about how to roll out a winning paid social media strategy in a future blog post.
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