PDF While working up some ideas for a client, I put together this quick overview for a social media strategy, with the goal of engaging fans and followers and building your audience. Take from it what you will, its seems to be working for them!
Generally speaking,, to retain your audience you need to have something engaging on each platform daily and interact with every response that poses a question, or an opportunity to connect.
With the following points you need to find a balance between your areas of interest within your field. Maybe you are focused on one field, e.g. football. In that case, you have it easy, others may be more segmented, for example, a food company might be divided into health foods, organic foods, fast foods, desserts etc. You need to appeal to all audiences.
For this client, Monday through Wednesdays appeared to the busiest times on FaceBook, so post your better content on those days.
What to Post
Choose 5 of the list below to make up one per day
- Video with question – find a video online, funny, technical, or helpful
- Poll with a general question/Poll to test knowledge of industry or about your company – you can get ideas of other forum-type sites, see what others are asking and have got a big response to.
- Post a cool or interesting photo with a related question
- An interesting blog post, could be yours, could be someone elses, it doesn’t matter, you’re offering relative content that will keep your audience interested in your page
- Post any promo’s that you may have. Some companies offer these weekly, daily or monthly. Be sure to include yours. You might even offer a FaceBook-only promo and market your page in that you are encouraging users to sign up in order to access your exclusive deals
- Post relative events, yours or otherwise
- Highlight new products
- Quiz about knowledge of big brands in your industry
One-off Project Ideas – These will require more thought and planning
- Post a caption contest. Post a photo and invite fans to comment on the photo, then pick a winner. Offer a prize relative to your industry.
- “Like” us for a chance to win. You can encourage new fans by having them “like” your fan page in order to enter a competition to win something of value. You will need to use a third party app for something like that, www.northsocial.com offers several apps at reasonable cost and are easy to set up and use.
- Use your existing subscribers to help you increase your fan count. Have them market your page and offer them, something in return if the fans reach a set number by a certain date. For example, you have 200 fans and want to reach 1,000 within 3 weeks. Offer each fan a free coupon if they help you get your 1,000 fans by that date. Read the case study on how Dingo dog food used this method to reach 6,000 “Likes” in 3 days.
Have you tried and succeeded with any of these ideas? Have an idea to add? Let me know in the comments below.
About Sam Beamond