Nowadays, producing content on your blog is great for getting more visitors and leads, but it isn’t enough. If you want to get more engagement in the form of comments, likes, shares, and retweets, the content has to be valuable to your readers whether it’s teaching them something, providing your opinion on a matter, or writing for humor. But how do you get to the point where you have an engaged readership that actually is aware of your high-quality content?
The answer is you have to use social media. You must create Facebook and Twitter accounts for your business and post links to your blog articles using them often. This will bolster your follower numbers by allowing them to keep in touch with your business and interact with you on a day-to-day basis.
After you get more followers in your social media accounts, you may notice that few of your posts are getting any clicks, or your click-through-ratio (CTR) is low. You want to make that ratio as high as possible so that your social media efforts drive the most possible traffic through to your website. So how do you accomplish that?
Use imagery in social media
Many readers are visual learners and do not actually read text posts, this is why you need to include imagery in your social media posts that make statements and hope to drive users to action. One common method is called an Infographic. Infographics are a cool new way to display data in the form of imagery, but if you don’t have the ability to create them on your own, you just need to make sure that the images you do use get your readers’ attention and help convey the overall message of your text content.
The more attention-grabbing the posts are, the more likely your followers are to read, like and share your posts. The more often this happens on Facebook, the higher your Facebook EdgeRank will be. For more detail on what EdgeRank is and how posting photos to Facebook will increase it, check out this article from Mashable. Getting more engagement will also increase your Klout score, which a lot of folks on Twitter use to measure how influential people are.
Here are 10 suggestions on how to effectively use imagery to increase engagement on Facebook and Twitter:
- Tag/mention people (they’re people, not businesses) in photos – By doing this, their friends will have a chance to view those photos, and it will drive a new audience to your page. If you can’t tag them, try finding them and adding them as friends. Ask them to like your page and share it with their friends!
- Post an obscure photo – Have people guess what it is or..
- Host a caption contest – Ask folks to write the best caption for your photo and offer some sort of reward for the winner.
- Share pictures from a local meetup or internal meeting and offer your followers a “behind the scenes” glimpse. This will give people the feeling that they’re seeing something they normally wouldn’t be able to.
- Did you interview an industry expert for your blog? Post pictures of the interview.
- Post pictures from a conference – They are a great place to meet folks and build relationships. Take advantage of that smart phone camera! Give us your best caption on the image from this blog post we did after Internet Summit 2012!
- Post pictures of your product – Use the captions for descriptions. This is great for anyone with tangible products that can be viewed in the real world like stone masons who just installed a retaining wall for a customer. Show off your good work!
- Compare and contrast two products in a photo. Prompt your followers to add their thoughts in the comments.
- If you share an infographic on your blog, share it on your Facebook page without any additional text with a link to the post on your blog as a “teaser.”
- (Facebook only) Use the top photo strip of your Facebook page in a creative way. Promote any current marketing/promotional campaign you may be running. Use funny imagery of staff to show that you’re all normal people too! Just don’t get too crazy. ?
Remember these tips and be sure to share this post with anyone who wants and needs help increasing their readership and building their online engagement.
You aren’t going to see any engagement results (more click-throughs, comments, shares, likes, retweets, etc.) unless you properly promote your articles using social media. This will cause your followers to interact with you more and share your content with their networks. Websites/blogs and social media share a symbiotic relationship. If you don’t blog often, you will not have as many opportunities to promote your new blog content via social media, so the more you can do both together, the healthier your over web marketing strategy will be.
