One of the best things about online marketing is the advent of social media. Social media lets you promote your content, expand awareness of your brand, and engage with your clients and potential customers. But you can’t just send blind updates without doing just a bit more to ensure that your audience wants to engage with you. Getting your audience to respond to your calls to action is all about engagement. After all, social media is supposed to be social, right?

1. Update Your About Pages &  Social Media Profiles

First things first – start updating your “About” pages on your websites, and all your social media profiles. You want there to be no mistake what your brand stands for, and who you are. In addition, every change you make is a chance to cross-promote on other social media. Your About pages, Contact pages and Social Media profiles are great places to cross promote.

2. Provide a Blurb of What’s to Come When Promoting Content

When you share any content, whether yours or someone else’s, always provide a little blurb to help pique interest and make your audience curious. For instance, if you’re sharing a Top 10 Ways that You Can Engage Your Clients thru Social Media article, you might say something like “Pay special attention to tip number 2” in your promotions. This will make your audience want to click through to read the blog post or article. In addition, ask them “What’s your favorite tip? Come back and share here in the comments.”

3. Use Multiple Types & Forms of Content to Keep Your Audience’s Interest

Don’t only share one type or form of content. There are so many forms of content to choose from, such as images, text, eBooks, articles, blog posts, infographics, memes, videos and so forth. There are also many types of content (such as evergreen content) that will be current for a long time, and then there is newsworthy timely content that you will want to share as soon as it occurs. Keep your audience interested by being exciting and different.

4. Never Forget Your Call To Action (CTA)

When you share anything on social media, always remember to put a CTA. It’s also important to vary the CTA. For instance, sometimes you might say, “share this with your friends” another time you might say “comment if you disagree, like if you agree” or you might say “buy now” as your CTA. Whatever you choose as your CTA, don’t overwhelm your audience with too many choices. But always include one, and make it different than the last time.

5. Show Off Your Personality (Let Your Helpers Do So Too)

Consumers want to feel as if they’re engaging with real people. Since you’re a real person that should be easy. But, we often get so tied up with automation (which is wonderful and useful) that we forget to engage with people. If you outsource to anyone who is handling your social media, they don’t need to act like robots. Let them show their personality too. Keep your business’s mission statement handy not only for yourself but for those who represent your brand. As long as you stay on message, it’s okay to let your personality show through.

6. Use Your Metrics To Improve Your Efforts

What posts, updates, and sorts of shares are your fans currently interacting with the most? By knowing what the numbers say, you can use that information to increase your efforts in a smart way so that you avoid doing what isn’t working, and do more of what is working. Not every audience will respond the same to every type of content that you share. But it’s impossible to know without looking at the analytics. When is your audience online? What types of content do they like, share, respond to the most? Never rely on guesses; rely on the facts and figures that you can obtain.

7. Use Apps & Technology to Improve Your Connections

There are so many apps that you can use to schedule, study, and interact with your audience. Did you know that there are custom apps that you can use for Facebook that will help you run contests, encourage email sign ups, add a storefront and more? Try Heyo to create mobile optimized campaigns for Facebook. Want to create useful Facebook Tabs, awesome cover photos, scheduled posts and more? Try Pagemodo.com. There are apps that can do so much, the best thing for you to do is ask your colleagues what they use, or simply do a Google search.

8. Keep Conversing With Your Audience

Speaking of apps, you can put apps on your smartphone that enable you to speak with your audience at all times. You want to talk to them at “off” times as much as “on” times. You might seem too robotic if you only post on Monday through Friday during business hours. It’s also great to post from different locations; it shows that you’re a busy person who nevertheless cares about your audience. Be sure to use some automation for this, such as using apps to schedule weekend updates.

9. Add the Right Metadata to Your Websites & Pages

Metadata is information that essentially summarizes data on your site, like the title, description, author, date and other things such as identifying images and more. The thing to remember is which metadata is important to include on your website so that when you share a link on social media the right information is presented in an attractive way. This will make your audience want to click through.

a. Titles – This is the keyword rich title of your article or blog post. On Facebook, it will show up in bold above the link.

b. Description – This shows up under the link and is usually the first words of your article or blog post that are NOT header text.

c. Image – You can use the code of your page to specify the images that are allowed to show up in the thumbnail.

d. Canonical URL – Within the code of the site you can ensure that everyone goes to the same home page when clicking through to your site.

It’s important to consider these factors when creating your WebPages and blogs so that when you or others share articles or blog posts they find interesting on their social media sites, it looks good and gets the message across that you want.

10. Ask Your Fans What They Want

Finally, never forget to ask your current fans, connections, and followers what they want from you. You can send out a survey, answer questions, and more to find out what your connections what. The more you give them what they want, the more they’re likely to engage with you in social media.

Use social media to communicate the story of your brand. As you use these top ten ways to engage your audience in social media, try to remember what your business core values are, what the benefits of your products and services are to your clients, and your point of being on social media.

About Wanda Baader

Wanda Baader is a online marketing and business strategist, speaker and consultant. She is the owner and founder of Strategize Your Success, a full service marketing agency. She enjoys working with entrepreneurs, non-profits and small business owners who need help with their online marketing, social media and Wordpress website development.