You’re growing a following, and you’re growing your clients, but how do you maintain it all? Interacting with your followers is the absolute best way to keep flourishing and to strengthen your customer relationships! I’m going to share some of the best ways that you can interact with your followers to keep them interested, engaged, and buying.
Share Videos
Putting yourself in front of the camera can be scary, but it’s well worth it. On Facebook alone, over 4 billion video views happen every day. You can showcase an event you’re putting on, your company culture (it’s okay if it’s just a home office), share fun facts, or give tutorials, all in real-time. You can expect that if you choose interesting subject matter, many will gladly tune in, perhaps even commenting on or sharing your videos.
Ask Questions
There’s no better way to get your followers to interact with you than asking them direct questions. Asking a relevant but fun question is a great way to get your customers to leave a comment on your post. You could even ask them how they’ve been liking your content, or what they want to see from you more.
Share User Generated Content (UGC)
If you're tagged in posts or stories, share them on your own feed. When your clients are happy enough to be posting about you, be reciprocal. If you don’t have any UGC, ask for it! Ask some of your clients to share either a written or video testimonial you can share on your page. Seeing real feedback and success will help convert more of your audience into paying customers.
Create Polls and Surveys
Instagram stories have some amazing tools that allow you to interact with your followers, like the ask me a question sticker, polls, and quizzes. You can actually learn quite a lot about your audience from the responses you receive. This information can help you improve your social media marketing strategy.
Engage in The Latest Trends
There’s always a viral challenge, TikTok trend, or meme. On Instagram, over one million posts each day mentioned the word “meme.” That’s a lot of traction! So if the meme fits, give it a try.
Finding a way to make a trend relevant to your brand will demonstrate to your followers that you value the social happenings beyond your business. This will generate respect and admiration for your brand, and you may even get a few laughs along the way.
Run Contests and Giveaways
The easiest way you can increase social media engagement is to run contests and giveaways. You can ask people to take certain actions such as visiting a landing page on your website, giving you their email, or liking and sharing a certain post.
Your prize could be giving away one of your services for free, or even something physical like a gift card. Either way, this is an excellent way to gain new followers, and interact with your current ones.
Create Eye-Catching Content
Make sure your content is eye-catching. You only have a short period of time to make a good enough impression to stop someone from scrolling. Whether it’s a story, post, or cover photo- it needs to be engaging. A great tool for this is Canva. You can design your own posts from scratch, or even edit templates to better fit your brand.
If you’re not sure how to do that, there are tons of templates on Etsy that will make designing a breeze so you won’t have to worry about whether or not your content will stop the scroll.
Engagement Starts With You
You can’t expect your followers to do all the engaging. Many won’t unless you take the initiative to do so first. And those that are naturally interactive won’t carry on that way forever if there’s never any reciprocation.
Learn to adjust your social media strategy accordingly and don’t underestimate the power of simply responding to comments and DM’s in a timely manner.