Every business wants to use social media to help them grow and market their brand at a minimal cost, but this isn’t something you can casually undertake. Instead, you must maintain a consistent presence for this to work. The following guide can give you a few ideas for how you can create a lively and engaging social media presence.

Don’t Distance Yourself

A lingering trend with businesses is to separate themselves from their consumers by creating an autonomous or emotionless brand voice. While that may have worked in the past, today’s consumers are more likely to connect and engage with a more empathetic social media voice.

They want to know there are human beings behind the brand name, so don’t be afraid to let your feelings and empathy shine through in posts, comments, and replies. It can also be helpful to share pictures of yourself and your team, so your followers can see those with whom they’re interacting.

Engage Your Followers

Creating a lively online presence isn’t just about the content you post. While that is important, you’ll also want to engage with your followers on a regular basis. You should dedicate some of your time each day to responding to comments on your posts, liking and sharing posts in which you’re tagged, and answering questions promptly. 

This type of interactive activity will appeal to your followers and will encourage them to share your content more regularly. Regular engagement will help you keep the followers you have and help you gain new followers. Your followers will be more active on your page if they feel confident you will interact with them in return.

Create Engaging Content

The content you share on your social media pages should be as unique and original as possible. If you don’t know how to create a meme, GIFs, or how to loop an MP4 video, there are online services that you can use. A service can provide you with the high quality you need in the content you post. Additionally, you can also share content posted by other pages that are relevant to your field of interest. 

Sharing posts from other pages will help you maintain a more active page without having to personally create all of the content. It will also encourage other pages to share your content. You can reach out to other page owners to work out some arrangements for sharing each other’s content. The goal is to expose each other’s posts to new followers, so you should have a good following before you try this tactic.

Focus Your Online Activity

As you get started, you should start accounts on all of the major social media sites, and you may even want to branch out to the lesser-known alternative sites that are starting to pop up. In the beginning, you should be making similar posts on all of these sites, although you may have to edit them to meet each site’s editorial restrictions. 

After a while, you should be able to tell which sites are providing you with the most traction. If you’re getting more interaction on Instagram and Twitter, you should spend less time on Facebook and other sites. This will free up your time, so you can focus on posting to sites that provide you the biggest return on your investment.

Always Use Hashtags

Your posts will get more traction when you use hashtags that are relevant to the post and to your area of interest. In addition to using common hashtags that are relevant to your field, you should also use a keyword generator tool to help you come up with more hashtags to use on your post. Generally, hashtags are search terms that consumers will use to find topics that you post about on your page. For instance, an arborist might use the phrases tree care, landscaping, and pruning on their posts. There are many more that could be used and, while you don’t want to saturate each post with a wall of hashtags, you should use enough to help your posts show up regularly in searches.

For more tips and tricks on upping your marketing game, you can even check out blogs such as the Basis Point, for more insight. 

Once you let your online activity lapse, your followers will tend to forget about your brand. You should be continuously looking for new ways to engage with your followers and attract new users to your page. By creating original and exciting content on a regular basis, you’ll stay relevant throughout the changing trends that might otherwise affect your brand.