Get More Social Media Engagement With Photos And Images
It amazes me how many businesses I see that literally have no clue how to properly engage with their audience in social media. They treat their Facebook and Twitter company pages like one long advertisement rotating between text updates and links to their website about their products, services and specials.
If you’re a business and this is the social strategy you employ, you really need to re-think your game plan. For starters, you probably have a really low engagement ratio on your Facebook fan page, which means you’re also probably reaching a small fraction of your total fan base. This is because the less engaging your content is, Facebook is less likely to have it display in people’s news feeds as recent news. Your updates are just zipping by on your fan’s news ticker with all the other updates they receive. If they miss your update in real time, they’ll miss your update all together.
One strategy to implement for more engaging content is the use of photos and images. People are very visual and Facebook made some changes toward the end of 2011 that makes photos look even more appealing on a Facebook page - they’re bigger! Plus, with some cool apps like Instagram and Pinterest, it’s really easy to share photos and images.
If you’re not familiar with Pinterest, be sure to check back for future blog posts, because we’ll be talking about it a lot. But in a nutshell, it’s a newer social network that relies entirely on images. Its popularity is going through the roof. Why is Pinterest so popular? Yes, they have a fun and easy interface, but I believe it’s because Pinterest is so visually appealing as everything revolves around photos and images.
So what can we take away from Pinterest’s fast growth and continuous buzz? Photos and images are engaging and people like them! So next time you’re thinking of posting your sale item of the week, try to come up with a fun, creative graphic or photo that can be posted instead. You just may reach more people and get people engaging with your update, which will help future updates reach your fans.
If you own an Apple Mac, we suggest downloading the free app Meme Generator, it’s super easy and slick to create fun graphics and images. If you have a little creativity in you, you’re bound to come up with some engaging content. We recently used it for a client and the meme that we came up with had over 20 likes in two minutes.
Of course if you simply just post a photo or image there is no guarantee you’re going to get people to engage with it. You still need to follow some other best practices that we preach - like asking for the engagement! Yes, ask people to ‘like’ it, comment on it, or share it. You’d be surprised how much your overall engagement will increase just by asking for it.
What are some of the more engaging photos images you have seen?