Seven Tips To Keeping Your Online Audience Engaged and Entertained

Irrespective of whether you are a small business owner, individual entrepreneur, or large enterprise, you need to connect with your audience online to grow your business more.

Social media provides you with the opportunity to communicate with customers at a deeply personal level, build a community around your business and get customers for a lifetime.

But such success does not happen overnight. Nor will it happen without some planning, collecting and creating engaging content that is timely, interesting and memorable for your readers. Here are seven tips to keep your online audience engaged for longer!

Be Heavy With Visuals

According to a recent Facebook study, posts with images are twice as effective, while videos increase engagement nearly 12 times. Avoid plain text where possible and try to share pictures, infographics or photo stories instead. Lengthy text messages are ok and will be read if accompanied by compelling visuals. Even if you are blogging or writing an article, try to include data charts, bar graphs or bullet visuals that bring out the essence of the article.

Get Fans to Contribute

Encourage readers to participate by asking questions or getting them to express an opinion. On most social media platforms, if someone comments on a post, their friends automatically get to see the activity, generating organic growth. Some of the best methods for getting people to comment involve providing some incentive for their interaction. A give-away, a discount code or even the promise of a personal message if they comment ‘interested’ on your post can go a long way in engaging your audience.

Publish Regularly

All social media channels are machines that need to be regularly fuelled to give you the best output. Your followers are probably also following hundreds of other businesses and interests. Why will your content show up on their news feed over everyone else’s? If you post frequently, the platform algorithms will automatically push up your content, but if you don’t, you are going to get dragged behind equally fast too. Channels like Facebook and Twitter demand multiple posts a day, while a channel like Linked In would probably require multiple posts a week.

Publish Timely Content

Getting your content calendar organised in advance will help you engage with your audience better. Not only will this give you time to advertise any events or campaigns within your business but it will also let you target annual holidays and happenings relevant to the moment. For example, a sale around Mother’s day is more feasible and profitable if you have done the planning in advance.

Target Your Audience Correctly

Paid advertising on all social media channels gives you the opportunity to filter your audience. The better you target, the more likely you are to get more engagement (and more marketing ROI) Use the filters to their absolute granular level – don’t stop at age and gender. Try targeting people on their interests, relationships, newspapers they read or public figures they follow.

Use Controversy and Humour

Many businesses end up being overly formal on social media. However, the fact remains that the Internet thrives on controversy. Share controversial topics and ask people to express their opinions. Share a funny image and get people to caption it. A few heated debates and witty exchanges in your comments section could see your organic reach soaring – however make sure you steer away from making statements or taking a stand that could potentially hurt your reputation.

Be Subtle

There is no bigger turn off than constant self-promotion. If you keep pushing ‘salesy’ content on your audience, you might lose followers instead of gaining them. A better option is to use the 20-to-1 rule. Share 20 pieces of useful information for every piece of marketing content. Those 20 pieces of information could include content from other people, responses or answers to audience questions and informational content generated by you. The 1 piece of content would be purely promotional, while others could talk about what you do more subtly. For example, if you are a jewellery store, 1 post could talk about the great jewellery you sell while other posts could talk about best ways to store jewellery or clean jewellery and you could mention that those are the practices in your store.