How to Engage Your Trenchless Business Audience on Social Media

So you’ve signed up for social media business accounts. Now what? With help from a social media management expert you can begin your foray into the online community, but there are certain steps you’ll need to take to boost audience engagement.

Although a professional service provider can do a lot for you, it’s always best to be informed and make decisions concerning your business outreach efforts. Here are just a few way to engage your trenchless business audience on social media.

Layout and Design

For many social media platforms, your options are limited when it comes to designing pages, but this doesn’t mean you should phone it in. Your cover and profile photos can help to engage visitors and you should include branded materials as a way to reinforce and carry over efforts from other online platforms (such as your business website).

Most social media accounts also allow you to create a bio of some sort, as well as add pertinent business information, such as your location, contact information, and links to your website. Take the time to fill in whatever information you can when creating your social media accounts and think about how the layout and design might draw visitors in or leave them feeling indifferent.

Update Regularly

This is a no-brainer. If you fail to show up you can hardly expect to engage your audience. Regardless of how often you choose to post updates on social media, it is essential that you do so regularly. Whether you post daily, weekly, or multiple times each day or week, a regular schedule of posting lends you credibility and reliability, which can help to keep followers engaged.

Create Quality Content

You can push blog content or create content specifically for your social media accounts. Both can be beneficial to your followers and different platforms lend themselves to different types of content.

Facebook is probably your all-around best bet since you can post content in a variety of formats (text, graphics, videos, etc.). However, platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Periscope, and other popular social media platforms also have their uses. You’ll simply have to do some research and consider which platforms are best suited to the content you wish to create.

In terms of providing quality content, the popular strategy of late focuses on content marketing, which involves using your content as a marketing strategy in its own right. In other words, you’re providing valuable information without asking for anything in return, thus building lasting relationships with customers.

Examples could include demos, tutorials (lists, intstructographics, videos, etc.), live streaming events, and perhaps even regular podcasts. Not all of these options will work for every business, but at least consider the options available to you and how they might benefit your audience and your business.

Interact

Your social media accounts allow you to open lines of communication with your online community of followers, but you need to participate in the conversation. What would happen if you placed a phone call and then remained silent while the person on the other end asked questions? Chances are the recipient of your call would hang up, right after getting pretty annoyed or even angry.

Social media can be used for many things, including growing your online presence, marketing your brand, and even advertising. However, you need only look to the name to discover its main purpose – it’s meant to be social.

Use the tools at your disposal to find your audience and engage with them. Want to gain followers? Start following those in your target demographic. Build relationships to gain new followers, along with access to their networks of connections.

When you gain followers, maintain relationships by providing regular content and updates, replying to questions and comments, and generally playing an active role in the social communities you’ve created. Audience engagement requires a measure of commitment to interaction.

Encourage Social Activity

Practicing what you preach is a good start. If you want your followers to engage, you need to make an effort to be social on your end. However, you should also find ways to encourage social activities such as likes, shares, re-posts, referrals, and reviews, just for example.

If you’re not getting much traction, try more interactive options like polls, surveys, contests, and perhaps even gamification. Again, it’s best to consider all options before deciding which strategies are most in keeping with your business model and your brand strategy.