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If your brand has been treating short stories on Facebook, Instagram and SnapChat just like regular posts — or you’re not using the short stories feature much at all — then you could be missing out on valuable opportunities to engage your audience and gain actionable insights on their consumer behaviors and preferences.

Since more and more users are flocking to short stories on social media every year, it’s absolutely critical for every brand to keep up with their followers by incorporating their favorite stories features into an ongoing engagement/marketing campaign. Although social media sites are always coming up with inventive new ways to get businesses and consumers excited about short stories, you can’t go wrong with these 3 tried-and-true ways to get the most value out of your approach to short stories:

Behind the Scenes Sneak Peeks

A classic short stories strategy that every brand should be using at least sometimes is the “behind-the-scenes” preview. Even if you’re not a brick-and-mortar business, you can still give loyal followers an exclusive glimpse at your operations, new products or services, virtual meet-and-greets with your staff and/or influencers, and so much more.

Similar to movie trailers or blooper reels, the “behind-the-scenes” approach is great for personalizing brands and connecting with audience members on a deeper level by giving them unique, limited-time experiences that only the dedicated early birds will see before your story expires 24 hours later.

Engaging Polls

Want to get more information from your audience members without paying for expensive consumer data research or collecting information on your website (which few people voluntarily offer)? Running polls on your short stories can be an excellent alternative for a few key reasons:

• Short stories have limited response possibilities (typically 2), which can increase your chances of getting more respondents
• You can ask multiple questions across several short story posts (making it a fun mini-survey for your fans)
• You can figure out what your followers like/need/want by presenting them with two options and asking them which one they like more
• You can run weekly trivia contests through your short stories feature to keep followers engaged with interesting, fresh material

Fan Shout-Outs

A final thing you could do with short stories on social media is giving shout-outs to your most dedicated followers without creating an entire post dedicated to them (which could be a turn-off for some other followers). You can do this by posting screenshots of someone who liked several of your posts, host “Follower Fridays” by tagging some of your fans in a short story post and offering prizes if they respond within 24 hours, or any other type of shout-out that you’d like to try with your fanbase.

Blogs have been around a long time, and for good reason. They’re effective channels to engage audiences through fresh, relevant content. The best way to engage audiences is by presenting the most captivating content in the most ideal way. It’s actually not as hard at it sounds as long as you follow this five-step checklist for blog perfection:

Start off with an opening hook
Why should people read your blog post? You’ll want to address that in the first paragraph in the most engaging way possible. A good way to approach this is by thinking of your audience and what problem it will solve or how the information will help the reader. Put yourself in your reader’s shoes and think about what would engage you in the first paragraph. Also, look at examples of blog posts on the Internet to get a feel for how others do it, especially your competition.

Write a short, creative headline
The headline is perhaps the most important part of your blog post. It is the first thing people see on search engine results, on social media and elsewhere. If you don’t have an eye-catching headline, the reader will just scroll past it or click away. A good rule of thumb is to get the point of your article across in a clear, direct and creative way. Shorter is also better: Research shows that shorter headlines receive far more clicks and engagement than those that are longer.

Incorporate high-quality visuals
A blog post can reach a lot more people and has the potential to become more viral if it has high-quality visuals. Studies show that readers will be more immersed in your content as well as more likely to share it if you include visuals. In fact, the most engaging posts on social media include an image and many of them come from blog posts. Along with increasing engagement, visuals allow your audience to see what your blog post is about rather than just read about it.

Break up your paragraphs with engaging information
The best blog posts consist of information that is easy to scan and digest. Keep each of your paragraphs short and add bulleted lists, statistics, graphs, pull quotes, block quotes, interesting facts, infographics, videos and anything else that is going to make your article pop. Information in these formats will provide more credibility and detail to your post, which can hook people in until the end.

Close with a clear call-to-action
What do you want your audience to do after reading your blog post? Make sure that your call-to-action is clear in your concluding paragraph, but also does not provide an annoying sales pitch. Rather than telling them to buy a product or service or visit a web page, encourage your readers to engage with you. Provide a question and ask your readers to leave comments. You could also present a link to a poll, quiz, or even direct people to a whitepaper or ebook for more information.

Now, we will close this blog post using the final tip as inspiration. Which of the five steps above have you incorporated in your blog posts? Is there anything else you do to engage readers?

Writing creative, engaging captions is one of the most difficult aspects of social media marketing. Considering our unprecedented access to millions of high-quality stock images, finding the perfect visual elements for a social post is practically effortless in comparison to writing clever captions, which still requires a bit of critical thinking, skillful writing and audience awareness.

Even if writing isn’t necessarily your strength as a marketer, you can still write acceptable captions for your social media posts, as long as you avoid these engagement-ending, conversion-killing mistakes:

Spelling and Grammatical Errors

This may sound like common sense advice, but you might be surprised by how many brands slip up on the proofreading process before publishing on social media. Mistakes happen every now and again, but if you’re consistently misspelling the same words, using incorrect grammar (e.g., there vs. their vs. they’re), or using improper capitalization for certain titles, then you might be inadvertently driving followers and potential customers away with your imprecise spelling and grammar.

All Sales, No Substance

One of the most common problems with social media captions is that the brand is too focused on their message of Buy! Buy! Buy! and forgetting to consistently engage their followers. If a vast majority of your posts involve some message about buying your products/services, then it’s time for a caption makeover.

You can engage followers by asking them questions (which, in turn, gives you valuable demographic/psychographic information), running polls (a fan favorite for Instagram stories in particular), and asking them to post photos of themselves (user-generated content opportunity!). This isn’t to say you should avoid explicit sales-driven captions at all costs; instead, make sure your salesy messages are posted alongside other, more substantive captions that treat audiences like human beings instead of potential customers.

Minimal Variety in Messages

Perhaps you don’t have an issue with too many sales messages on your social profiles, yet your brand still isn’t getting the engagement you’d like to have with your target audience. What’s going on?

Read through your last 10-20 social posts and take notes on your captions. Are you mostly just asking people to like and share if they agree with the caption? Are you mostly posting statements, without ever posing questions for audience members to answer in the comment section? Are you mostly relying on evergreen captions (which are always loosely relevant) or are you incorporating recent trends and seasonal messages into your captions?

Make sure your brand is always offering insightful advice, intriguing questions, and compelling calls-to-action in your captions to prevent audience members from growing bored with your content.

Too Many Hashtags or Emojis

On the one hand, you don’t want to have a boring caption with only a general, forgettable hashtag and no emojis. On the other hand, you don’t want to drown your captions in hashtags and emojis in an attempt to appeal to audience members’ interest in diversified, clever captions.

To achieve balance and maximize engagement, strive to include one or two hashtags per Twitter post and two to five hashtags per Instagram post, along with an emoji or two. It’s important to consistently experiment with new styles (e.g., one hashtag and four emojis for a post then three hashtags and no emojis for another post) to see what types of caption content work best for your target audience.

Social media is everywhere – its ubiquitous use now touches nearly every facet of human life. In the healthcare industry specifically, users of social media must always be aware of the fine line between proper and improper information sharing.

Being governed by strict HIPAA compliance standards, the healthcare industry must manage the rising use of social media in healthcare settings. Maintaining HIPAA compliance must always be the first priority when sharing sensitive healthcare information.

According to a recent DC Interactive Group report, 26 percent of all hospitals in the U.S. participate in social media. Another study revealed that a whopping 92 percent of marketers indicate efforts in social media have created better exposure for their business.

Healthcare marketers have huge opportunities when it comes to social media marketing, but how do organizations know what is acceptable for them or their employees to share and what is not?

Social Media and HIPAA Compliance

There are a number of benefits to sharing information and patient success stories. Although HIPAA does provide a strict framework to operate within, there are still ways to stay social, secure and in compliance.

Although institutions and employees may use personal social media channels, discussing patient information on those channels is strictly forbidden. The following guidelines apply to healthcare businesses as well as workers:

1. Avoid gossiping about patients.
2. Identify a central point of contact.
3. If you wouldn’t say it to a co-worker, don’t post it online.
4. Be aware of the tone you are using when you post something.
5. Do not bring professional matters into your personal life.

By using social media, healthcare marketers can both increase awareness and share positive stories. They can provide crucial information and assist with decision-making. By keeping these tips in mind, you can stay in compliance while still reaching your target audience.

When was the last time you reviewed your social media strategy?

Do you even have a strategy? Or have you been posting just to post, inconsistently, without any sort of plan?

All good marketing starts with a plan. If you don’t have one, you need one.

If you do have one, you need to understand what you’ve been doing and how well it’s been working.

When it comes to social selling, that means doing a social media audit. Hearing the word “audit” might send shivers up your spine, but don’t worry. This kind of audit is well worth the time and effort. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be daunting.

There are common elements to all social audits, regardless of the platform. These six steps cover the core social strategy components you need to be on top of.

1. Your Profile: Are your images clear and professional? Is your bio compelling?
2. Your Posts: Are you posting regularly? Is the content interesting? Is the frequency right for the platform?
3. Your Formatting: Do you have your posts customized for each channel? Are you using the appropriate tools for that platform?
4. Your Tools: Do you have a way to track and analyze your progress, such as Google Analytics?
5. Your Competition: Are you reviewing what your competitors are doing and figuring out what’s working for them?
6. Your List: Are you capturing leads to build your email list?

See? It’s not so hard. With these easy steps, you’ll have a better sense of how your social media strategy is moving you toward – or away from – your company’s goals. One final thought to add — potential customers are online every second of every day looking for businesses to meet their needs. Are you visible? If you’re not, it’s time to do something about that, whether you take the DIY route or work with a team of professionals. Whatever you choose, make sure you audit your social media strategy. Just putting thought into it will yield positive results.