Why aren’t your Facebook followers engaging with you?

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Do you have a decent chunk of followers on Facebook, yet your posts continue to experience little to no engagement? If you’re wondering why you have hundreds or thousands of followers but only get a couple likes and maybe one comment on each post you publish, then here are three possible reasons for low engagement figures:

Your Facebook Page and Posts Are Boring

Many Facebook users don’t think twice when liking a page that seems interesting (based on an ad they saw) or that their friends recommended to them. Since many users have hundreds, if not thousands of friends whose posts are already clogging their feeds, the last thing you need is a boring or irrelevant post that will get lost in the masses.

Worse yet: what if you create a brilliant ad that entices followers to flock to your page…. only to discover a relatively empty page with a dull or low-quality cover photo, minimal information about your brand, few recent posts, and few images? The old adage of “don’t judge a book by its cover” rings true for Facebook advertising as well: you don’t want your ads to be more exciting than your page itself. Otherwise, people may unfollow your page or abandon your page altogether in hopes of finding another brand with more valuable information to offer.

You’re Limiting Your Advertising Strategy

A common problem many companies and organizations run into is deciding on an ideal campaign strategy. For new and experienced marketers alike, the option to grow your follower base seems like the best option because who doesn’t want more followers? However, this singular strategy can be pretty limiting when it comes to long-lasting results. It’s easy to click “like” on a sponsored post – it takes someone significantly more effort to scroll through the brand’s page, comment on posts, and share content with their own friends.

Rather than limiting yourself to paid advertising campaigns that solely emphasize racking up followers, consider adding campaigns that seek to increase engagement among your existing base. In other words, you can create a group of ads that invites followers to respond to thought-provoking questions, share their own experiences, or even tantalizes them with a contest open exclusively to followers of your page.

You’re Not Engaging with Them

Why should people comment on your page, like your photos, and share your posts if you don’t give them any incentives to do so? One of the biggest reasons why you might rack up a huge but silent following on Facebook is because you and your marketing team aren’t actively reaching out to those followers once they’ve liked your page.

Sure, you may put out great content, but that’s not sufficient enough to engage your audience. Unless you’re asking them personally relevant questions, requesting specific feedback about your products/services, and giving them other incentives to like or comment on your posts/page, you won’t be able to increase your follower engagement levels. It certainly requires more time and effort to respond, but the long-term benefits of personalizing your customers’ experiences with your brand on social media will be worth it.

Short vs. long-form content: Which is best for your blog?

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Have you ever considered how the word length of your blog posts can affect everything from your website’s search engine rankings to the number of leads generated by your content marketing strategy? If you’ve ever wondered whether you should be writing shorter or longer content to maximize your blog’s ROI, then here’s what you need to know about short versus long-form content:

Short-Form Content is More Feasible

How long does it take you (or your hired writers) to research, write, proofread and publish a blog post? Generally speaking, the longer the content is, the more time it’ll take, which equates to higher costs as well. Meanwhile, short-form content ensures you can regularly publish new, high-quality content on your blog without having to worry about sporadic gaps in your publishing schedule or going over budget when it comes to your content marketing strategy.

Short-form content should be at least 250 words to be effective and no more than 750 words to maintain your audience’s attention throughout the article. Another advantage to short-form content is that it avoids repetitiveness (repeating the same information, just with different words), which is a common problem experienced by long-form content writers who may run out of fresh ideas once they get past the 1,200 word mark.

Long-Form Content is Ideal for SEO

According to the top blogging statistics for 2019, the average blog post is 1,050 words long and the average length of top-performing blog content in Google searches ranges between 1,140-1,285 words. Although further research shows that long-form content can generate as much as 9x more leads than short-form content, just 18% of companies regularly publish blog posts that are longer than 750 words.

Additionally, there are many search engine optimization benefits to publishing long-form content, including: more backlinks, more social shares, better rankings on Google search, and so much more. If you want to increase your website’s ranking in the search engines, then producing high-quality, well-researched content in the 1,500-2,000 word range would be ideal for your SEO strategy.

Best Solution: Variety of Content Lengths?

Unless your marketing budget is exceptionally generous, you likely won’t be able produce long-form content often enough to satisfy your audience. However, this doesn’t mean you should solely focus on producing short-form content, either. For best results, you should experiment with a variety of content lengths and analyze your most valuable metrics (leads generated, backlinks acquired, social shares, etc.) to determine what the ideal length of your blog posts should be.

Supercharge your brand’s online visibility with LinkedIn in 3 easy steps

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There are millions of company pages on LinkedIn, so if your brand isn’t already active on LinkedIn, now is the time to get started. It costs nothing to start a company page and there are countless benefits to doing so: greater digital footprint (and thus, more eyes viewing your branded content and people clicking on your links), increased opportunities to connect with potential business partners, high-quality recruitment channels, and so much more.

Even if you already have a company page on LinkedIn, there is likely room for improvement when it comes to optimizing your page and getting your content in front of new audiences. Since LinkedIn’s popularity is unlikely to fade any time soon, here’s how your brand can amplify its online visibility with LinkedIn:

Create/Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page

Creating a company page on LinkedIn is as easy as creating a LinkedIn profile for yourself. The trickier part is optimizing it so that you rank higher in LinkedIn searches. To accomplish this, you can’t go wrong with taking notes on the best LinkedIn company pages (over 13,000 nominations in 2018 – resulting in LinkedIn’s hand-picked list of the top 10 company pages of the year).

Additional ways you can optimize your LinkedIn company page include:

  • Including branded visual content (profile photo, cover photo, and posts)
  • Publishing authoritative content in a variety of formats (video, podcasts, blog posts, infographics)
  • Personalizing your brand with just-for-fun posts (every once in a while) and interviews with company leadership and/or happy client testimonials

Boost Your SEO with Company Specialties

Did you know that the “Company Specialties” (in the About section) are SEO-indexed? This means that the keywords you select as your brand’s specialties could drive in more traffic from LinkedIn searches. For instance, if you’re a pet sitting business, then you should include a variety of specialties like “dog sitting,” “cat sitting,” “pet care,” “dog walking,” “animal care,” and so on.

These are the key words and phrases people use when searching for businesses both on LinkedIn and in general search engines like Google, so don’t miss this opportunity to get a free SEO-boost for your brand!

Post Regular Company Updates

Oftentimes, brands create a company page on LinkedIn and proceed to do absolutely nothing with it. Simply having a company page is a good start, but to really see some results from your LinkedIn presence, you should treat it like any other social platform and create/schedule/publish regular updates.

These may include exciting company announcements, occasional product/service launches, information-packed blog posts, and even quotes or stats overlaying a relevant, eye-catching image (these tend to acquire particularly high engagement rates on LinkedIn).

Are you guilty of these Instagram caption mistakes?

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In spite of the popular belief that Instagram is purely a visual platform for marketers, influencers and consumers, the caption you create for a post can have a tremendous impact on your engagement rates. Here are some of the most common captioning mistakes you might have made in the past with your brand’s Instagram posts and ads — along with some helpful solutions to improve engagement in the future:

No Caption at All

Some brands rely heavily on paid Instagram campaigns and follower growth from website traffic, but these alone are not sufficient to get your posts in front of enough viewers. Even if you’re in a hurry to churn out posts on a near-daily basis, it’s always preferable to include a caption rather than throwing an image on your brand’s page and hoping enough followers see and like it.

Hashtag Overload

You may have noticed other brands doing this before: #everything #seems #to #be #hashtagged #even #if #it #doesn’t #need #a #hashtag #!!!

Rather than hurting your audience’s eyes with a caption drowning in hashtags, be sure to start out your caption with an engaging message written in plain English (then follow up with a couple well-chosen hashtags so you can at least increase your post’s viewership rates).

Boring Captions

Even the highest quality, relevant images can’t make up for a terrible caption in an Instagram ad campaign. If your photo or video is spectacular, then why settle for a dull, everyday caption (or blatantly salesy message) when you can take some extra time to come up with a witty or engaging caption to accompany your post?

Long Captions

Did you know that Instagram users and business profiles tend to use longer captions – even when studies show that shorter captions are more effective when it comes to boosting engagement rates? A 2018 study from Quintly found that posts with 1-50 characters (out of the 2,000 character limit) receive the highest engagement rates, though a majority of posts use at least 300 characters in their captions. For best results, try incorporating a variety of lengths in your captions to figure out which length is best for your target audience.

3 futuristic technologies that will transform social media marketing

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As if lightning-fast internet access, voice activated smart home technologies, and AI-run customer service weren’t enough, there are several technological developments going on these days that could transform marketing and social media as we know it.

To stay ahead of the curve, it’s important for marketers to not only be aware of these latest advancements but also be willing and able to implement these technologies into their marketing strategies. To give you an idea of what you can expect to explode in popularity within the next few years, here are the top 3 tech developments you should start looking into:

Virtual Reality

Virtual and augmented reality are already popular among gamers, but this tech is becoming more and more mainstream every year. From Facebook buying the VR developer Oculus to the latest immersive shopping experiences developed by Sixense, you might be surprised to learn just how popular VR already is among consumers.

Within the next few years, consumers might be able touch and try out holographic versions of products before deciding whether or not to buy – all from the comfort of their own homes. If your brand isn’t actively considering the possibility of implementing augmented reality and immersive, virtual shopping experiences into your marketing strategy, then now is the time to get onboard with the future of online shopping!

Voice Shopping

Thanks to smart devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, shopping with our voices has never been easier. We can already ask Alexa to re-order more dog food from Amazon or ask Google to find the lowest prices on gaming consoles in our local shopping area. How much further will this technology take us?

By some estimates, 50% of online shopping by 2020 will be conducted by voice. This is extremely valuable information for marketers who have not yet rewritten their product descriptions and blog posts to be optimized for voice search.

Since there doesn’t appear to be any slowdown in voice searches in the foreseeable future, it’s crucial that marketers optimize their content for voice searchers, which may include audible product descriptions for anyone searching without a screen in front of them.

Blockchain-Based Social Media Platforms

Do you know what blockchain is? Many social media startups are increasingly reliant on blockchain to support their websites.

In a nutshell, blockchain social media websites are also known as “decentralized social networks,” which refers to the fact that there’s no central database where all users’ information is stored. Instead, the information is highly protected and private because it’s spread out across an encrypted network (the blockchain). Websites such as Steemit, Minds and Mithril are good examples of early adopters of the blockchain technologies for social platforms.

On these websites, social mining – or content creation and engagement with other users – is key to earning money (in the form of cryptocurrency) and/or digital tokens that you can exchange for more views on your posts. This is the future of content marketing right here: publishing high-quality content that attracts a wide base of people upvoting, commenting and sharing that content, which can then earn you digital tokens to exchange for even more visibility among your target audience members.

3 useful strategies for getting to know your target audience better

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Most brands conduct thorough target audience research when they’re first starting out, but not as many brands regularly check in with their target audience to see if consumer preferences and motivations have changed.

Even if you’re a smaller company with fewer resources to dedicate to routine audience research, there are still plenty of easy ways to gain valuable feedback from your audience, which can then be used to fine-tune your marketing strategy, messaging and general interactions with potential followers and paying customers alike. Here are a few things you could implement within 24 hours:

Brief Feedback Surveys

Survey programs like Google Forms and Survey Monkey are incredibly useful for marketers who want to customize their own questions and acquire deeper insights about their target audience. Survey Monkey has free and paid versions available, but you shouldn’t need more than the basic free version to get the information you need from followers.

When creating a survey, keep it as short as possible. Include only the most essential questions, and use mostly multiple choice questions to minimize survey-taking fatigue among audience members who don’t want to type lengthy responses.

To encourage people to take your survey, post links to it on your social media pages and set a deadline so people feel a sense of urgency to complete it now rather than later. If you’re not getting the number of responses you’d like to see, consider giving away a gift card to one lucky survey participant as a fun incentive to rake in more responses.

Social Media Polls

You can create polls on Facebook, Instagram (through the Stories feature) and Twitter. These polls can be treasure troves of information for brands because intrigued, social-savvy and engaged followers will likely participate. Even if you get some negative responses from brand detractors, this information will help you discover problem areas you might not have known about otherwise.

One downside to these polls is that you can only ask one question at a time. You may get dozens of responses for one poll and only a handful of responses for another poll. This disparity can lead to skewed results, so be mindful of potential limitations of this audience research strategy.

Fill-in-the-Blank Social Media Contests

A final way to engage your audience members and learn more about them is giving them opportunities to be creative and express their thoughts and opinions. For instance, you could run a seasonal contest on Instagram with a post that encourages followers to finish the sentence, “My favorite part about the winter holidays is________.”

This type of contest offers the additional benefit of raking in user-generated content and word-of-mouth awareness for your brand. Offer a prize for followers who respond to your sentence with their own pictures and your branded hashtag in the caption.

Do social media posts with images always perform better?

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When it comes to data analyses of posts with and without images, results appear to be mixed on whether or not an image truly increases engagement on social media. There are obviously multiple factors involved – the relevancy of your copy, the quantity and relevancy of your hashtags, timing of posts, etc. – but deciding whether or not to use an image in a promoted post is not as easy as some marketers might believe.

While some social media studies suggest the use of images isn’t always the best idea, a majority of studies lean in favor of using images in social media posts to increase engagement. Let’s unpack this further to see which route is the best path for your brand’s social strategy:

Twitter

Research conducted by Buffer on its Twitter account found that tweets with images performed 150% better in terms of retweets than tweets without images. The same study also found that tweets with images received 18x more clicks than tweets without images. Additional studies have found similar results, which suggests you should definitely use images in your tweets if you want to increase engagement.

Of course, it’s worth noting what works for Buffer and other marketing companies may not work for every other brand’s Twitter account. For best results, consider testing out different types of ads with the same copy to see for yourself if tweets with images drive up your follower engagement rates.

Facebook

Although research from Buffer and BuzzSumo suggest Facebook engagement rates are generally declining, posts with images are still more likely to get clicks and engagement in comparison to posts with just text. Posts with video also tend to perform significantly better than text-only posts, perhaps due to heightened user interest in viewing dynamic video content as opposed to plain text in a post.

Further research has confirmed that Facebook posts with images consistently outperform text-only ads, so the best way to prevent your followers and potential followers from scrolling past your content in their newsfeeds is by including a high-quality, relevant image in each of your posts.

Can Using an Image Decrease Engagement Rates?

Some of the few times an image might decrease your engagement rates on social media is when the image is low-quality resolution, completely irrelevant to what you’re describing in the text of the post, and/or the image is just…. boring. You can’t simply slap an image onto a post and expect stellar results; you need to carefully curate your images from high-quality photo databases if you want to maximize engagement!

4 proven ways to stop people from scrolling past your social ads

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The average attention span of an adult is shorter than ever, which makes it all the more challenging for social media marketers to capture their target audience’s attention while they’re swiftly scrolling through their newsfeeds.

To compete with all the other fascinating and eye-catching posts and videos shared by friends, family and coworkers, marketers need to do extra to convince people to spend more than 2-3 seconds glancing over their sponsored post before moving on. If you’ve struggled with lower engagement rates recently, here are some proven strategies for persuading your audience to slow down and see what your brand has to say.

Craft Attention-Grabbing Headlines

First and foremost, look at your headlines. Are they dull? Do they contain error(s)? Do they really offer much to readers? It’s so important to spend time writing headlines that people will actually care about, because a headline can make or break a potential follower’s decision to interact with your brand, check out your page, or buy a product or service on your website.

If you’re not sure which headline is right for your audience, then test out several different headlines with the same images and ad copy to determine which one leads to the best results in your next campaign.

Animate Your Posts

Did you know that people are more likely to stop scrolling if your visuals are dynamic and moving, rather than static? This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to spend a great deal of time on creating videos, of course. With the help of websites like Crello, you can create high-quality, animated posts for your social channels, which will likely lead to greater engagement rates from current and potential followers alike.

Add Captions to Your Videos

Did you know that 85% of video content on social media is typically viewed with the sound off? Many social users reportedly dislike when sponsored video ads auto-play with sound, so many of them turn the volume off on their phones, laptops and desktop computers to eliminate the possibility of intrusive sounds flooding their speakers.

What this means for marketers is that you must include captions in any videos you post to social media – otherwise, a majority of people viewing your video likely won’t understand the full context of your message if you’re still relying on verbal narration to persuade them.

Use Bright, High-Quality Images

Last but not least, it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that social media users often skip over irrelevant, dull and/or low-quality images that appear in their newsfeeds. When you are constantly exposed to interesting, high-definition photos on social media, you don’t want to waste time checking out ads with poor quality, confusing imagery. Make sure your sponsored ads are maximizing your brand’s connection with audience members by including only high quality, appealing, relevant ads in every post you publish on social media.

5 common design mistakes that are killing engagement rates on your social ads and pages

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You don’t need to be a graphic design extraordinaire to succeed in creating your own visual elements for social media, but there are nevertheless plenty of instances in which you might be making design mistakes without even realizing it. Worse still, these seemingly minor mistakes could be causing lower engagement rates with your ads or driving followers away from your social pages.

To make sure you aren’t distracting your followers with tacky images or poorly designed visual elements, here’s a nifty checklist to help you assess whether your visual marketing strategy needs a makeover:

Poor Color Choices

According to the marketing fundamentals color theory, consumers typically decide whether or not they like a product within 90 seconds, and 90% of those consumers typically base their decisions on the color. The same logic applies to social media images, visual advertising collateral, on-page elements like profile pictures and cover photos…and so on. If your images are more eyesores than they are eye-catching, then you may be inadvertently driving people away from your pages and ads.

Wrong Size Images

Unless you have a strong foundation in graphic design, you might not realize just how big of a difference image sizing can make in the appearance of photos and ad visuals on social media. If you use the wrong sized image for a profile photo or mobile ad, then you might be accidentally frustrating your followers and potential customers who expect high-quality images for everything they might spend time and money on. To make sure you’re using the appropriate sizing for every image you post to social media, this image sizing cheatsheet can help you cover your bases.

Unreadable Cover Photos

Speaking of image sizing: do you presently include text in your Facebook cover photo and/or Twitter banner? If so, then the text might not be as readable as you might imagine. Cover photos may appear differently on a desktop versus a mobile app. A common mistake some marketers make with their brand’s cover photos is pasting the full logo or text about a new promotional offer without testing to see whether page visitors will be able to view it properly. For best results, avoid using text in your cover photos as much as possible unless the image is specifically designed (and sized) for a cover photo.

Too Much Text Overlaying Images

Perhaps your profile pictures and cover photos are fine, but what about your actual posts? If there is text on 20% or more of an image included in your post, Facebook and Instagram’s ad managers will reject it. Even if the image is intended for organic engagement with followers, plastering too much text on your visual elements can be distracting and unpleasing to look at. For best results, keep your social images text-free and save your message for the actual text area of the post, not the image itself.

Blatantly Obvious Stock Photos

A final design mistake you should watch out for while working on your marketing collateral is using images that are so clearly stock photos that the people, animals, food, drinks and other elements don’t even look real. The goal for images – particularly on social media – is to capture your audience’s attention, and the best way to accomplish this is by incorporating high-quality, realistic photos into your visual toolbox.

People relate best to images when the people/places/things look similar to themselves and other things in their lives. Although it would be difficult for most brands to produce all of their own photography, it’s important to at least balance your occasional use of stock photos with realistic imagery that reflects your target audience’s personalities, wants, needs and lifestyles.

4 reasons why you can’t afford to ignore your brand’s SEO strategy

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Search engine optimization is perhaps one of the most important aspects of any brand’s marketing campaign, yet many brands are so fixated on social media and influencers that they neglect the data-driven, search engine side of their marketing strategy. This isn’t to say social media isn’t crucial to any brand’s success online, of course – rather, there’s not enough emphasis placed on SEO compared to other marketing channels that are easier to understand and implement.

If you’re hoping to boost your website’s ranking in the search engines and revitalize your brand’s reputation on reviewing platforms like Google, Yelp and Facebook, then here are four things you should prioritize in your 2019 marketing campaigns:

Grow Your Presence with Directory Listings

Directory listings are just like phone books, except they’re in a digital format. These allow potential customers and business partners to easily find your business, while also creating more backlinks for your website. There are more than 160 directories online today, and so many brands miss out on this super simple opportunity to expand their network and boost their online visibility. Don’t make this common mistake. Be sure to add or update your brand’s information in the top 100 business directory listings as soon as possible.

Save Money on Paid Search

Why spend hundreds or thousands of dollars each month on paid search when implementing a more in-depth SEO strategy could bring in much more traffic for a fraction of the cost? When a brand’s blog begins to optimize articles for keyword searches, it increases the likelihood that you’ll drive more traffic to your website. Researching the best short and long-tail keywords and including these in both your regular website content and blog articles is one of the best ways you can boost your online visibility while saving money on paid search.

Revive Your Brand’s Reputation Online

Did you know that many brands are unaware or indifferent to their company’s reviews on platforms like Yelp or Google? Letting reviewers take the reins when it comes to your brand’s reputation management is a terrifying strategy for anyone hoping to grow their business because customers with bad experiences are more likely to leave reviews than customers with positive experiences.

This means you could be losing customers to competitors who are much more in-tuned with their reviewers’ needs and concerns, which involves monitoring your brand’s reviews and responding to customers in polite, professional ways. A new SEO strategy that encourages satisfied customers to leave honest reviews and professionally manages reviews from unhappy customers is absolutely necessary in 2019!

Embrace Analytics

Even the best marketing strategies can fail from time to time. Why is that? Typically, marketing strategies fail because they ignored key analytics that could’ve informed the brand about which ad copy and images were working and which ones were performing poorly. If you’re not closely analyzing various ad metrics, then you could be unintentionally producing and promoting ineffective campaigns. Fix this by learning how to analyze SEO and social media metrics or hire a professional SEO strategist or agency to do it for you.