Whether you are a first-time entrepreneur starting your first online business or a seasoned veteran with a couple of years in the game, either way, you may already be aware of the importance of social media and the impact it has on your business and your customers decision-making process. More and more business owners are flocking to social platforms in order to help boost their brand awareness and overall product engagement. Creating good, and meaningful content is becoming all the more important nowadays and is one of the major contributing factors to increasing your brand’s overall engagement.

If you are like most entrepreneurs and have been creating content for your social media platforms for a while now, you may be wondering why you aren’t gaining more traction and why your engagement levels are still low. You have followed the traditional ‘post everyday’ gibberish you have read online and the results are still the same: no engagement, no traction.

One of the reasons for this is that your content has become repetitive – your potential customers likely do not feel like responding to the same type of daily posts that never even resonated with them to begin with. In that case, what you need to do is switch up the way you tackle your brand’s social media feeds! Here is a guide to how you can spice up your social feeds and increase your brand’s overall engagement and traction levels. All without paying a dime in social media ads.

Increasing your engagement on Instagram

Before implementing any of the following tips, make sure to do a short analysis of your current feed: what sort of posts did the best? What do your followers engage in the most? What fits your brand better?

1. Tease your product releases

Whether you sell a product or a service, one of the most recommended ways to get your customers’ attention is by giving teasers for upcoming collections or additions! You can start by posting short stories and slowly build upon your customers’ anticipation. Instagram lets you do polls or questions in Stories, so make sure to use that to your advantage and engage customers throughout the release process!

2. Give your followers a challenge

Online challenges are all the rage these days – especially because so many are stuck at home during this time. You can follow existing challenges that your customer base takes part in and regularly post about them to create a bond with your customers. Alternatively, you can create your own challenge to encourage your customers to participate and post their rendition of the challenge. That way, you’ll get higher engagement, along with more reach!

3. Use Canva

Instagram is only one of the few platforms that is almost entirely visual. As such, to gain more traction and to catch people’s attention, you need stunning graphics – and where better place to get those than from Canva? Canva offers the best editing tools to create the most eye-catching posts – all for free! If you’re feeling fancy, then you can sign up for a premium account to unlock some of the rarer features.

4. Create how-to posts

Creating how-to posts is particularly helpful if your business is mainly product-centered. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a post about how to build your product. Instead, you can give your customers ideas and tips about using your products and how to utilize all their features. If your business is a marketing business, you can make posts about creating a meaningful relationship with customers through advertising.

5. Post about current events

In this case, you may need to conduct some primary research – notice what your followers commonly celebrate or post about. You can post about major events like Christmas or even minor ones such as Bicycle Day – either way, make sure it is relevant to your brand. However, keep in mind that you don’t get too political. Neither your following nor Instagram will be too happy about that.

Increasing your engagement on Facebook

As mentioned before, make sure you conduct a bit of research first – see what is getting shared, what type of your customers seem to like, what competitors are doing differently, and then consider the following tips.

1. Ask questions

Perhaps the easiest way to engage your customer base is to ask them questions. Besides increasing customer engagement, asking specific questions about your product or service itself will help you get some insight into how well your business is doing at the moment. You may even get some ideas on how to improve. The questions don’t need to be specific to your business, though – you can ask broad questions about your industry as well. For instance, if you run an ice cream shop with an online presence, you could ask your customers, “what is your favorite ice cream flavor?”

2. Post behind-the-scenes

Behind-the-scenes photos often end up being more popular than the professionally curated ones. You can post photos about how your products are made, who your staff are, how you go about advertising. You can even ask your employees to post pictures about certain National Days, such as National Pet Day!

4. Create branded graphics

Although Facebook is not as visual a platform as Instagram, it is still fairly useful to post more images than text on your feed. In an era where most people are rapidly scrolling through their feeds, only good graphics will stand out and make them stop and consider. As mentioned before, you can use Canva for Facebook posts and cover photos.

Conclusion

Conclusively, coming up with ideas for both platforms can be a bit of a hassle. However, it is important to keep trying out new things and looking for inspiration because you never know where you’re going to get your next big idea from.