How To Turbo-charge your company’s presence on social media with declining organic reach

If you own a company one of your biggest headaches is getting as much exposure for your business on social media as possible. With over 3.17 billion social media users combined on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, there are 3.17 billion reasons why you should make these social networks your second home.

If you are reading this article now you make up part of the findings that show that the average user spends a whopping one hour and 40 minutes on social networks daily. This is the reasons why advertisers will spend over $35 billion on social media in 2017. In 2016, 1.61 billion people made a purchase online.

However, the paradox is that while global users continue to rise, the reach for branded content on social media continues to drop year to year. Just yesterday Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg officially said Facebook would cut down reach for business pages in favor of friends and families. Not that this is news if you have been monitoring the trends over the years. However, this presents a big challenge for brands worldwide as they grapple to attract attention for their business.

In this article, I have researched five effective ways you can beat the not-so-friendly social media algorithms to drive impressive traffic to your business page.

Smirnoff selfie video campaign: Smirnoff turns selfies into cocktails for a winter competition

Videos

Take it or leave it, people are watching more videos than ever on social media. According to Cisco, 80% of all internet traffic will be streaming video content. Videos generate 1200% more shares than text and images combined. Videos have become strategically important to the survival of social network due to their high engagement rate and longer view time. Apart from Youtube which has strategically been a video platform, other platforms have started to embrace the video sharing features. LinkedIn introduced video to increase engagement rate on its platform. Facebook introduced live video sometimes last year and it’s experimenting with a video platform - Watch. 

Marketers are aware of this and are in a rush to create videos that truly connect with their fans. However, your video strategy is equally important to your success on social media. One way to it is to determine the platform you intend to publish to. A video on your Facebook page may not do well on your LinkedIn page.

Let’s take a look at Smirnoff, the alcohol producer. Smirnoff ran a campaign on social media telling users to submit a selfie. The winning selfies were used to inspire the creation of cocktails which was filmed on Facebook. The Facebook live got 2.6 million impressions, reached 451,000 users and had 239,000 video views and 46,000 interactions.  (clockworktalent.com)

The guys at boohoo.com did something even more creative. The brand froze a golden shoe inside a huge block of ice placed in front of a heater. Users then commented ‘melt’ on the video to increase the heat and whoever commented closest to the shoe dropping from the ice block, won ￡500 worth of Boohoo vouchers. The video campaign was a huge success achieving a record-breaking 1,323,274 engagement and 332,895 video views on Facebook.

Influencer Outreach

• Toms of Maine micro-influencer marketing campaign result

According to data from musefind, 92% of consumers trust an influencer more than an advertisement or traditional celebrity endorsement. We can never get tired of hearing this. Influencers now command the same power (if not more) as celebrities. Literarily anyone with a following on social media can help you project your brand to their followers and you know what, you don’t necessarily have to spend much to achieve this.

To carry out an effective influencers outreach you would need to spend some time researching the influencers you want to work with. Make sure they have the right audience with enough engagement to drive interest. Do a check-up on their content to see if it matches your brand voice. Next, you would want to approach them and see if they can help you promote your brand. In exchange for talking about your brand, you would want to give them free samples of your product or offer them some special service or give cash. This way you are piggybacking on their already built audience to reach out to a whole new fan base.

When carrying out your influencers outreach, you don’t necessarily need a Kim Kardashian type of account to engage with your brand. Take a look at Tom’s of Maine, a company that sells natural ingredients. They chose to work with micro-influencers, people that had between 500 – 5000 followers to boost engagement for their campaign. At the end of the campaign, Tom’s of Maine was able to boost engagement by 600%. They gained 6000+ interactions on every 1000 micro-influencers they engaged.

Interactive Contents

Interactive contents have been with us for a long time but not many brands are capitalizing on its high engagement rate to drive traffic on their business pages. Interactive contents consist of quiz, polls, interactive videos, assessments, calculators, galleries and interactive infographics.

The days of just posting plain text are gradually dying and users are looking for more personal and memorable experience on social media. To get started with interactive contents, you can get your hands dirty with software like;

Snappapp: used for creating different types of interactive contents like calculators, surveys, and infographics.

Zembulla: This is an exciting interactive content creation platform for email, SMS, and social media. One of its interactive content is scratch it; which allows users to reveal a hidden image. It’s very effective.

Qzzr: Qzzr is used for making customizable quizzes. It’s easy to use and can be embedded on your website and shared on social media.

Wiremax: Wiremax allows you to create interactive videos. With this, you can create videos and make them clickable.

RooJoom: This tool allows you to easily transform your existing content into interactive contents. Transform your videos to pdf to images to text with this tool.

Content Graders: This platform allows you to create interactive contents like content graders, business assessment, and quizzes.

Infogr.Am: This beautiful platform allows you to create interactive graphs which are super cool and very engaging.

Mapme: This allows you to create interactive maps on your social media pages. It helps you tell stories through maps which gives more information through images, gifs, and data along the path.

Venturepact, a software development firm tried its hand on interactive contents on social media with some amazing results. It created an interactive calculator to help users estimate the cost of building an app. After 2 weeks of launching the calculator, its traffic boosted by 15% and increased conversion rate by 28%. It also brought in 11,000 leads as the calculator went viral.

Public Relations

• Pics from Tecno fathers day campaign shared on their social media pages.

Perception is everything. According to Richard Bandson publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad. People are less interested in your products or services than you think; they, however, want to buy your stories, relations, and magic.

Social media has provided a ready-made platform to showcase your stories and drive high engagement to your brands. Whether it’s an award, a CSR, press briefing, media mention, or a speech make sure you let your fans know what you have been up to by regularly posting on social media. Make sure you let users know how they have also contributed to your success; this makes them feel a strong connection with your brand thereby propelling them to share your contents.

Tecno Mobile; one of Africa’s biggest mobile phone producers decided to treat some of their fans and their dads to a special treat on fathers' day at the Continental Hotel in Lagos. The images were shared on their social media pages and it generated impressive engagement for the brand.

Sponsored Post

This is a no-brainer; sometimes the only option you have to drive engagement to your brand is by paying these social networks to promote your contents. However, there is more to just payingfor ads.

You need to understand your audience, their interest and the ability to target the right users across various social networks. A thorough knowledge of social media ads optimization is important in order to generate the lowest cost per engagement.

Most small businesses do not want to spend their limited budget on sponsoring post. However, I would suggest you set out some little budget for this. You should sponsor post that has the tendency to go viral these will help to reduce your overall advertising budget. Sponsoring post on social media can give you tremendous reach and turbo charge your engagement.

If you are about to abandon your business pages due to poor engagement and low reach you may need to give it a second thought. Incorporating all these into your social media business pages will no doubt help to increase engagement. What are your experiences managing and growing your social media business pages? What strategies are you currently using?

**About the author**

Seyi King is the founder of Onemediafarm, a strategic content marketing agency. He helps brands, startups and companies create contents that help grow their brand and increase sales. He can be reached through [email protected]