1.    Generate Dialogue
Interacting with your audience is one of the most crucial steps to great social media. By engaging with customers or potential clients through social media it shows them that there are real people running your business. Don’t be afraid to make jokes, be a little cheeky, respond to negativity and form relationships through these channels. Giving your business a personable way for people  to enquire, vent or praise can see your company benefit in the long run.
2.    Ask Questions
One of the best ways to get your audience talking and interacting with you is to ask them questions! Regularly ask your followers questions about topics related to your business. Opinions may be a dime a dozen but they are still highly valuable. Use questions to get an understanding of where your audience is at through true/false questions, multiple choice and open ended questions that get their brains ticking. Use your followers as part of your decision making process, this can create a sense of inclusivity and community, and you get the added benefit of valuable feedback… for free!
3.    Ask for Questions
Not only should you ask questions, but always give your followers the opportunity to ask you questions and respond! Opening yourself up to take queries, answers questions and even offer some advice can be just as valuable to you as a traditional ad campaign. It creates a sense of business transparency that people can relate to and find comforting. It also helps you form positive relationships between your business and its potential clients.
4.    Provide regular content
There is nothing worse for your followers than visiting your page to see that it hasn’t been touched in weeks or months. To keep your fan base growing and more importantly, coming back you need to be posting no more than twice a day on your various media platforms. Twitter is the only exception where hourly updates are more than suitable. Excessive posting will find you losing followers faster than you can say Mark Zuckerberg. Businesses also need to be careful to avoid saturation of promotional content as this will also drive your followers away. Try to stick to a ‘one for you’ ‘one for me’ rule of thumb. For every promotional or business-based post, reward your followers with a funny – but still relevant – update or picture.
5.    Use multimedia
Use pictures, videos and info graphics as much as possible. Anything that relates to your business that you feel you your audience would appreciate is worth sharing. The effectiveness of multimedia is due to the fact that we are drawn to quick, snappy images and videos. Don’t be afraid to post light, humorous images or short quirky videos about your team to put a human face to your business. Just be careful not to flood your page with pictures and forgot about actual content.
