Social media is a great tool for engaging an audience and building relationships, but how can you make sure that it is what you’re doing?

Posting a steady stream of content without following up on conversations makes you look bad and doesn’t build trust.

But fear not!

Here are two social media activities that (actually!) get results…

1. Your Strategy Must Match Your Objectives

One of the main reasons social media activities flounder is that they don’t have an end goal. To get the best results, you need to have a plan.

First, you need to identify your ideal clients.

Get really clear on who your ideal clients are, understand the language they use when describing themselves, their problems, and what keywords they use to search for someone who offers the kinds of solutions that you do. Know where they connect with their peers.

Once you have developed a sense of where your clients are and where you are going to interact with them, break it down even further.

• How will you use each social media platform at your disposal to connect with your clients?
• What message are you trying to put across to them?
• How will each of these platforms help you to achieve each goal?

To keep things as efficient and effective as possible, draft message templates and scripts for each platform or type of client, which can be swiftly and easily personalized, as you need them. This will speed things up.

2. Create Content that Educates and Entertains

When it comes to selecting content that gets results, this is the winning formula.

Focus on entertaining your audience or teaching them something useful for their business, their life, or their relationships.

This will help you to establish yourself as an expert voice in your industry, communicate a sense of your personality and connect with your audience on an emotional level. Plus, by giving something back, you encourage a sense of reciprocity. People will feel more compelled to give something back, whether that is in the form of a retweet or ultimately by becoming a client.

So what kind of content should you offer?

There are three types that really work:

• Content that helps to solve a problem, such as “how-to” blogs/articles, checklists, videos, podcasts, eBooks, etc.
• Items that connect on an emotional level, be it aspirational, humorous or reassuring: For example, such as inspirational blog posts and interviews, visual content and infographics, and articles that outline mistakes to avoid or taking a satirical view of frustrations a client might be having.
• Content that informs or reinforces their belief about something.

Keep the conversation going. Putting out fabulous, conversation-starting content is only the first step. You need to comment and create ways to connect with them.

Engaging people in a positive way encourages others to interact also.

Well, that’s it for this issue. Next time I’ll write about another solution to problems you might be having and how to reverse them. If you need step-by-step instructions on how to implement this and other ideas I give on Creating Customers. Please go to www.buildyourpracticefast.com   and sign up for my one-on-one coaching program.

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