Actively publishing content, such as blogs and social media posts, is just another way to promote your business. However, reach and engagement can become stagnant and difficult. If posts lack a call to action, aren’t relevant, or would be more appealing on a different platform, engagement can be low. It’s hard to keep track of social media trends, but one way to boost your company’s content is by sharing it on your own personal profiles. Not only does your personal promotion increase reach, but it allows your followers to make a personal connection with the business and interact with a familiar face.
Create and share engaging content
If your company has a big event coming up or reached an important milestone, share those moments on a large scale! Adding your own perspective or other pieces of information can make the content more personal and intimate for your audience. You’ll also want to respond to or like comments and questions you receive.
You can repost to your story, and even add interactive elements such as polls or questions to encourage engagement. You can also create a highlight on your Instagram profile. Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat all offer the “vanishing” 24-hour story, but with Instagram, you have the option to permanently keep a story posted as a highlight. This allows for a subsection of your profile to be about a specific topic or interest.
For content that you know will resonate with specific friends or family members, sharing via direct message or text can be more effective.
Distinguish between social media platforms
Different social media platforms serve different purposes. Understanding what types of content to share on which platforms can greatly increase interest. For example, Instagram is all about visuals, where Twitter uses a quick, short and often clever blurb about a topic called a tweet. Twitter users have the option to choose whether they want to see top tweets or latest tweets. To take this into account, using hashtags and trending keywords can help you land in a user’s feed. When sharing your company’s content, quote tweeting is a great option. It allows the original tweet to be seen, as well as your own personal insight, as shown below.
Another way to share your company’s page or content is by tagging or mentioning them. If you run into an issue where posts from your blog don’t look right when you share them, there is no need to panic. The Facebook Sharing Debugger is a great free tool to help troubleshoot Facebook’s preview of your website or blog.
To best utilize LinkedIn, you first have to understand the goal of the platform. Senior director of product management Pete Davies says that LinkedIn is about “People you know, talking about things you care about.” Therefore, making connections with people who have similar interests to you and your company can create engagement, and appeal to your network. The “share” button on LinkedIn is also very similar to the retweet and quote tweet button on Twitter. Sending a post directly to a group or individual can help make it more personal and meaningful! If you are sharing a website or blog, similar to Facebook, LinkedIn has a debugger called the Post Inspector. This tool allows you to view missing items on your page, see some specific insights and debug certain issues.
Use basic insights
If you’re a Facebook or Instagram user with a public/business account, you have access to free, easy-to-understand insights. Meta Business Suite and Creator Studio make it extremely easy to track metrics, schedule posts and gain specific feedback about your page or individual post! These metrics can include accounts reached, accounts engaged, top posts, net followers and even where your followers are from. One of the most helpful insights tells you where your followers are the most active. For example, the @parkwaydigital Instagram account reaches users in the city of Buffalo most often. Therefore, sharing blogs or other media that relate to the city of Buffalo will likely be of interest to the people who see our posts.
When sharing on a platform like LinkedIn, it’s most important to know when your connections are active. According to the LinkedIn Marketing Blog, the best time to post any sort of content is between 10:00 am and 12:00 pm on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. It is important to share your company’s media during this time, because it will show up as a fresh post for your connections.
Be a positive representative
Finally, it is important to share positive content when using your personal profiles. Sharing posts that could hurt your image or your company’s image should be avoided. Remember, posts on your personal account help followers connect a company to a face. You are the representative of the company, and how you portray yourself is how others will perceive you. As long as you stay consistent, positive and interested in the media you share from your company, others will become interested too.