Twitter and Facebook have the potential to bring in business, but they also are an easy way to turn away people. The primary reason people start to follow a business on social media is to keep informed about products, promotions, and sales. People stay because there is quality, engaging content.
Creating engaging content for your followers is not as hard as it seems. Posting with regularity and honesty will help keep your followers engaged and earn new followers and retweets. Building a trusting relationship based on respect to your followers will help retain them. Content coming from your business on social media pages should somehow relate back to your business, it doesn’t need to be a literal and direct relation, but rather something within the realm of your business. People start following businesses for promotional deals and things that benefit the follower, and keep following because of quality content.
One of the most vital parts of social media is posting with regularity. If a follower goes to your business twitter page and sees that the most recent tweet was from 2 months ago, they most likely will not follow you because there is no content coming out. Finding that fine line between posting too much and not enough may take time to figure out, but don’t stop trying! Twitter can handle a lot more posting because the content changes faster than content on Facebook. Facebook posts can be more interactive, and are an easier way to share more information and images because there is not a limit on the number of characters that can be posted.
Putting out content that isn’t entirely self-promotion is also very important, and content that doesn’t abuse the ins and outs of a social media platform. Tweet about things besides yourself, period. For every 5-10 tweets about something else you can do one yourself. Abusing hash tags to self-promote turns people off of your twitter as well, not everything is about your business. The same way no one wants to be friends with a narcissist, no one wants to follow a narcissistic business on twitter.
Be conscious of your followers and people will begin to be more conscious of your business. We are all after the same thing, but following a few simple guidelines can help make all the difference.