by Ecommerce Tips

Any business these days knows that it’s vital to include social media in your marketing strategy if you want to be remotely successful.

But it’s not enough just to be visible and try to post regularly. You need to do more than that — you need to work hard to increase your engagement with your audience. This will help you to get your brand name out there, reach potential new customers, and create brand advocates of your current ones. Social media posting can contribute to growing a loyal community around a successful brand.

One of the best ways to do this is to vary the type of content you post on social media. You shouldn’t stick to just one or two types of posts or just write whatever comes to mind. To keep your customers interested and engagement levels high, shake things up. Vary your posts.

To help inspire you, we’ve listed 5 types of posts that your business can use on social media to increase engagement.

1. The storytelling post

This type of social media post is a chance for your customers to meet you and the team — to discover the faces and values behind your business.

Storytelling posts are a chance to show that your business is unique, human and relatable. There are too many brands out there that don’t share enough with their customers, and as a result, they come across as robotic and generic.

By sharing stories about your brand on social, you are building your brand identity, increasing engagement and solidifying your connection with customers.

Here are some examples of storytelling posts you can use:

• Your origin story: share a little-known fact about your startup story. Customers love to hear about humble beginnings, particularly if you’re a big brand
• Your product story: how did you come up with your product? Why did you want to invent it? Focus on aspects like wanting to help your customers fix a problem
• Your staff story: let your customers get to know the team. Share fun facts or mini interviews with each team member
• Your values story: what are your brand values? Do you want to provide high-quality products or help people to save money with low prices? Does your brand help charities or want to change the world? Shout about it!

Video features like Facebook Live or Instagram Stories are a visual and memorable method of sharing your stories and increasing engagement.  For other creative ways to share your brand stories on social, check out this inspiring post.

2. The competition post

Everyone loves free stuff. Give your followers on social media a chance to win something for nothing by answering a question or resharing a post. This gets your business’s name out there as people notice the shared posts and click on your products to investigate.

It’s good to do giveaways, but you don’t want to do them too often. Firstly, you can’t afford to keep giving away your products for free — or heavily discounted — particularly if you’re a small or new business.

Secondly, you don’t want this to be the only thing that your customers associate with your brand — you don’t want to become the business that everyone follows on Facebook just to get free things.

Unfortunately, they can also make your timeline and those of your customers look spammy. If people are just resharing your “Win breakfast for two!” posts, it can quickly get frustrating for your non-customers. This is why it’s important to balance out these posts with other types of social media posts to show your human side.

Toms is a great example of a brand that balances giveaway posts and storytelling or customer-focused post really well. Take a look at their Facebook page and you’ll see a healthy combination of social media posts:

Image credit: Facebook

Remember, giveaways and competition prizes are a reward to customers for following you, or extra incentive for potential customers to start. Too many and they stop being special and start being taken for granted. Use funsocial media graphics to encourage sharing.

3. The informative post

The informative post is a really good way to balance out your competition posts.

This type of social media post is the total opposite to product-promotion or boasting about how awesome your brand is. It allows you to share useful information with your customers in a way that adds value for them as well as you. Offering it for free will also show that you genuinely care about offering help, advice or information.

This could be in the form of a “how-to” guide, a video tutorial or some little-known information about a niche or product.

Make sure this links to your product or service though — for example, if you run an online camera store, then why not offer a free downloadable flipbook to help budding photographers with top tips on taking portraits? You can create your own flipbook easily, and then give it to customers for free.

Or if you’re a make-up brand, you could create a make-up tutorial video to teach your customer how to contour, or how to use your new liquid eye-liner in 5 different ways. You can post this on facebook, or stagger it as an Instagram story.

4. The exclusive post

By giving your customers the inside scoop on new products, events or what’s going on behind the scenes is a great way to increase engagement.

This is because they will feel like they have exclusive, insider information that other people aren’t privy to. And it’s true — you’re giving them updates before everyone else! This will make your customers feel more special — like they’re a part of your brand’s story and community.

As a result, customers are more likely to keep following you and liking your posts. They are also more likely to start engaging with other people within your community and talking about your products and your business. This sort of social media promotion is perfect because it’s organic and can grow by itself.

5. The customer-focused post

There are all sorts of ways you can create customer-focused posts.

You can do this by sharing the stories of your customers on your account. This works well for both B2C and B2B business — if you provide a software or service to small businesses, you can talk about how this has helped your clients and had a positive impact on their life.

It could have made their jobs easier, helped with time management or saved them a ton of money. Whatever the positive was, by sharing your customer’s story in a post, you are telling other customers that this could be them too.

Similarly, if your business is B2C, then show your customers using your product or talking about how much they love it.

For example, if you’re a clothing brand, you can post photos showing customers modelling your clothes or accessories. Get your followers to tag their photos using a certain hashtag for your business, and then reshare on your profile. This promotes user-generated content and gets your customers involved with the business.

Miss Selfridge ask their customers to tag their “cutest looks” using the hashtag #missselfie:

Image credit: Instagram

This type of social media post doesn’t just build a connection between you and your customer — it builds connections between your customers. It creates and grows an organic community of people that all have one thing in common — they love using your products and want to shout about them.

Posting a variety of social media content will help to keep your customers interested and increase engagement. Use the post ideas above to inspire your next tweet or Instagram story and create some hype around your business!

Are you a business owner? Are there any other types of social media posts that you’ve found work well for engagement? Let us know in the comments below.