3 Authentic Ways to Connect with Your Social Media Audience

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We are not robots, and you may not be either. Phew, what a relief! Since you are not a robot, chances are good that you have a strong desire to authentically connect with your social media audiences. We know the feeling! We also know the feeling of flat out, brain-dead, absolutely drained of all creative strategies.

You see, here at Intentional Marketer University we do our fair share of content creation. Ok, we do A LOT of content creation. The bottom line is that sometimes it can get frustrating to continue with creative content design. Especially, when well, it seems that everyone around you is doing very basic social media posting. It almost makes you wonder why you are trying so hard to begin with.

You are trying so hard, because you are different. You care about your reputation. Your desire is to authentically help your audience and not merely post to post. That’s a good thing too, because your audience no longer pays attention to boring posts simply because it is in their newsfeed.

Instead of focusing on what everyone else is doing (which isn’t working), let’s talk about new, exciting ideas. The fun stuff that gets your audience alert, excited, and reactive to your calls to action. Not sure about using a call to action on social media? We have a post about that here.

1. Interactive Guides

Guides, ‘How Tos’, Resources, and E-books have all been around for a while. And if you start using them today in the traditional sense, you will most likely hear crickets. Instead, of creating another Free Downloadable Resource Guide, let’s make it interesting. Let’s get into multimedia, interactive, and exciting guides.

Today’s guides need to focus on the customer. No really, they need to provide accurate evaluations, videos, and personalized content. You must give the audience information that is highly targeted to their needs. Basically, you must be the leader who solves specific problems.

Thinglink is a tool that is doing it right.

Interactive content is becoming the go-to form of advertising and effective marketing. It’s new, hardly anyone is using interactive media, and you will achieve better results on your blog.

Thinglink allows you to make clickable images. But it is so much more, than just clickable images. Using this tool you can add multiple links to one image, have people go separate places, the possibilities are endless.

1. Visit the site and get a free account using one of your social media accounts or your email address.
2. Using the “Create” button, it is simple to start walking through the site and creating your own interactive media.
3. Upload these to your blog, to social media accounts (hello Facebook interactions!)
4. You can hover over different parts of your pictures, insert different messages, send your customers to different products, all dependent on what they want to interact with.

Check out the custom Thinglink Infographic we made here at IMU. Scroll over any of the icons and you will easily find resources to increase your family time while working from home.

Imagine the possibilities that are now open for your business!

 2. Infographics that Inspire:

Piktochart 

Infographics are incredible useful for getting shares and likes on your social media posts.

Professional marketers (think Digital Marketer) are spending thousands per infographic to have then created by professional designers. Instead, at this stage in your business, you can create them yourself.

Picktochart and infogr.am are two of the most popular infographic creators. Similar to Canva.com they will give you templates, text, and the ability to upload custom images. Once you get good at it, you can get some great interaction with self-designed infographics.

 3. Slides That are Share Worthy

Haiku Deck

Slideshows are what can separate your professional content apart from the competition. The problem though, is that you cannot simply insert a Power Point into your blog or other posts. Therefore, you need a tool to create them. That is here Haiku steps in.

Haiku Deck is user-friendly, and quite reminiscent to Canva. It is a paid product, if you want your Decks to be private, but one that is worth it if your business plans on doing quite a bit of presentations.

If you do not care that your Decks are public, you can easily set up a free account.

1. For each slide in your presentation, you will pick a background image from the Deck library.
2. Add your text.
3. Repeat the process for each slide
4. Once you’ve created your slideshow, you can download it as a PDF or a PowerPoint file or embed it on your website (using HTML code).

What’s the Take-Away?

Creating valuable content that your audience will not only enjoy, but digest, share, like, promote, etc. is your top priority.  Using these 3 authentic ways to connect with your social media audience means that you still care.

Add some fresh content to your social media accounts (Thinglink interactive infographic once a week, anyone?!) You will remain the leader that people are eager to see. They want to ‘play’ with your posts, share your slides, post your images to their Pinterest account. And all the while, this equates to incredible traffic and word of mouth for you.

Harte Hanks, a marketing services organization, provides a market-intelligence calculator that tabulates the value of missed opportunities. This single calculator boasted a 51% click-through rate. Think about that! Over half of everyone you are trying to market to is clicking away without ever giving content a second chance. We are proud that you refuse to be that type of marketer.

Ultimately your job as a content marketer is to first get your audience’s attention, and then to keep it. With average click rates of 50% and lead conversion rates of 40%, interactive content might be just what you need to boost your lead generation and sales conversions.

So tell us. What is the first tool that you will be using from this guide? Perhaps you are already using something fantastic we didn’t mention here. Let us know in the comments below!