Because of the automation tools available to marketers today, it’s easy to just go through the motions and robotically go through the different elements of your campaign—especially social media posting.

Sure, using a scheduling tool does take a lot of the tedium out of the process. But there are things you can do to make sure that you maximize your content and resources so that you get as gagement from your social media posts.

Let’s start with Facebook—

• Make sure you provide relevant and valuable information that your followers will find useful — users engage most with posts that pique their interest.
• Whenever you can, provide a link back to your website, when you post to drive traffic back to your website.
• Always add a photo when you post—posts with images are proven to get the highest amount of engagement.
• When your followers start a conversation on one of your posts, be sure that you engage with them and respond to any questions.
• A huge chunk of Facebook users access the site via their phones—so make sure that you tailor your content and posts to fit the requirements of this platform.

Things to remember when posting on Twitter—

• Twitter has a 140-character limit, so be sure your posts are short and sweet, with enough room for people to retweet.
• Because of the character limit, people assume grammar and punctuation aren’t important. But posting a badly written tweet will reflect badly on you.
• URLs take up a lot of character space. Use bit.ly or goo.gl to shorten your links and make the most of the allocated character limit.
• Don’t forget to retweet interesting content or relevant posts from authority sites to increase engagement.
• Images and videos also help increase your engagement so be sure to add them whenever you can.

When posting on YouTube—

• Make your title catchy and informative. No other social media site puts as much premium on the title as YouTube—limit your title to 70 characters.
• To complement your title, make sure your thumbnails are customized to reflect your content.
• Incorporate keywords in your video description to help your video rank better on the site and drive traffic.
• Add a clear call to action at the end of your videos to increase subscribers, like, and comments.
• Make the most out of your tags—use main keywords as tags, as this will help with rankings.

Keep these in mind when posting on Pinterest—

• Pins without faces are known to increase engagement by 23 percent.
• Take note of your background—backgrounds that take up less than 40 percent of the entire image are repined twice as much.
• Images with the colours dark green, red, and pink get three times more engagement, while images that have dominantly red and orange images get repined twice as much.
• Colored images get repinned more than black and white images.
• Use those filters—images with 50 percent more colour saturation are repinned four times more.

When you’re posting on Google+ —

• Make sure your headline doesn’t go over 60 characters to make it catchy and easy to consume.
• Ensure that you have a link on your post that will take followers to your website.
• Tag relevant brands, companies, or people when you post to help increase engagement.
• Leverage on trending topics whenever you can to help raise your visibility.
• Use hashtags to expand your post’s reach.

Final word…

How you post is just as important as when you post. This means it’s not enough that you’ve scheduled posts to go up regularly, it’s also important to keep in mind the quality of your post, the topic, and—it almost goes without saying—your audience.

The platform itself, social media, means the human component is very much part of the strategy. And engagement from your audience is essential to the success of your efforts.

If you have anything more to add to this list, any tips or tricks that you’d like to share, be sure to leave a comment below. We’d love to hear all about it.

And if you’d like to find out how we can help give your conversions a boost, get in touch with us today.