Archive for Hashtags

Secrets to create Engaging Social Media Content

Over 76% of marketers report that finding quality content is the greatest marketing challenge. Posting regularly to social media requires research, familiarity with trending topics, strong communication skills and brain power!

Today, we are sharing three of CC Communications secrets to keep your social media content engaging:

Start a Conversation to #ConnectMORE 

Social media is the perfect place to #ConnectMORE with your audience and “get social” with your customers. Try posting content that is interactive. For example, ask your audience questions about their preference or personal opinion to entice a conversation.

Once your followers have started to engage with you, it is important to respond. Social media platforms make it easy to respond to followers by replying to their comments or by using the “@” symbol to speak directly with them. Other users are more likely to participate in the conversation when they view responses from the company.

In this post to the left, it is clear that the company has not made an effort to converse with their audience. Such posts are ad driven to increase sales but fail to start an interactive conversation.

If a social media user is interested in the product, they may purchase the item, however posts such as this fail to encourage conversation or social interaction. This is a disadvantage because social media interaction through the form of written conversation often spurs interest from other users who could become potential buyers of such products and/or services. 

Can you spot the difference in this Coca-Cola post for example?

It makes a point to engage followers by asking them a question, while still promoting the product.

Represent Your Brand

Sharing and reposting existing content is part of a good social media strategy, but the majority of your content should be unique and relevant to your overall products and services. People will follow your social media pages to view content that represents your business and brand.

To accurately represent your brand and preserve your image, you should avoid “clickbait.”

Clickbait is the posting of articles with attention grabbing headlines that are designed to urge users to click on a link. Due to their frequent use, Facebook officials have altered their algorithm to reduce the viewership of “clickbait” articles. This recent change was made as an overall initiative to provide the Facebook community with organic and authentic content. Have you been a victim of “clickbait?”

Think Outside of the Box and Make it Visual 

Keep your content fresh! Research and capitalize on trends people are socializing about. Include visuals that represent your brand. In doing so, your social posts become 80% more interactive according to Facebook analytics.

For example, by adding this image of a quote to the Facebook post it has become more visually stimulating and might encourage viewers to remember it’s positive message (and your brand in association).

For commercial photography, consider utilizing the photography services of CC Photography, a division of CC Communications. Also book your FREE 30 minute consultation  as our agency is driven to provide business owners with the opportunity to increase their brand awareness and build community through interactive and conversational content.

The Power of the #Hashtag: 3 Ways to Promote Your Brand

Once seen only as your phone’s pound sign, hashtags now have a powerful role on social media platforms.

If you attended our #ConnectMORE Social Media Seminar in May, you would have learned that using hashtags can expand your brand’s reach by bringing attention to your social media platforms through the use of innovative and creative hashtags. Hashtags are words or phrases that are preceded by the “#” symbol which act as links to related content. This helps string related content together on various social media platforms and provides social media users with a unique opportunity to receive a substantial amount of information by clicking on a hashtag. For this reason, utilizing hashtags can do wonders for your online presence, if used properly and in moderation.

For example our #ConnectMORE hashtag is used to reference CC Communications unique capability to provide online content for your website and social media platforms that is both engaging, conversational and relationship building.

On Instagram, posts with at least one hashtag receive nearly 13% more engagement than posts with none. Adding a hashtag to your tweet on Twitter or your post on Google+ is also statistically proven to give you twice the amount of engagement compared to posts that do not use hashtags!

Here are three ways you can you use #hashtags to promote your brand:

1) Be Specific

The more specific you are when using a hashtag, the better. It is always good to use a hashtag that is unique to your business. Find one or two existing hashtags that will help serve to explain your services and or product.

One prime example is Guinness: the brand uses very specific hashtags on Instagram to maximize their digital reach. To promote their new ale, the brand strategically “hashtagged” certain words that were relevant to their content. They leveraged the existing popularity of the #BeerandFood and #Dublin hashtags on Instagram to ensure that users who searched for those hashtags or utilized regularly would come across their branded content.

2) Be Unique

Come up with a snappy, easy-to-remember hashtag for special events, deals or promotions to facilitate easy sharing. Some of the most used hashtags are popular because they are easy to remember, or funny.

Destination British Columbia used the easy to remember hashtag #exploreBC when sharing photos of the province as an initiative to help promote tourism. The hashtag ended up being a way for tourists and residents to share their own photos of British Colombia. By clicking on the hashtag, social media users were able to browse photos others took in the area.

Lay’s Potato Chips encouraged people to pitch their best potato chip flavor ideas for their “Do Us a Flavor” contest. With the goal to engage users and collect ideas, consumers were invited to submit their flavor ideas on Twitter and Instagram along with the hashtag #DoUsAFlavor. By creating this unique hashtag, Lay’s was able to easily track contest entries and provide contestants with the opportunity to view other entries. 

During your FREE 30 minute consultation with us, CC Communications will show you more examples of unique hashtags and give you tips on generating your own brand-specific hashtag to increase engagement with your customers!

This brings us to our final tip:

3) Do Your Research

Take the time to discover the most popular hashtags on a specific subject for each social media network.

Before creating a hashtag specific to your business, be sure to do a search of the hashtag to make sure it is not already in use by another organization and that it does not have any alternative meanings that could obscure your brand’s message.

However, finding the most relevant and useful hashtags to promote your content can be tough – if you would like some help from the experts at CC Communications, drop us a line to find out more about our social media management services and our ability to create a unique hashtag for you!

Remember to be specific, be unique and do your research first! If you would like to learn more about social media and hashtags, join us at one of our Social Media seminars – sign up here to be the first to know when new seminars are announced.