An easy way to increase social media engagement for your small business

Increase your social media engagement using images.

Social media engagement is a back and forth with your audience.  You post, they like or comment or share, you acknowledge their activity and on it goes.  For sites like Facebook your engagement level corresponds with an edgerank, a number that indicates how much you engage fans and the extent of each post’s reach.  Your reach is how many people who’ve liked your page and will see each post.  If you’re able to increase your social media engagement, you can boost your Facebook reach. One of the best ways to increase engagement is to be more visual by adding images to your posts and tweets. Including pictures in your posts is proven to increase engagement: Facebook posts with pictures get 120% more engagement than the average post and social media updates that include images get 50% more likes and retweets than text-only posts. Most social media sites encourage photo sharing and may assign posts with images a higher relevancy.  Instagram interactions are based on photo sharing, Facebook is all about images and Pinterest wouldn’t even exist without pictures.  Twitter recently encouraged users to post visuals by including image previews in users’ streams and supporting photo collages that let you include up to four photos in in each post. Knowing that you need to add images to your posts, how can you do so in ways that resonate with your audiences?  Pictures of your product or service in action, shots of satisfied customers and shareable quotes are just three ideas for using visuals in your social media posts. With people spending more time online with smart phones and mobile devices and social media platforms evolving to make photo sharing easier, it’s definitely time to make increasing social media engagement with pictures a part of your small business marketing plan. Social media and your small business are a perfect fit. Check out a few success stories for inspiration, then get busy posting!