Everybody is on social media these days, so businesses need to be on social media and have a social media marketing strategy, as well.

Social media is about posting information to virtual communities and networks. By joining social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc., businesses’ can then post information to their target customers that’ll ultimately, lead to increased sales at little or no cost.

What’s great about social media is it’s easy for your business to post information regularly to keep in touch with customers.

The trick though is figuring out what kind of information you should be posting that’ll get your target customers to share your content to their friends and followers. What follows is a Social media marketing strategy that increases your chances of your target customers doing just that.

Your Social Media Marketing Strategy: Post Engaging Visual Content

We’re visual creatures. We process visual content much quicker than textual content.  Content that contains images attract 94% more total views than content without images. What this means you should be posting information of interest to your target customers in a visual format, where possible.

By posting visual content, your target customers will then be more likely to like, click, comment or share your posts to friends and followers. This spreads online word-of-mouth about your business and increases followers to your business.

Types of Visual Posts That Engages

But what kinds of visual content should you be creating and posting that best engages your target customers?

Post a variety of the following types of information below as visual content, 80% of the time. Its these types of information that together will increase customer engagement and ultimately, sales:

• How to or handy tips posts that people find useful or educational.
• Inspirational posts featuring a quote that inspires or resonates with people.
• Contest posts for a prize giveaway.
• Survey posts that asks a question.
• Multiple choice posts that asks a question with options.
• Posts that people find funny, emotional or entertaining.
• Posts linking to articles that people find interesting or educational. Most social media platforms automatically will display any graphic from these articles.
• Posts featuring testimonials.
• Posts of your business. These posts can be anything about your business: your events, news, accomplishments, new products, staff, behind the scenes, milestones, fun, etc.

Again, remember to post these types of information in a visual format.

With increased engagement from this, you can then occasionally post your sales advertisements, offers, coupons the reminding 20% of the time, also in visual format. Your customers will then be more likely to buy off your sales posts.

How To Create Visual Content For Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

You can create visual content either as videos, images with text, as infographics or as animated images.

Videos engages the best. Shoot moving image videos on your smartphone and later edit them in Windows movie maker or on iMovie, if you’re on a Mac. You can also create slideshow videos on PowerPoint or Keynote.

To create images, take pictures of your business on your smartphone and source images from a stock photo site, like Pixabay. Choose images that evoke emotions and are relevant to your business.

Next, add text to your business pictures and images. This communicates your message to them and increases chances of engagement. You can add text to them by importing them into a editor like Picmonkey to add text to them.

Try to add witty text to your pictures and images. You can get witty text ideas by visiting Short-Funny, Inspirational-quotes.

Your Visual Content Offer Posts

Once people engage with your posts, occasionally post your business offers or specials to them, again in a visual format. For these type of posts, make sure you add a call to action text to prompt them to take your offer.  At that point, they will be predisposed to your offers, if they are not already buying from the trust you’ve built up with them from earlier liking and sharing your visual posts.

And don’t forget to engage with people who engage with your posts by replying to them. This shows to others that you’re listening (people like to be acknowledged) and may prompt further customer engagement.

Here are some visual content examples to give you ideas of the types of visual content you can create for your business:

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  A how to post example. Think of info that your target customers would find useful and create a visual post for that info.

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  Funny post example, ideal for donut or coffee shops.

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  Inspirational post example to drive engagement.

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  A handy tip post example, ideal for restaurants, that can be customized for any food based business.

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  A customizable sales offer post for your business offering.

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  Funny, inspirational post ideal for pet related businesses.

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  Contest post example that can be customized for your business.

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  Example of an offer post with call to action.

Also checkout my previous blog posts below. They go into greater details on how to create engaging visual content to carry out your social media marketing strategy.

What are your thoughts on this post? If you have any comments or questions, please write them below. We welcome and appreciate your opinions.