Are your social media channels at a stand-still? Are you struggling to gain new followers or experiencing a lack of involvement from current followers? You have your social media channels established for your senior living communities, but how can you improve them?
There is always the option to buy fake followers (although we strongly recommend against this). Instead, you should focus on making your channels engaging for your audience. Interact with your followers and let them know you are listening. Ask them questions and try to get their input. If they ask you a question through Facebook or comment on one of your posts on LinkedIn, respond to their question and thank them for their input as soon as possible. Engagement in social media is a long-term strategy, but will make your overall social media strategy much more effective.
4 Methods to Enhance Social Media Engagement
1. Understand Your Audience
Some social media channels provide analytics that will provide you with information about your network, followers, fans and connections. If you understand the demographics such as age, geographic location, gender, and profession, it can help you determine the best type of posts and who will be most likely to read them. This will allow you to adjust your content to be more appealing towards your biggest demographic.
2. Content is Critical
The most important rule of social media: your content must be focused on your personas a.k.a. your target audience. If the content you’re posting doesn’t interest your audience, then it doesn't matter what you post. When people aren’t interested or engaged in the content, they are less likely to interact or share, so your efforts will be wasted.
Make sure you post not only a large amount of content, but--more importantly--be sure to post a variety of content. I’m sure you’ve heard that posting links is important (and it is), but make sure you mix it up a little. Post some photos, infographics, podcasts, videos, ask questions, create polls, show some humor or inspirational messages. Just make sure you're giving people a reason to follow you in the first place, and adding variety to their news feeds is the best way to go. Switching up the content keeps your audience engaged and interested.
3. Timing Matters
The half-life of social media posts range anywhere from 3 to 7 hours, so you don’t have much time to work with, and there's no point posting something if most people aren't going to see it. This is a great infographic that shows the best times to post per social media platform. This information can be used as a baseline, although you'll need to do your own testing first to find out the best times for posting before you can make any final conclusions. It may vary from community to community.
In addition, your senior living organization may take into consideration time zones. More often than not, the majority of your audience will be located in the same--or close to the same--time zone as you. Therefore, you won't have to make major changes. However, if your audience is in California and your company is located in Ohio, for example, then you will need to take that into consideration when posting and testing for best times for engagement.
4. Consistency is Key
In order to make sure your followers pay attention to you, make sure they're expecting you to post and have an understanding of your routine. Nobody is interested in following an inactive or inconsistent company, so make sure you're posting through your channels on a regular basis. Likewise, avoid posting in quick succession. This can cause followers to get annoyed with you for taking over their news feed with your constant updates. The only exception to this rule would be if you were live tweeting an event that you think your followers would enjoy hearing about. Otherwise, typically try to allow for time spacing between posts, as it will leave your followers much happier!
Use these tips to help your senior living community increase their number of social media engagements.
How does your senior living community engage with social media followers? Share in the comments below!
