Steps to Social Media Success: Part Two – Humanize Your Content

Do you acknowledge breaking news? Do you add personality or pop culture? Are you joining the conversation or only pushing out content? These are the questions you should ask yourself to help humanize your content. In this second post on tips to increasing social media engagement, I’ll cover how to humanize your content, how to not sound like a robot and the importance of knowing your brand’s industry on social media. No one likes someone who only talks about themselves so why should you do the same thing on social media?

1)      Humanize your content: If something breaks in your industry whether it’s a large security breach, a malware attack, a huge deal on a building in your city, the announcement of a new product, talk about it. Posting in real time shows that you’re listening and you know what’s going on in your industry. From a logistic stand point, it also shows that you aren’t only pushing out content you’ve had scheduled in a queue for a week in advance. Real time and posting the latest news is one of the main reasons people find the value in social media. In fact, 41 percent of the news shared on social media is breaking news. There’s nothing wrong with adding personality, humor or even pop culture. Consider tweeting out pictures of a cartoon that is relevant to your industry or even something about the weekend’s big sporting event or pop culture news with a tie to your expertise. For example, if your brand is an energy company - “Did you know, this weekend’s #SuperBowl will require XYZ amount of energy to power the stadium.” Photos tweets on Twitter display the image and catch people’s eye making the tweets more clickable and people more likely to engage with the post. Social media is all about creativity.

2)      Give credit where credit is due: It’s great to source and share content from the news, but are you including the reporter’s or the publication’s handles? Grabbing the headline of an article and tweeting the link is lazy. Don’t be lazy. Take the time to read the article and add in some commentary to the tweet. “.@XYZ gives great insight on why the latest data breach happened and how to prevent another. Read about it in @XYZ” Giving the reporter a shout-out and praising their article will not only increase your chances of them responding to you, but it also shows that you took the time to read the article and share it to your network.

3)      Know your brand’s industry: Be aware of the biggest events and conferences happening in your space. Even if you cannot attend, the power of social media enables you to participate and tweet along from the comfort of your own home, or desk. Monitor event hashtags and join the conversation. Retweet and reply to people, show that you’re engaged and involved. When the event is done, capture the conversation via Storify and create a blog post on the event. Again, this helps to show that you’re aware of what’s happening in your industry and that you should be considered an expert. Even when events are not going on, have no fear there are still opportunities to engage. Monitor relevant hashtags in your industry for engagement opportunities every day. Do you care about commercial real estate? Follow #CRE. Are you all about security? Follow #datasecurity. Make it a goal to retweet or engage with someone else at least two times a day.

Do you have any other tips to increase social media engagement? Leave them in the comments section below. In the next post I’ll discuss sharing different content on each social media platform.