The festive season is almost here with all its opportunities for stronger customer engagement and increased sales. One great way to boost both your online following and your customer engagement is through social media. If you aren’t making full use of this platform, you really should be. Here are 6 tactics you can use across all the popular social media sites to help you give your business a push. These will work well for the Christmas peak season, but can be successfully applied all year round.

Use a Chatbot

Chatbots are fast becoming ubiquitous in social media marketing and customer support. Thousands of chatbots are active on Facebook Messenger, with more being added all the time, and users are increasingly willing to engage with them. The technology is more responsive than ever, meaning you can create sophisticated algorithms to drive chatbots that will talk to your customers as if you are personally dealing with each question. You never miss an inquiry, all customers are answered and happy, and your staff can focus on tasks that really need their direct attention.

Target Your Video Marketing More Precisely

Everyone is doing their best to make video marketing work. However, you need to remember that social media users are bombarded with video content all day long, everything from ads to cat videos. You can’t compete by throwing your carefully created visual media into the “general population” of the social media world. Forget about going viral. Use keywords, good quality, and clever timing to hit the right audience.

Use Facebook Custom Audience to Hone in on Your Market

Facebook’s Custom Audience feature is something you should absolutely be using by now. If you aren’t yet, then look into it right away! It is the best way to make your PPC spending worthwhile because it enables you to target your advertising specifically at those people most likely to convert their clicks into sales. Say, for instance, you put out an ad that receives a high number of clicks from women aged between 20 and 25. The response from this group is huge but, unfortunately, few of those clicks (each of which you’re paying for, by the way) have been converted into sales. You find instead that men aged between 30 and 35, although fewer of them click, render many more conversions. With Facebook Custom Audience, you can then eliminate the non-converting group and target the converting group alone, maximizing your spending and making more sales.

Generate Short-Lived Content

Many social marketers have scratched their heads wondering how to make content that lasts on platforms where each post only has a lifespan of a few minutes. The approach now is to go the other way. Nobody is going to scroll back through their feed or search to find a story you posted yesterday. So, why not rather create content that appears, makes a strong impression, and then expires. This will generate engagement and drive users to your website if they want more information. Fleeting, tantalizing content is the way to go.

Leverage Voice Search

The ascent of voice search means that you should start shifting your content mix on social media towards a higher proportion of audio and video, as opposed to text. How-to videos, podcasts, and the like, will all be valuable to you as more people adapt to hands-free and reading-free searches.

Make Smart Use of Conversion Tracking

In order to make targeted marketing work, you have to track your clicks and conversions carefully. Facebook Custom Audience, for example, can only work if you have done all your homework. Set specific social media marketing goals and then measure your results against them with as much accuracy as possible. You can then constantly tweak your tactics to hit the targets better.

The Digital Marketing People specializes in generating highly effective social media marketing strategies as well as devising high impact short-term tactics. Contact us for help to perfect your strategies.