There are approximately 4.75 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook daily. Everyone wants to be seen and heard. So how do we catch people’s attention through all of the social media noise?
Dr. Brian Stewart, Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at North Central University, presented some helpful tips at our Slow Your Scroll training in October on how to effectively use social media to capture the attention of those we are trying to reach.
4 Ways to Effectively Use Social Media to Engage Others:
- Create Content that Works
One of the biggest questions we need to ask ourselves is, “Who are we really trying to reach?” This is our foundation to the content that we share. This is the lens through which we must view everything else.
In order to do this, we need to begin by thinking about things like gender, age, location, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and interests.
“How do you engage with those people? They want to be known and they want to talk about the things that they are passionate about,” said Dr. Stewart. By knowing our audience we can be creating content that is relevant to them and engages them.
- Understand Facebook Analytics
What tools do we have for answering this question “Who are we really trying to reach”?
The answer: Facebook analytics
Facebook provides tools to help us learn more about the audience we have selected. Using Facebook audience insights will help us to figure out who we’re actually reaching and allow us to reposition our guidelines to reach those we want to be reaching through data by gathering and analyzing the data.
- Build Effective Facebook Ads
When we create Facebook ads, we should start big picture and work our way down. What is our goal?
“You’ve told me this is what you want to know and now we’re going to speak that language,” said Dr. Brian Stewart.
Once we figure out the foundational aspects of our audience, we can begin creating ads that will be relevant to them. When using ads, make sure you know what sort of engagement you are aiming for and what is the call to action. What do we want them to do?
Some examples of calls to action:
- Drive traffic to your website
- Increase event attendance
- Reach larger numbers with original content
- Boost engagement for your page
- New leads of contacts and donors
- Develop a Social Media Strategy
Setting a social media strategy creates goals for what we are trying to achieve.
Social Media Strategies include:
- Audits of content we are sharing to figure out if we are on the right track.
- An accurate audience lens which we can go back and filter our content through.
- A calendar for scheduled posting.
- Plans to reevaluate; test and adjust the plan as needed.
“Is this connecting or not, are they engaging with it? If they’re not engaging with it, then it’s not connecting, and we need to change it,” said Dr. Brian Stewart.
Quotes from Participants:
[pullquote2 style=”left” quote=”light”]“It was helpful just hearing from a professional who does this in the church world… We’re all trying to get on social media,”-Anita Matta, Five Stones Global[/pullquote2] [pullquote2 style=”right” quote=”light”]“I was coming in with very little ideas about what we were going to do with our Facebook page… it was helpful to get me started thinking about a lot of things.”
-Mike Peterson, Epiphany Covenant Church[/pullquote2]
