If you plan to run a successful business, you will have to spend a sizeable portion of time improving your social media presence. Publishing engaging content on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & Google Plus will give you opportunity to establish your presence with hundreds to thousands of prospective customers. However, you need to post interesting content if you hope for prospects to share your posts with their own circle of influence. However, if you aren't engaging with other social media users on a regular basis, you likely won't be successful on social media regardless of what you are posting. Does your business need help with building and establishing ironclad connections with your target audience? In this blog post, we will discuss steps you can take to generate higher engagement rates across social media platforms to increase your social media reach.

Share Relevant Content For Your Industry

Take a few minutes each week to follow other businesses related to your industry/topic. Constantly be on the look out for interesting posts, and if your followers are posting relevant content, retweet their posts or mention them in new tweets. Your followers will appreciate the attention, but it retweeting also indicates that you are passionate about your industry, which will encourage others to start following you and to view you as an industry authority.

The best Twitter accounts are experts at sharing curated content. Data, links, ideas, etc.; all of these things are shared regularly by an account with a great grasp on its influence. When you share a lot of content, it’s important to remember to give credit where credit is due

Consistency Is Key

Many businesses are not successful with this aspect of social media. It is important to implement a social media schedule, so that you can consistently provide interesting content. Sure, if you feel inspired you can break free from the schedule, but it does help to have a template for success.

Creating a Facebook account and posting once or twice a month simply is not enough. You need to provide some sense of consistency. Create a schedule and stick with it. This goes for each platform of social media that you decide to use. Though, it is important to note that each social media platform requires a different amount of posting.

Exercise Caution When Using Hashtags

Hashtags are one the most popular trends to hit the world of social media, and frankly, it's quite easy to overuse them. Many businesses have added multiple hashtags to the end of every post or tweet, much to their follower's annoyance. Only use hashtags when they are relevant and at least somewhat specific. Writing something like #waffles often won't be very productive because it is too general.

Use Quotes From Your Content

In this day and age, many people suffer from diminishing attention spans. People can be quite picky about the content they decide to devote their attention to. With longer text-based posts, many users can be dismayed because they don’t want to put the time or energy into reading it without knowing what they are getting into; however, you can fix this by using a compelling quote to summarize content. It will help to pique a reader’s interest.

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Are your social media efforts falling flat? Being aware of this and willing to change is half the battle. If it’s time to rethink your strategy, all is not lost. Do research on what others in your industry are doing in social media: what works, what doesn’t and their tone.  Take the time to get to know what your potential clients or customers want to see from you.

We understand that social media can be overwhelming, and it's not always easy to change with each update or refresh. If you are looking to boost your social media marketing then you may want to take a step back and reevaluate the online presence you already have.