The Secret to Engagement

What does engaging content look like for people? Let me share a little with you about this exact topic.

This past week, the PR firm that I am interning for hosted their annual Women’s Leadership Summit. The knowledge that I walked away with was truly amazing. All of the women who spoke at this Summit have made professional careers for themselves and either make a living from using social media or use social media to promote themselves and their brand. Esentialling, the topic of how to get people engaged In your content was the main message of a lot of people's speeches. Listen up because what I am going to share rocked my world.

People don’t buy products just to have them, they buy them for the value that they are going to bring to their lives. The same can be said about pretty much anything but in this case, social media content and posts. Reflect on your brand and yourself, does this piece of content provide value to anyone. Yes, it is aesthetic but, is there anything else that your audience is going to be able to take away from your content.

The best piece of advice that someone shared was if you don’t know if your content has value or not, share a story. Stories that are shared with people elicit many different responses and have many different takeaways depending on who is hearing or reading what you have to say. Each person finds value in different things and that is how it should be. Your content is not going to cater to anyone but who is to say that there is no value in your content and that everyone can experience a different form of value from it.

Essentially, when you provide more than just a picture, you are going to engage your audience in some way. This could be sharing what was happening behind the scenes and having someone relate to that, sharing what happened after the photo, sharing a conversation that you heard that made you think… it truly could be anything. People are more likely to come back and be interested when you are showing them that you are human.

Steering away from sharing stories and adding value, a great way to engage your followers is to be consistent and to use interactive tactics in your content. This could be done with polls, questions, live videos, etc. It is important to find what you excel at and try to stick to it. Oftentimes we find that people are trying to mirror another influencer and the tactics that they use but we forget that maybe we don’t excel at that type of content and we shine more when speaking live. Find your niche so that you can deliver the best content to your audience which will ultimately lead to engagement and other people sharing your content because YOU delivered them VALUE.

I would highly recommend these influencers who I feel like do a fantastic job at showcasing everything that I mentioned in the blurbs above.

@daniellebayardjackson

@themattiejames

@juliannetaylorstyle

@alisonlumbatis

@megantamte