The One Principle For Amazing Engagement on Social Media

Why being more authentic with your brand?

When someone knows they support an authentic and honest brand, it triggers a positive feeling about their own choices. By humanizing your brand, authenticity makes it more trustable. And we all want to engage with and buy from trustable businesses.

Also, as stupid as it may be: authenticity is cheap. It's about sharing what you and your team goes through every day. It's about snapping a simple picture of coworkers, clients, providers, or any kind of partner. It's about telling stories and anecdotes that get created all the time in your place of business. It's everywhere if you know where to look, it's abundant and can really be insightful.

Authenticity will also make your brand stand out! For most communications people the default reflex is to talk about the company's products & services: the quality, the value. We all want and need to sell stuff, so that's what most businesses default to in their social media content. Go beyond that, share your stories, be unique, it's the best return on investment.

Do not take our words for it, try it out, see how it works for you. Now that we - hopefully - convinced you to get going, here is how.

How to convey authenticity, and generate more engagement, on social media ?

We have 7 tips for more authentic content that you should start using today!

Granted, we only used highlights from our own Smiirl social media accounts. There are tons of brands doing it better than us, but we are trying our best every day, so we thought it could be interesting for others 🙃

1. Show faces

Seeing a face behind the brand shows your community that you are in fact human – just like them. So, it humanises your brand and it acquaints your followers with your faces, building a sense of familiarity and trust.

By the way, Instagram photos that include faces are far more likely to get likes than those without, definitely worth it.

2. Be open about your successes and failures

Transparency!

Update your followers on your progress, and ask for advice when things aren’t going so well.

Posts displaying some level of vulnerability achieve the highest engagement on social media. They work because they call on the community to have an input into the way our business is run.

3. Feature your users as much as you can

Whether it’s sharing reviews, experience or any other kind of content from customers, try to tell stories with customer-focused posts. Also make sure to tag anyone relevant for extra reach and engagement.

All of this helps us form close relationships with our customers, which in turn, builds a community of like-minded people around your brand. You feel like you are part of a family – not an online group.

4. Avoid the hard sell and focus on how you can help your customers achieve their goals

We only create and share content that we think our followers will find useful and interesting. That means avoiding aggressive sales posts (or trying to avoid 🤭 ). Instead, we share resources and knowledge that will empower marketers.

One rule that we follow when producing promotional posts is to avoid interrupting what our followers are interested in, and instead be the what they’re interested in.

The golden rule is to always consider why your audience might want to see a post, and what value it will bring to them or their business.

5. Use personal branding

People tend to trust people more than companies. The owner of the company or anyone with a key role in it could be the face of the company and get your audience more engaged compared to your company’s social media account (like it does for Gauthier on LinkedIn, our dog-ate-my-homework work style founder 😉)

6. Encourage user-generated content

Making users’ authentic content a highlight of your marketing campaigns will make your promotional messaging more reliable & trustworthy, leading to even more user engagement and happy ambassadors!

By showing how other people are experiencing your products, you are sure to create a feeling of empathy and even envy. We are nos geniuses but this is usually good for business.

7. Engage with your customers in comments

People do not trust brands that don’t reply on social media. It takes just a few minutes and it can do wonders for your visibility and trust.

We thought we'd keep it short and not drown you in details. That being said, there are many more ideas and ways to make your business more authentic on social media, they will flow once you start practicing!

One of our favorite will always be #2, only good things can come out of asking for advice, do not be afraid to use it.

Perhaps you are already experienced and learned nothing new, perhaps you're just at the start of your journey, either way we would be super interested in hearing any comment or suggestion you might have!

Until next time.