There is no denying that the rise of social media strategy forever changed the way we communicate and use the internet in general. From the strictly business perspective, social platforms became a versatile marketing tool that gave a powerful voice to anyone with enough creativity and ability to engage the audience on a more personal level. And as the virtual playing field became more competitive, these qualities have gradually turned into absolute requirements.
Let us see how this story affects the marketing strategy of your online tutoring business and what you can do to improve it.
Update posts regularly
Each social media platform attracts a unique audience and plays by its own rules. If you want to create the broadest appeal, you should do your best to learn the “lingo” of each platform and adjust the post frequency to appeal to its core audience. Roughly speaking, your activity should look like this:
- Twitter – Up to 14 times a day, never more than one post per hour
- Facebook – Two times a day, seven days a week
- LinkedIn – One post per day, no weekends
In this case, the unique perk of your profession as an online tutor is that you have an undeletable source of content you can use for posting. Use small bits of trivia and free lessons to engage the audience to learn more about the subject you are teaching.
Create quality content
Of course, these bits of trivia are an excellent way to fill in holes and keep the conversation alive, but the core of your social media efforts should come in the form of high-quality, engaging and presentable content. If we take a look at the list of the types of content that generate leads with the highest customer conversion rates, we can see they rank as follows:
- Research reports (46%)
- Videos/Motion graphics (44%)
- Social media content (42%)
- Webinars (40%)
- Website articles/Blogs (31%)
Use this information to counterbalance the possible weaknesses of your current online presence.
Use relevant hashtags
Hashtags are a powerful asset that can grant your posts incredible exposure if used properly. First, you need to be aware they belong at the end of the post. Using them too frequently throughout the text will make the whole thing unreadable. Second, the hashtags should be relevant to the post. Someone who is looking for an English tutor will more likely search for #englishlessons and #englishtrivia than #englishtutor. Finally, three hashtags are more than enough – everything above that number looks like begging for attention.
Ask the audience for participation
Social media posts that present the audience with some interesting bit of information are perfectly fine and have a high chance of being reposted. However, you can get a much better response if you end the post with some kind of question or challenge that will instigate your followers to start a discussion with their friends. For instance, if you are teaching history, you can ask the followers to tell you who you consider the most influential civil rights advocate of the 20th century and why. Or you can play with the always funny “three of them are trying to kill you, one of them needs to save you” challenges.
Follow influencers
To put it simply, influencers have already established numerous and well-connected follower bases. By joining their ranks, sharing the influencers’ posts and posting frequent comments, you will come into a position to be noticed by these vast communities. With enough effort, you will be noticed, and re-followed by these influential personalities. Of course, each share or repost you get from this point on can only introduce your profile to thousands of new potential followers.
Allow the followers to share feedback
According to recent research, customer testimonials are identified as the most effective content marketing tactics by as much as 89% of respondents. Although this survey examined the results of B2B marketing, it should give you a pretty clear idea of why discouraging or disabling customer feedback would be a great mistake. People like to form their opinions based on the experience of their peers. Even if some of the testimonials may not be the most flattering, they will still make a much better impression than obvious hushing.
We hope these six considerations gave you some general idea of the steps you can take to make your social media much more interesting and engaging. We are living in a world where a bold social media approach has long since transformed from novelty to necessity. Let us then try our best to use this circumstance as an advantage and use these incredibly useful tools to silence the competition.
