How to Talk to Your Audience on Social Media

Last week, I shared a Tip for Tuesday summarizing the “Grasping the Power of Social Media: Rules of Engagement For Instagram and Tik Tok” session that I attended as a part of virtual Chandler Chamber Marketing Summit.

This week, I’m sharing the content from the second session I attended,  “Digital Content Pillars: How to Talk to Your Audience” by Melissa Forziat of Melissa Forziat Events and Marketing.

For most of us, we use our personal social media for pleasure and engaging with things we enjoy. This can be anything from tasty food, fitness content, travel ideas, beauty products, sports, news and the list goes on. Social media gives us the ability to feel more connected with our favorite musician, author or even your favorite snack brand.

We feel more connected because these brands and influencers that share content that keeps us interested and makes us want to spend more time on interacting with their pages.

Melissa shared the importance of not only using social media to talk or engage with your audience but about why you shouldn’t use your social media to aggressively push selling your product or services. While social media is a great place to make your audience and others aware of new products, services or a fundraiser, if most of us use social for more personal reasons, we don’t necessarily want to be constantly bombarded by posts geared to getting us to spend money every time we scroll.

Melissa shares the importance of “selling without selling” when engaging with your audience, by using social media to share concepts/ideas, values, philosophies, success stories, create content that appeals to the senses and emotions and take the opportunity to partner and collaborate when appropriate.

Here are some examples that Melissa shared of brands using social media to sell without you hardly noticing:

Nestle Toll House

Go take a look at the Nestle Toll House Instagram or Facebook, you won’t ever see a post saying “go buy our cookies.” Instead, you will see posts that include  pictures of delicious cookies that cater to your senses, recipe ideas for you to try at home, resharing of photos from other bakers, polls on their followers’ favorite desserts, etc.

Nestle is appealing to our senses by sharing photos of freshly baked cookies that we feel like we can almost taste and smell through the screen and also sharing new ideas for us to try out at home. I challenge you to spend 60 seconds on their Instagram or Facebook, and I bet you will be buying cookies on your next grocery store trip.

Aston Martin

Another example that Melissa used is Aston Martin’s Facebook page. You won’t see a post of Aston Martin sharing the price of a vehicle or telling you to go buy one, but you will see a lot of posts using images and history to showcase the vehicles. These posts include photos showing the details of the stitching in the leather seats, the acceleration of the car as it races through a city, hauls a bike to a trail to watch a sunset, and the other capabilities of the car in action.

Aston Martin is appealing to our senses by using sensory in images that makes us feel the speed of the car, the softness of the leather and also by not sharing the prices makes the car feel more attainable. We all know that Aston Martin is a luxury brand of vehicles, so there is no need to share the price. They’re keeping the interest of potential future customers by sharing their stories, values and appealing to our senses, so when the time comes, they will go pursue the price on their own at the car dealership.

I challenge you to go take a look at your favorite brand’s social media or even the HMA Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn social media pages and see if you can identify which tactics are being used.