Businesses that know how to leverage psychology and marketing often create the best outcomes for their marketing efforts.
One principle of persuasion that’s widely used is reciprocity. This principle rests on fundamental human behaviors that enable us to thrive as a group. As human beings, we desire to reciprocate when we receive favors from others. At the very least, we’re in a frame of mind where we start to feel favorably towards the person who did the favor.
We can leverage the principle of reciprocity in day to day marketing by creating free content on social media.
Let’s look at different ways to win customers over and grow your business by providing them with free content.
Create Giveaways
If you’d like to amplify the effect of reciprocity, a great marketing technique that complements it is having giveaways.
Giveaways are exciting and do well on social media. It’s also a straightforward way to give something to your audience for free. Depending on your goals, giveaways can help you accomplish the following:
- You can grow your email list by asking your audience to sign up for newsletters to participate in the giveaway.
- With the help of a giveaway plugin, you can allow users to get more entries into the contest by following your brand on different platforms.
- Get more attention to social media as giveaways create excitement and other emotions that boost your content visibility.
Start planning your giveaway so that they coincide with the holidays. In this way, you’ll maximize the attention your giveaway gets and grow your business fast.
Today, virtually anyone can create content. Quality information is not the domain of large businesses alone. With the emergence of free social networking platforms as well as the creativity of individual users around the world, people will expect you to create unique and high-quality content for engagement.
Businesses that create explicitly promotional content are less likely to win people over. But offering how-to videos and content that’s meant to inform will make audiences appreciate you.
Once you’ve build engagement on social media and developed followership, you’ll find it easier to drive conversions.
One great example is the way Luxy Hair, a human hair extension business, did just this. Luxy Hair started a YouTube channel that shows people how to attach extensions and different ways to style hair. Their helpful content won viewers over. This made it possible for them to sell their actual products, hair extensions, with relative ease.
There are several platforms where you can offer informative content. YouTube and your own Facebook profiles are great places for sharing videos. If you can create short but information-packed videos for video-based platforms like Snapchat, Tik Tok, and the like, you’ll be able to build a substantial audience amongst younger demographics fast.
Remember to add your website information and relevant links to your profile so that people can find your business directly. While social media is a great, free platform to boost your business, you’re always at the mercy of their algorithms. You should always try to direct people to your site and build an email list where you can nurture a long-term relationship with your audience.
Curate Content
One of the challenging aspects of content creation and marketing is producing fresh and interesting content regularly. Fortunately, you can also repurpose content or curate it instead of building content from scratch for your social media.
Content is readily available online for your audience, but finding exactly what they need remains a challenge. This makes content curation a free offering that your audience will value.
Research the kind of information people are looking for. Use SEO tools, your Google Analytics account, and social listening tools to understand the type of queries people are making. As you learn more about what people are looking for, you’ll find information gaps. There are themes that you can create great content for by collecting and organizing posts, images, videos, and gifs from varied sources.
Pinterest as a Content Curation Platform
One critical platform for curating content is Pinterest. It’s available as a website and an app where users can swipe through pictures for inspiration. You can easily save photos into ‘boards.’ Make sure that you add descriptions that include relevant keywords for each image. And naming the board appropriately and adding the right description to the board will also help you create a relevant board that people will follow.
Social Feeds as Curated Content on Your Website
There’s another way to curate content with social media and also embed it onto your website. It’s by using a social feed plugin. A social feed plugin will allow you to create a feed on your site pages that display posts you choose to show. In this way, you’ll curate content for your website and also keep people from moving to competing posts.
Even if all you’re doing is organizing other people’s posts, you’re still creating a helpful create source of information on social media. You save people time and effort in finding content, which is something they’ll value. You’ll get more followers and build trust in your relationships with your audience.
Social media is the ideal platform to showcase thought leadership in an arena. Content such as industry news, your own unique insights, and discussions around relevant topics are also types of content that offer value.
Many people follow businesses and business leaders to stay on top of important trends and industry news. You can provide value for free on social media by creating white papers, studies, or simply giving your ideas about a topic.
You can also support your community by letting them know about good deals, giveaways, and discounts.
Actions like these are clear indicators that you’re online to offer value, which will be appreciated. Make sure that you’re not self-promotional and try to share content that you’re passionate about.
This type of content takes effort to create, but when you do come up with informative news or insights, you’ll see recognition in the form of more likes, comments, and shares.
Conclusion
Today, your audience is quick to spot the difference between self-promotional and truly authentic content. So, when a content creator on social media gives away useful content for free, it creates a positive impression. It also creates a desire to reciprocate.
Your audience will be more likely to respond to your posts with shares, likes, and comments. They’ll start to trust you and your business and will support your business in the future. So, use the ideas presented in this post and begin to create content for free on social media, and you’ll see steady but solid growth in your business.
DepositPhotos – social media content
