Looking for some simple ideas to help your digital content reach more people in 2017? Here are a few tips you should work into your earned media strategy to help boost your campaigns for the new year. Implement these strategies to increase your social engagement today!

1. Engage your influencers: Research from Twitter has proven that the social media landscape has become the new standard for word of mouth. Everyone knows that consumers trust the advice of their close family and friends over commercials or advertisements. What’s happening now is that “trusted circle” is expanding to include their different followers and fans on social media. Twitter states that influencers are rivaling friends in terms of building trust with 49% of twitter users relying on recommendations from social influencers, while 56% rely on recommendations from friends. This means that now is the time to start identifying and engaging with the key influencers in your field. Building partnerships with trusted names and advocates in your industry can be mutually beneficial in building both you and your partners image and reach. Collaborate on a thought leadership piece for your blog that can have legs on social, have them take part in a Q&A session on your handle, or even feature them in your video content to help showcase them as an advocate for your brand. Don’t limit yourself to one or two influencers either, reach out to as many as you can. The more relationships you have and the more people sharing your content the better.
2. Say it with a card: Have you been taking full advantage of Twitter cards yet? Twitter has provided data showing that tweets with images get 313% more engagement than those without. So why not take that to the next level and make it easier for your web visitors to visually share your content on social? Utilize twitter cards, and with a few lines of code on your web page, whenever a visitor shares a URL to that page it will have an image card attached to the tweet. The image, URL, and custom message are of your choosing, embedded right in the HTML of your page. Learn more about how to implement twitter cards here. Just make sure to test and validate that your card is working before you’re done.
3. Do it live: 2017 is going to become the year where everything is live! In the past, live videos on Facebook were reserved for celebrities and public figures. That all changed this year with Facebook giving everyone the option to broadcast and share live content. You can write descriptions for your live content to help get more viewers and even ask viewers to subscribe to your live notifications. On a similar note, Twitter recently baked their Periscope functionality right into the twitter app. Now it’s easier than ever to start a live conversation with your audience. The functionality works through Periscope but will take place right in the Twitter app. With this new capability, you can now embed live video on your site, tag your location, and have your audience comment and “heart” your live commentary as it happens! Live broadcasting on your social platforms is a great way to expand the reach and awareness of a local event, focus test a new idea, or even hold a community Q&A session. To learn about how to setup a live video you can visit Twitter’s page on the topic here and Facebook’s here.
4. Leverage the power of subtitles and accessibility options: Facebook videos have been automatically (and silently) playing in your newsfeed for quite some time, but most people still aren’t optimizing with this feature. They are now even allowing you to use their auto-captioning technology on your page videos. By adding subtitles to your video you can ensure your viewer is able to get the message you’re trying to send without needing to take any extra steps. This will also help optimize your video for any hearing-impaired viewers on all your channels. Did you also know that you can now add alt-text to your images to help people who are visually impaired understand what you’re showing them? Alt-text is a feature common to web sites that allows you to view a short description of an image by clicking or hovering over it. This is a great way to help ensure your campaigns and imagery are accessible to everyone in your audience and no one is accidentally being excluded. To start adding alt-text to your images you can follow the simple steps outlined here.
5. Add some color: Facebook recently added the ability to add a background color to your text based status updates. Since this is a new addition the jury is still out on post engagement but this could act as a simple (and free) way to make your day-to-day posts stand out among an already cluttered newsfeed. While this is currently only available for Android devices, the update will roll out for iOS and the web soon.

These are just some simple tips and strategies that can help broaden your social media reach for the new year. It can be easy to fall into a routine of posting and moving on to the next pieces. The tactics mentioned above can help you engage more people, boost your brand image, and grow your audience. Start implementing them today to help grow your digital world for 2017!