When you post something on Facebook or Twitter, you hope to see it liked and shared. That’s the whole point. It means you’re connecting with your audience and it also gets you more exposure for your brand. But if you’re not seeing the likes you’d like, there are some things you can do to get more.

Pay Attention to Peak Times

For every social media site and for every market, there’s a sweet spot when people are online. There are patterns and it differs from one audience to another, but in general, people are checking their social media accounts during the early morning, right after work, and at the end of the day. These are usually the best times to reach them.

The best way to find your peak times is to set up a schedule of posting at different times a day and measure for about a week or so. Patterns will emerge. Keep in mind that if you’re marketing nationwide or globally, there is a time difference.

Be Consistent

The more you update, the more your market will get used to seeing your posts. It’s estimated that within about four hours, most of your audience has seen your update. Use this as a guideline to get into a routine of posting about once every four hours or so. But be careful because there’s a limit. Posting too often will actually turn people off. Experiment with frequency to find out how much is enough.

Fans-Only Content

There’s a custom tab on your Facebook page that allows you to provide exclusive material only to people who have already liked your page. This exclusive content makes them feel closer to you. You can focus on more specific content for them that relates to your needs. This in turn will get you more likes and shares among these fans. You can’t do this on Twitter but you can segment your list in various ways.

Offer a Freebie

There’s one guaranteed way to get likes – to offer a freebie or special offer. Whenever you give your fans something of value to them, they’re bound to get you the thumbs up and retweet to all of their friends.

Multimedia Content

Videos and photos tend to get more likes than text-based content updates. This is definitely true of Facebook but most other social media sites as well. This makes your job quite a bit easier – all you need to do is find good visual content to share. But don’t forget to comment on it. Shares without comments don’t usually get a lot of activity.

To make it even more engaging, ask your followers a question like ‘What do you think about such and such in this video?’

What NOT to Do

There are a few things you never want to do, such as:

– Ask for likes. It makes you look desperate.

– Self-promote. Why would anybody like that?

Invite people personally to like your page. It’s desperate and also awkward, especially if they don’t really like it.

– Buying likes. It takes more time to get them organically, but they’re real likes from real users.

Finally by just getting out there and commenting, liking and sharing yourself, you’ll get more people doing the same on your posts.

Tony Phelps