social media engagement

5 Tips to Creating Great Social Media Content

Content is no longer the king of the hill when it comes to content marketing. That honor now resigns with great, high quality content. You’ll get great tips on how to take your content from the good variety and make it fantastic. If you are creating all of the content for your website, you’ll want to get really great at these five steps. Turn them into a habit and capitalize on the habit with article/post consistency.

 

Define Your Target Audience

 

Knowing who you are speaking to is of the utmost importance. You can’t speak to 80 or 90 year olds about technological trends in social media, and you certainly can’t talk to 20 year olds about life insurance. You should know your product, vision or organizations mission well enough to know who your target audience is, then you should proceed to do even further research: acquire demographics.

You want to set an age range, is your product / service / message for mostly females, males or both, are you targeting the appropriate ethnicity or is your product / service / message appropriate for all ethnicities? You should know how they think, so you should definitely have someone of the same demographic helping you create your content or be available for consultation to run your content ideas by them before publishing.

 

Compose The Right Message

 

Great, once you’ve found out who you’re talking to you have to determine what exactly you’re going to say. It’s all in the headline! If you can’t capture your readers with your headline, the majority of them will not read the super awesome content you came up with. Photos are the social media equivalent of a headline, so get that part right.

Here are a few viral techniques that are highly effective that deal with including photos: behind-the-scenes photos of your workplace or office or team of employees having fun at work, infographics that include business statistics and industry statistics, a funny or inspirational image with your brand / company logo and website on it, photos that seemingly have nothing to do with your brand or company but things you want your brand to be synonymous with, such as McDonalds and happiness. Successful tweets that have garnered great engagement can also serve you well as a headline.

When composing the message, the next thing you need to do is to assert your value that should recall why people choose your brand over competitors. What sets your company, brand, product or service apart from the others?  It shouldn’t feel like an advertisement to your audience, it should feel like a big brother or sister reminding their younger sibling “Hey, don’t forget I’m an expert at this and I’m always here for you.” After all, when your audience does eventually need your product or service, you want your name to be the first to pop up in their head right?

 

Optimize Your Message to Each Individual Social Network

 

Optimization is the third step. It is critically important to optimize or “tailor” your message to each individual social network that your brand, business, or company operates on. If you have a stellar message that gets your highest amount of retweets and favorites or likes on Twitter and Facebook, consider expanding on that message within a gap of your content schedule to keep yourself going.

You can expand on smaller messages within Twitter and Facebook via videos on YouTube and Instagram. Always remember that video is the highest form of content. Although video may be the hardest to construct, it’s the best way to get your message across. You’ll want to make sure the video is high quality and clearly delivers the message just as your still photos and text.

Disregarding the optimization technique will almost guarantee no engagement or reach of your post. For both Twitter and Facebook, it has been found that attaching a photo will help increase the chances of engagement. You’ll also do good to avoid requesting comments or likes, on Facebook because the coders behind Facebook have created an algorithm to limit the reach of posts with that wording. If you or are not using paid advertisements on these channels, study the entire design of the advertisement, from wording, to link placement, to the photo or video that is used.

Tips on Instagram Influencer Generated Content

Trust Your Knowledge

Specialize in a topic, whether it’s related to your industry or your personal tastes. For example, if you’re a fashion brand, your social media discourse should focus on fashion-related topics: tips on how to dress for the occasion, information about body types, fashion trends, what to wear in each season, industry news… All of this information will be very valuable to the people who follow you because it gives them much more than if you just post images of the clothes you sell.

Trust Your Followers

Many people rack their brains thinking about topics for their content and stories, and omit those frequently asked questions that their followers ask them either in the comments of the publications or via direct message. If several people ask you the same question over and over again, they’re actually giving you a great source of content. For example, suppose you have a restaurant and your followers ask you over and over again for a recipe for Christmas, or for a children’s party, or to surprise a special person. What do you do? Well, your content plan includes a couple of publications where you give your followers recipes for those dishes they want to learn how to make.

Celebrate Your Followers

If your product or service has been useful to your followers and they advertise it on their Instagram accounts, refuel those publications that mention you. This is an incredibly successful strategy that many brands overlook. As stated above, the best marketing is word of mouth. If a person recommends a product or service, chances are their friends will want to try it too. Among friends we are confident and know that we will not be disappointed. What about influencers? We don’t really know them and we know they recommend something because they are being paid to do so. So make your followers know you. When you are tagged in a story, Instagram allows you to take that post to your stories. Do it! It’s the greatest validation your brand can have. And if you are tagged in the feed, there are several applications that allow you to refuel your account. Maybe you can set aside one day a week to celebrate your fans and on that day you’ll be grateful for those posts. Your followers will be happy to appear in your account and you will have gained a good reputation and quality content.

 

Do A/B Testing to See What Message Your Audience Likes the Most

 

After you’ve decided who your audience is, composed your message and optimized it specifically for the audiences of each individual social network, you must then begin to start A/B testing. A/B testing is the process of formatting the same message or post in two different ways: type A and type B.

When you’ve optimized for each social network that you want to post on and have both Type A and Type B, you want to then try them out. Don’t forget the time variable when considering your audience and your A/B testing. If you aren’t posting at the appropriate times, you’re not even giving your social media a chance to grow.

This is extremely important and companies sometimes contract marketers and advertisers strictly based on their ability to run these A/B tests to provide them with the best social media strategy moving forward. Each piece of content should have at the very least an A/B component to test out.

During testing you should be asking yourself questions such as which headline acquires my posts the most engagement? What language (wording of the post) worked best to express the value in our company/brand? Which structure of our posts garnered the most engagement or click thru? Did we share this post enough to extend across time zones? Did our testing extend the life of the content?

 

Use Time-saving and Effective tools

 

Now you’re probably thinking how can I incorporate all of these techniques into my social media strategy without giving hours of man-power to it, which either your brand or company cannot pay for, or if you’re working by yourself, you simply don’t have enough time for? Be thankful to the originators of the Internet and the opportunities they have given us.

If you’re willing to write or have an in-house writer at your disposal already but are deprived of ideas, you’ll want to use this prompt generator found at Creativity Portal. If you don’t have a writer at all and aren’t skilled enough to write a well-crafted article, blog post or to complete your A/B testing then you’ll want to use the writing services or to hire freelance writers at such writing service like, for example, Essay4Students. Lastly, if you do have both of these covered then you want to be sure you’re checking your content against the web through Copyscape to make sure you’re not plagiarizing or there isn’t anyone copying you. You can use any of such kinds of resources and find ones that fit your needs the most.

When you’ve created your written content and are in need of visuals there are online resources for that too. Canva is a place created by aspiring designers who have made an online, browser based photo editing web app to create colorful visuals with different templates in mind for all your visual content needs.

A place by creative for creative where you can acquire high resolution stock photos for any design or illustration necessities can be had at MorgueFile.

IconFinder has nearly 500,000 different icons and almost 6,000 icon sets that you can utilize for any of your content such as a nicely added click gesture on your photo that links through to your Facebook page.  Last but not least is the Social Image Resizer Tool, which you can utilize to make sure that you have optimized your photo size for each individual social network.

Now go out there and start working on your social media strategy, fine-tuning it with these tips, implementing the tools that have been linked to, but most importantly, make sure you drive that engagement!

About the author: Alana D. Frazier is a copywriter. Besides, she is fond of learning something new so that she tries to keep up with advancing technologies. Besides, she attends different conferences and presentations to improve her knowledge.

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