Before Creating Social Media Content Read These 6 Essential Tips

UPDATED JULY 10, 2021 | PUBLISHED OCTOBER 11, 2017

When creating social media content, what strategies are you using?

Do you perform in-depth research before posting or are you winging it? I admit it, sometimes I do both! 😉

Creating social media content can be overwhelming when it comes to strategy and idea generation. But, social platforms are helpful for growing a brand and community. Your audience is using social media and so are your competitors.

Consider these facts (compiled by Statusbrew) when you think about whether or no social media is important to your marketing:

• 50% of people follow brands on social media to learn about products and services.
• Consumers spend over two hours a day on social media.
• Active social media users have passed the 3.8 billion mark.
• 40% of small businesses rely on social media ads for revenue generation.
• 26% of people who click on Facebook ads ended up making a purchase

Yet, the truth about social media marketing is that it’s not for everyone. Using social media as a marketing channel is not a simple case of creating some profiles and sharing the most basic information about your business and niche.

Social media content creation is a persistent task that requires effort and research. Before you hit the ground running with your posting, why not discover what you need to do BEFORE creating social media content so that you maximize your efforts and improve your results?

1) Limit Your Sharing of Other Brands’ Content

Sharing other brands’ content is often promoted as a quick and easy way to gain followers and develop a social media presence. However, it’s important not to get carried away with sharing content that’s not your own or that doesn’t offer your insight.

Sharing content from other brands helps develop relationships with businesses, influencers, companies, and colleagues in your industry. Although the content may be complementary to your business, it’s important to find the balance between supporting key influential people in your niche while also building your own brand.

It’s also critical that the content you share does not take the focus away from your own brand and offerings. The aim here is to provide added value without overshadowing your own brand messaging, offers, and strategy.

Consistency, as a rule, is important, but it doesn’t precede high-quality, branded content. Post less frequently if you need the time to create better, brand-related content.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Balance the content you share from other brands by incorporating enough of your own original, custom content into your strategy.

PRO TIPS

1. Before you even consider social media, be prepared to invest in content creation.
2. You can repurpose your own content from other sources (e.g. blog, podcast, video) if necessary.
3. Don’t move forward with social media marketing until you have enough branded social media content. Start with a plan!

2) Make it Visual to Stand Out and Capture Attention

90% of information transmitted to the human brain is visual!  These days, visual content is how people consume and process information. They skim, not read. It makes sense that visuals need to be the driving force in your social media content.

Keep in mind that you’re competing for screen time with thousands of other social media posts that your audience is exposed to every day. Your content must stand out in a way that keeps your audience engaged for longer.

According to research, visual content is what’s working on social platforms for marketers. Look at these statistics:

• Social media content with visual elements generates 94% more views.
• Post views can increase by 48% if they contain both images and videos.
• Visual content generates more likes, shares and comments.
• 90% of consumers state that watching a product video is very helpful in making a purchasing decision.
• 64% of consumers are more willing to make a purchase after watching a product video.
• 40% of online users will provide a more favorable response to visual content than plain textual content.
• Tweets with images get 150% more retweets than tweets without images.
• Facebook posts with images generate 2.3 times more engagement than posts without them.

So, before creating social media content, plan what types of visuals you’ll include. You’ve got options! Infographics, illustrations, screenshots, images, charts, and videos are just a few examples.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Make your content for social media VISUAL because it performs best when it comes to visibility, engagement, reach, and branding.

PRO TIPS

1. Posting just to post on social is one strategy but one that probably won’t yield the results you need.
2. Convert your text posts into visuals by batching your creation process and using templates. Just a small change from text to visuals can boost your results!
3. Try easy-to-use graphic tools that allow commercial use, such as Stencil, Canva, Snappa, or DesignBold.
4. Or, forget creating your own graphics and join the Go Social Content Club!

NEED AWESOME, READY-TO-POST VISUAL CONTENT FOR SOCIAL MEDIA?

Check out the Go Social Content Club by social media influencer and experienced pro Kim Garst. Within minutes, you’ll be posting content that builds your community and your brand! The monthly membership program includes a free image editor that makes adding your logo fast and simple.

3) Connect with People Using the Three E’s

Your content makes it possible to emotionally and intellectually connect to your audience. And, that’s a big advantage of content marketing.

Your avatar’s perceived connection to you accomplishes some super important benefits. For example, it helps to:

• Attract and keep their attention
• Personalize interactions and communications to feel more one-to-one
• Align your brand values with theirs
• Establish your legitimacy and credibility
• Build trust

These factors play a role in whether someone decides to buy from you. Connecting has an emotional aspect to it that influences purchase decisions.

This is where the three E’s come in handy. Content that Educates, Entertains, or stirs Emotions builds connections and increases the influence of your posts.

Emotion grabs your audience and draws them into your content. It gives them something that they can directly relate to on a personal level. Emotion is effective in titles as well as in the overall message of certain content.

Education informs your audience about a topic that they want to know more about. It expands their knowledge on something that they’re already interested in.  Educate in a way that speaks to the wants and needs of your audience, and you’ll find success!

Entertainment is intrinsic to every social media platform to some extent. After all, people use social media to fill their time communicating, connecting, and learning.  Entertaining content helps you get noticed, generate engagement, and create a positive  impression. But remember to make the entertaining content align with your business; otherwise, it won’t be as effective.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Create social media content that educates, entertains, and touches your audience in an emotional way to see the biggest results from social marketing.

PRO TIPS

1. Use Buzzsumo to find what content is popular so that you can see what’s working and create similar content.
2. Go to your Facebook Page’s Insights tab and use the Pages to Watch feature to spy on what content is working for your competitors and colleagues.

4) Boost Audience Engagement with Interactive Content

On social media, you don’t want to broadcast to your audience. You want to engage with fans and have conversations to develop rapport and build relationships. And one way to ramp up engagement is with interactive content that gets your community taking action.

88% of marketers said that interactive content is effective in differentiating their brand from their competitors.

What is interactive content?

“Interactive” content involves the participant in active engagement, not just reading or watching but directly interacting with the content.

Social media is interactive by nature, with commenting, retweeting, private messages, and other forms of engagement that are inherent to most platforms. But that’s not what I’m referring to here. I’m talking about creating opportunities for engagement with your branded content through the use of:

• surveys
• quizzes
• games
• apps
• calculators
• polls
• contests
• assessments.

Interactive content is effective, especially since it often ticks all three boxes for being emotional, entertaining, and educational. In fact, according to Demand Metric, interactive content “blows away passive content for educating the buyer.” And, it generates twice as many conversions versus passive content types.

Interactive content cuts through the noise and appeals to our desire to learn by doing. And, interactivity feeds your audience’s visual preferences and keeps their attention.

Let me set your expectations, though. While this type of content yields good results, it requires more time and money to create and manage. You may want to reserve it for special campaigns, launches, or events if you’re budget is small.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Interactive content is highly effective for increasing engagement, education, reach, and visibility on social media.

PRO TIPS

1. Start with only one type of interactive content to test what works with your audience.
2. Use tools to help create interactive content and keep your investment low.
3. Read my tutorial on setting up a quiz to get an idea of what it entails.

5) Figure Out What is Relevant

Before creating social media content, it’s immensely important to determine what your target market finds relevant. What matters to your avatar matters to you.

If your content isn’t relevant at some level, then it won’t succeed in helping your business. The tricky part is pinpointing what content your community prefers to consume.

One way to test the waters is to post for a while to gather data about what’s working and what’s not. Also, research your competition to see what they’re publishing on social media and how it’s doing. Paying attention to what others before you have done to save time with your marketing.

To determine what content you’re going to create, you need figure out if anyone cares about it other than you. There is some trial and error in this process, especially if you’re starting from scratch. Let your fans guide your strategy and make adjustments as needed.

Consider this too: relevance has different meanings. Answer these questions:

• Is this content relevant to my audience? (aka is this something they care about?)
• Does this content make sense for my brand?
• Is this content relatable, interesting, and applicable in my industry/niche?
• Am I contributing to the conversation?

Allow time in your plan to account for creating an audience if you don’t already have one—or you don’t have the right one. Let your content be the beacon that leads your ideal avatar to your business.

Understanding the needs, desires, and interests of your ideal avatar means that you’ll attract more targeted leads. Creating desirable, noteworthy content has the added bonus of increasing your authority, influence, and reach.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Create social media content that is relevant and relatable so that you attract and maintain the interest of your ideal avatar.

PRO TIPS

1. With organic reach at an all-time low, consider paid ads to get in front of a targeted audience. Otherwise, you won’t know if you have a content relevance problem or a visibility problem (due to algorithms).
2. The more relevant social media content you create in your niche, the more it helps you in SEO too! Don’t overlook the benefits of social media when it comes to your SEO value.

6) Identify the Best Hashtags to Reach More People

Hashtags are searchable AND act like keywords to work with social media algorithms to get your content in front of interested people. This means that anyone—even people who don’t follow you—can discover your social media content. BOOM!

Therefore, prior to content creation, investigate hashtags to see which make sense for your niche and brand. Research hashtags on the social platforms themselves or use a free tool such as ritetag.com or hashtagify.me.

Once you’ve identified your hashtags, it requires little effort to incorporate them into your posts. That makes them a simple and easy way to reach more people.

Just make sure to choose the hashtags that support your business with greater visibility and reach! You don’t want to align your brand with negative or inappropriate hashtags. 😉

KEY TAKEAWAY

Incorporate relevant hashtags into your social media content to get in front of more people, including those who don’t follow your social profiles.

PRO TIPS

1. Always research hashtags BEFORE using them to make sure you understand their context and intent. You don’t want to embarrass yourself or your brand by misusing a hashtag.
2. Use popular and trending hashtags to extend the reach, visibility, and engagement of your social media content.
3. Stick to a couple of hashtags for Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Facebook. For Instagram, feel free to use more (up to 30 on regular posts and 10 on a Story).

Creating Social Media Content is an Investment

Gone are the days of low competition and massive organic reach that made social media a much easier marketing tactic for businesses. Even so, compared to other marketing channels, social media still remains a low-cost alternative.

Is any marketing tactic truly free? If it takes up your time, then it isn’t free since your time is definitely worth money. So, choose your marketing tactics wisely!

When it comes to creating social media content, you must accept that you get out of it what you put into it. There’s always the misconception that social media marketing is free. Alas, whether you’re spending money or time, you’re making an investment.

Remember these two things: content marketing takes time to develop and to succeed, and sometimes hiring a professional is your best option!