For many years now, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have been among the best places for businesses to connect with their audiences. Due to the growing popularity of social media, more and more marketers are deeply integrating such channels into their strategies. And many of them face the same issue—how to create engaging social media content that resonates with their audience.
In this guide, we will tell you everything you need to know about social media content and give you some expert tips to help ensure the best results!
Social media content definition and types
In a nutshell, “social media content” is an all-encompassing term that refers to pretty much anything people post on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. It could be literally anything, including text-based publications, photos, videos, links, status updates, and so on.
Regardless of the type of publication, there are three main types that we can distinguish by their purpose:
- Entertaining: The core goal of this type is to entertain the user. Pretty much any kind of publication can fall into this category as long as it entertains the audience. From a marketing perspective, this type of publication plays a huge role in growing your audience. Entertaining publications tend to get more engagements from users, including likes, comments, and, most importantly, shares that extend your outreach.
- Inspiring: The primary goal of this type is to inspire the user. It can include inspirational quotes, engaging facts, success stories, etc. Often, this type of publication becomes the secret sauce to brands’ marketing strategies as it allows consumers to imagine how certain products or services can enhance their lives through real-life examples.
- Promotional: The primary goal of this type is to educate users on your products or services and drive sales. Although this is the type of publication that directly markets your products or service, today, it’s important not to overdo it. The golden rule of SMM is 80/20 – 80% of your publications should be helpful, entertaining, and bring value, whereas only 20% should explicitly market your brand.
Why does it matter?
According to an in-depth market analysis by Kepios, in April 2023, there were 4.80 billion users on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This equates to 59.9% of the entire world population. This fact alone proves that SMM is a pivotal element in every modern marketing strategy. After all, if you aren’t using it, you might be losing a chance to connect with nearly 60% of your potential customers.
Now, why is creating social media content such a big deal? First of all, it’s important to note that social media platforms are all about posting something. These platforms were designed to let people exchange ideas, thoughts, photos, and other things. And they are still gaining enormous popularity today. That is, there are billions of accounts filled with all sorts of content. So if you are not posting something great, people won’t be able to find your brand, and they definitely won’t stick around.
On the other hand, if you can craft engaging social media content, it can help you enhance your outreach, build a large and loyal following, and create lasting relationships with your audience that will ultimately result in more sales and larger revenues.
Despite the benefits and general importance of SMM, PR Newswire reported that as many as 93 percent of businesses struggled with common SMM challenges in 2021. And for 11 percent of them, the primary challenge was crafting engaging publications.
6 killer strategies for crafting engaging social media content
#1 Know your audience
Before you can start creating social media content, you need to have a clear idea of who you are trying to reach with it. This will help you find topics and tactics that resonate with your prospects and, respectively, ensure the best outcomes of your SMM efforts.
There are a few key questions you must answer to understand your audience:
- Who are they?
- What are their interests?
- What kind of publications do they engage with?
One way to answer these questions is to carry out rigorous market research and analyze your existing customer base. These two strategies will help you define the common trends and patterns in your industry.
Additionally, you should carry out a competitor analysis to fine-tune your strategy. Look at other brands that operate in your niche and collect insights on how they engage with their audiences. To streamline the process, you can use SE Ranking’s SEO backlink tool. With this tool, you can quickly analyze the backlinks of your competitors to understand what kind of content they deliver and what resonates with their audiences the most. This trick will help you enhance your own strategy and craft copy that is more likely to drive the attention of the audience.
#2 Create a content calendar
According to Statista, in 2022, global Internet users spent an average of 147 minutes (about 2 and a half hours) on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. This means that your prospects spend a huge part of their daily screen time on such platforms, so you have to provide them with enough publications to fill this time. Moreover, it’s important to deliver your publications at the right time, when your target audience will be more likely to see them.
Due to these reasons, creating a dedicated calendar is an excellent strategy. It will help you plan your postings in advance and ensure consistency. Following your calendar will help you create better customer experiences and boost your credibility. Eventually, this can help you improve your brand’s reputation and build an audience that trusts you.
#3 Include eye-catching visuals
If you want to use social media for business growth, you have to include visuals. Unlike text-based publications, those that include visuals are more likely to drive users’ attention when they scroll the feed. Visuals like videos, images, and others also communicate ideas faster and ensure better information retention.
Besides, a lack of diversity in an account’s feed is one of the top reasons why people unfollow, and different visuals give you the possibility to bring diversity to your account. So be sure to adopt this tactic as well.
#4 Tell relatable stories
Modern marketers rely on such platforms a lot to appeal to prospects’ emotions. Indeed, platforms like Facebook and Instagram help brands show that there are real people behind them. This helps create a more emotional bond between the prospect and the brand. This is how marketing uses emotions to shape buying behaviors and capitalize on them. And storytelling plays a big role here.
People love stories. Stories create positive associations and memories, build trust, and appeal to a variety of human emotions. And they often go viral. Thus, in order to make the most out of your SMM efforts, be sure to use these channels to tell stories about your brand, your products or services, and your customers.
Pro tip: Twitter revealed that tweets with videos tend to get 10x more engagement compared to only-text ones. This and many other studies confirm the huge power videos have in marketing. So if you want to take your storytelling to a completely new level, consider implementing video storytelling into your strategy as well.
#5 Post consistently
We already mentioned how much time consumers spend on Facebook, Instagram, and similar channels these days. This only means one thing—if you don’t create and deliver a lot of engaging social media content consistently, your audience will eventually get bored and leave. Thus, you have to be very coherent in your strategy.
#6 Measure your results to inform future activity
Although creating social media content plays a huge role in your SMM success, it’s not all you have to worry about. Social media patterns and trends change very quickly, and so do your audience’s interests and opinions. Thus, even when you streamline content creation and start delivering excellent publications on a regular basis, it doesn’t mean that your work there is done.
In order to achieve real success, you have to continuously measure, analyze, and improve your strategy. Track the key engagement metrics, keep an eye on which posts work best, and use those insights to make your strategy even better.
Source: Unsplash
Conclusion
Now you know everything about social media content, its role in your business success, and strategies for creating truly engaging social media content. Wrapping up our guide, we can say that the success of your SMM strategy really depends on six core tactics:
- Understanding the audience;
- Posting planning;
- Incorporation of visuals;
- Storytelling;
- Consistency;
- Ongoing measurement and improvement.
Implement these strategies right now to make the most out of your brand’s social media!
