How to Create Engaging Content on Social Media
Why Create Engaging Content?
Creating Engaging Content is crucial to increasing your visibility.
Posting engaging social media content is key to reaching your target audience and in turn, meeting your marketing objectives.
It can also help to improve your SEO i.e. your ad positioning in search engine results pages, through backlinks to your website. When you link to your website/blog posts in your social content online it improves your SEO as you are creating more backlinks.
Who is your target audience?
You should not be just be posting any old thing on social media. You should be creating targeted content for your target audience to help you meet your marketing objectives. So start off by doing two things:
- identifying your target audience.
- identifying your marketing objectives/goals.
If you haven’t already done this – write your customer persona first and define your marketing objectives and goals for your social media.
What are your marketing objectives?
Your marketing objectives might be things like:
- Driving Sales
- Increasing Visibility and Brand awareness
- Boosting Newsletter sign-ups
- Educating others
- Building your reputation as an Influencer
What should you post?
Once you have identified your target audience and your marketing objectives you should start thinking about the content you should post on your blog and on social media. As mentioned above you should be posting targeted content based on your answers to the above questions.
Plan out your content.
- You might take a thematic approach and use colour, or a monthly theme or round-up style content.
- You should use hashtags and geo-location tagging to boost the visibility of your content when you post it.
- You might only use certain types of content e.g. text/blog, pictures, videos, infographics etc.
- You should use visual content – this might be Images, GIFs, Video, Infographics etc.
Be clear about what your content should be and what it should look like. Then post content that is on theme/message for you, your brand, your audience and your marketing objectives.
Need inspiration?
Stuck for ideas of what to post? Here are some suggestions:
- use stock photographs for inspiration or to fill out your content;
- share your news and show your authentic self;
- look at what your competitors are doing for inspiration;
- use social media calendars and prompts like our 30 days of social;
- use testimonials.
Not sure what is working? Test your content and try out different things.
How often should you post?
How often you post depends on:
- the platform you are using; and
- the size of your audience.
What platform are you using? You will need to think about the lifespan of the post. Posting on Twitter is very different to posting on LinkedIn so you need to take this into account.
If you have a small following you will want to be posting every day to increase your following and your visibility, if you have a medium following you might post every other day, and if you have a large following you might only post twice a week. Have a look at your competitors and see what they are doing.
Finally, one of the key things is to post consistently. Post at the same time and on the same days of the week.
What tools should I use?
In case you haven’t worked it out yet. To have a successful social media content strategy you need to plan and you need to plan in advance. Plan out your posts, your content and schedule it. There are a number of tools and resources that you can use for different social media platforms.
View our full list of tools and resources.
