The Nifty Guide to Social Media Content Creation
The quality of your social media content will determine how well it performs on your channels and ultimately, how well you fulfil your social media marketing goals. The best performing brands on social media share content that is on-message, on-brand and relevant to their audience.
Why bother crafting content?
Engaging content that resonates and adds real value to your followers is likely to perform better on social media. Social Media Examiner asserts that for 32% of marketers, visual images are their top form of content, and the popularity of video is also on the rise.
Investing in designed posts has been shown to help retention of information too. According to Brain Rules, when a relevant image is paired with information, people are likely to retain 65% of the information three days later, in comparison to just 10% of the information when heard.
What types of content are there?
Content can range from a simple text-only or link-based post, through to photos, graphic posts, gifs and video. Since COVID-19 has changed how we all behave and interact online, we've seen the popularity of quizzes and polls also increase.
Types of content include:
- Written posts and ebooks - these will help to establish credibility and thought leadership for your brand.
2 Links - Posting industry news from other sources can carve out your brand as a leader in the field.
3 Images - Engagement increases significantly when posting visual content, and some platforms will not let you post without imagery.
4 Videos - various services help you to craft professional-looking videos for your business. Once you have mastered visual posts, posting video is the next step to improving engagement.
5 Infographics - Displaying data and information in a visual way can create compelling social posts.
6 Testimonials - Celebrate your success with your followers! If you receive a great testimonial from a client, be sure to share it - with permission, of course.
7 Competitions - Your followers will love a competition, make it relevant to your business.
8 Holidays and national days - Make a note of relevant national days to your business and celebrate holidays that are important to your business.
Repurposing for each channel
Once you have your base content, you can start to repurpose this for other channels. If you've had a great reaction to a piece of content on one channel, don't be afraid of tweaking and reposting to another channel. It may be that you are performing continuous tailoring as you go.
Staying consistent
When you are frequently posting to many channels, it can be a challenge to maintain consistency in terms of styling and tone - especially if you have a team of contributors. It absolutely pays off to spend some time defining brand guidelines to inform your content creation. Brand guidelines will include acceptable colours, fonts, tone, hashtags and themes. From this, you can create template posts in the correct dimensions for each channel - helping your team to stay on-brand.
Curating your content
Once you have some posts drafted, you can store them in a content library - if you are using social media management software, you should be able to store your content here. From there, you can start to craft the final post that will eventually be in front of your followers. This will include the caption, emojis, hashtags and links - ideally shortened with UTM parameters.
Monitoring performance
Understanding how your posts are performing will depend on your aims and objectives. We have written a whole blog post on measuring social media performance, to summarise, understanding what it is you are trying to achieve by using social media will make it clear which metrics are best to track. If your goal is to direct followers back to your website, then make sure you are using UTM codes effectively - more on this in our blog post!
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If you are interested in our social media management services, get in touch to learn more!
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