Social media content is one of the most effective ways to increase your audience, attract new customers, and maintain good relations with your customer base. However, this fact has not gone unnoticed and has resulted in large amounts of content that your business must compete against. Thankfully, there are some very simple and practical techniques that you can employ to create engaging social media content.
5 Best Practices for Social Media Content
- Be Consistent. If you aren’t posting content consistently you may as well quit. There is so much competition online that your business will be forgotten unless you remind consumers that you exist. Posting consistently is how you remind them.
- Provide Value. Content that gets the most engagement, be that through clicks, comments, and/or shares, is content that is the most relevant to your audience. It’s content that provides a solution to a problem that they have. This helps to create trust between you and your audience and serves to establish your business as an authority in your industry.
- Research the Competition. Look at the social media profiles, blogs, and websites of similar businesses to yours. What strategies are they employing that are working for them? How can you do them better? What mistakes do you see them making? How can you avoid making those same mistakes? How can you outshine them simply by being you?
- Realize that there is no competition. This is a point that can seem counterintuitive, at first. However, your business has a unique approach to doing things, even when compared to other businesses that provide the exact same services and products. That difference sets you apart. That difference is what attracts your audience and convinces them to do business with you and not someone else. In this way, similar businesses are not competition because they aren’t you. They cannot do things the same way that you do. But, they can help you to better reach a larger audience. By working with the “competition,” promoting them and lauding their strengths, they will reciprocate the favour. This helps to expand your reach and presents a very good first impression of your business.
- Use video and graphics. Studies have found that using a video as part of your social media content boosts engagement by some 80%. Split testing has proven that attaching an image to a post results in a 60% increase in engagement. Using images throughout a blog post helps to break up blocks of text and makes blogs more easy to read and digest. In this way, you really cannot afford not to use video and graphics as part of your digital marketing strategy.