How to Design Content for Social Media Social media is everywhere, and the potential to use it for your business is endless. For this reason, many companies are turning to Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter to connect with customers on a more personal level. But posting anything you want without regard to audience or sentiment is a sure-fire way to alienate fans, lose followers and offend potential customers-the last thing you want in this day and age of social media. In this article, I will review some basic tips on content creation best practices and how they relate to social media.
This comprehensive guide is designed to help you become a strategic and thought-provoking social media content creator. Learn the art of creating stunning images, videos, and text that are not only eye-catching but further your business objectives.
Most Effective Ways to Create Content for Social Media
There are various ways to figure out what your customers like. Based on that, you can create content for social media that they will like. Let’s take a look at some great ways to create content for social media that will resonate with your audience.
Share Positive Statistics and News
People tend to believe and appreciate positive statistics and news. If you can come up with some statistics that portray your brand in a positive light, use them on social media.
When people see a positive statistic, they will trust your brand more. Some users who like such positive stats and stories may even share them.
In 2018, IBM introduced its supercomputer, Summit, which was the world’s fastest supercomputer at the time. They didn’t pass up a chance to share this news on social media – not forgetting to mention that it’s capable of doing 200K trillion calculations per second.
Such powerful statistics can surely connect with audiences well and is a brilliant way to create social media content that works.
Image via Instagram
The best way to create social media content that works is to prompt people to react. And statistics and news are perfect for that as people like to share both.
You need to figure out what sort of content can trigger emotions in your audience. Once you’ve figured that out, you will know how to create content for social media successfully.
Share and Repurpose User-Generated Content
The easiest way to create content for social media is by repurposing user-generated content. User-generated content is great for two reasons – it engages your audience and it creates greater brand awareness.
Such content may include guest posts, images, videos, online reviews, or even testimonials. When you share such posts, your audience can connect really well with them. This is because your audience believes that such content has been created by people just like them.
So they are more likely to engage with and share your content with others. According to a BrightLocal study, positive reviews make 73% of customers trust a business better. This is where user-generated reviews can help a lot.
Thankfully for brands, customers are more than happy to write reviews. The same survey found that when 74% of customers were asked for feedback, 68% wrote reviews online.
Image via Instagram
Apart from requesting that your customers write reviews, you can also ask them for their testimonials. Testimonials can serve as reviews too, and you can use them to your advantage.
You could also get your users to send in images and videos in which they are using your product. You can then share those on social media and on your product pages.
Daniel Wellington, for example, gives their followers a chance to get featured on their Instagram page. All they need to do is post their pictures of their Daniel Wellington watches and tag them using the branded hashtag.
Such user-generated content is great at engaging and connecting with their audiences. Thus, this is an excellent way to create social media content that your audience can connect with.
Image via Instagram
Leverage Influencer Marketing
When we talk about ways to create content for social media, we can’t overlook influencer content. Leveraging influencers is one of the best ways to create social media content that is authentic and engaging.
Influencers are social media celebrities who have a loyal fan-following on social media. Brands partner with such influencers for creating content for social media.
Even though they may be social media celebrities, not all of them may have a million followers. Many influencers have fewer but more engaged fans. Such influencers are called micro-influencers.
There are various ways to partner with influencers to leverage influencer marketing. You could ask the influencers to promote your brand using content created by them.
Image via Instagram
The involvement of an influencer can give your brand a human touch. An influencer’s endorsement builds trust for your brand in the minds of the influencer’s followers.
Creating content for social media with the help of an influencer can give you access to the influencer’s audience too. This, in turn, can increase your brand’s reach on social media platforms.
That’s not all. Influencer marketing has many more advantages. You can ask your influencers to try your products and share their reviews on social media. Such reviews or testimonials can also help you get the valuable attention of your audience. Your audience is more likely to relate to them. Influencer content is trusted by their audience and hence leveraging influencers to create content for social media is a brilliant strategy.
However, before you can start utilizing the real power of influencer marketing, you need to find influencers. There are thousands of influencers on social media, but you need to zero in on a few. These influencers should ideally be related to your brand or product niche.
When an influencer is in the same niche as yours, their audience will find your messages more relevant. With such influencers, there is a greater probability of a higher ROI.
Every social media platform has its own set of influencers. This means that an influencer who is great on Facebook may not be great on Instagram. In this case, finding a good influencer can be a tedious task.
There is also seemingly no way in which you can manually track the conversions through influencer marketing. Without a metric to judge an influencer’s performance, you cannot calculate your ROI. This makes it difficult to implement influencer marketing for creating content for social media.
Thankfully, there are tools and platforms available that can help you keep a track of everything. These take care of everything so that you can concentrate on creating quality content.
Grin allows you to find the finest influencers on social media who are popular in your niche. That is not all, it also helps you get in touch with them and recruit them. You can filter the influencers by category, location, and even social platforms.
Grin not only helps you recruit influencers but also helps you brief influencers in bulk. You can use the platform to collaborate with influencers easily and pay their fees with ease. You have the option of paying your influencer using products, cash, or both. Also, you can track their content directly through the platform.
As mentioned above, tracking the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns can be difficult. However, Grin sorts that out for you as well. You can see the feeds of all your influencers’ social profiles in a single screen.
This shows their content and how it is performing. Accordingly, you can find out which content is performing well and which ones are not. This way, you will easily be able to find out when your ROI becomes positive too.
Create High-Quality Content
This seems like the most obvious point, and it is, but it’s also forgotten too often. There are no shortcuts: shareable content is always high-quality content. If you focus on superficial topics and don’t invest enough time into research or content creation, you cannot expect your followers to become interested and engaged. This is one reason why long-form content is doing better than ever.
Content development can take time and effort, so if you need professional help, here are some simple resources I have used in the past:
- Blog Title Generator: This tool will show you the list of the most relevant topics in any given niche.
- Headline Analyzer: Headline is the first thing that your readers notice and you have to come up with a catchy and intriguing solution. Headline Analyzer will tell you if you’ve succeeded.
- Essaysontime: If you decide that serious content creation is out of your reach, you can always ask for help from this expert writing service.
Written posts, blogs, articles, guides, and more
Advantages: These articles demonstrate your company’s knowledge and expertise, which can help build your credibility and reputation.
Disadvantages: There is a lot of blog content out there, so competition is thick—and you need a lot of creativity to create new topic ideas. Writing also takes a lot of time to generate content ideas, especially if you’re explaining complicated concepts.
How to produce: To help you think of compelling content, look at trending searches. This will give you insight into the questions people want answers to, which can spark ideas about what to write about.
Best platforms: LinkedIn and Facebook are perfect for these types of content, especially when it comes to articles that are 1,500 words or longer. You can post the whole piece, a short snippet, or a link to the piece. Twitter is also a great bet, but the limited character count means you can only include a link and small quote, which still can drive traffic to your website.
Pro Tip: Embrace the content calendar. Your content calendar is a framework for the ongoing story you want to tell about your business and what content to share. When you take a holistic view of your social media or email marketing output, you can turn ideas and broad strategies into an actionable plan that can be tweaked as you learn more about what works best.
Use our content marketing editorial calendar to visualize when and how you connect with your audience. The calendar displays your scheduled and completed marketing emails, social posts, postcards, and digital ads. You can filter your calendar to display your marketing for a specific audience or all audiences.
Conclusion
Creating great social media content that engages audiences is hard work – but it doesn’t have to be. This guide will show you how to design content for social media in step-by-step chunks and give you the inspiration and know-how to get started, even if you’re an absolute beginner or don’t have time to create it all yourself.