The posts you share on Social Media are the key to increasing engagement, traffic and awareness of your brand online. Many businesses and marketers want to create posts which will bring virality to their content. But before you jump the gun, there is a lot you must achieve in order to reach that goal; and to do that you will need to create perfect social media posts! So, you’re wondering how?
By the way, Facebook is changing the timeline algorithm again. Hope you already know it from InsideFacebook. The key point is “If a Page posts about a trending topic or if a post sees a high velocity of engagement early on that then drops off, that post may begin to see increased distribution early on and less distribution over time” so it’s important to get more engagement right after you post something on Facebook to get wider reach.
Social media is a crowded place; you need every competitive advantage possible to stand out. Often marketers get overwhelmed by the following questions – What to post? How to post? And on which platforms? In this article, I’ll go over some simple tricks and best practices to help you create the perfect social media posts. Here we go!
1. Visually Appealing
Visual content is the rising star on social media. Images, videos, Infographics, memes GIF’s etc are a great way to share your brands information. They are easier to grasp by your audiences and it always receives good engagement. This is the generation of easily distracted audiences, thus snackable pieces of information are fared much better in comparison to only text-based information. Hence, make use of various free resources, tools etc. to create visual content which will spark interest from your users and give you that edge over others.
Example: Chobani on their Pinterest page have 25 boards even though it is a yogurt brand. They share amazing pictures which is a mix of their products, lifestyle boards and they have that many followers due to the high quality imagery they share.
2. Be Humorous
Humor makes you stand out; it makes your brand seem more interesting than a pushy salesman and humanizes your brand online. There’s a fine line between funny and offensive, topics like race, religion, and sexual orientation are extremely touchy for some people so don’t cross the line from being funny to creepy. Humor makes your brand like a friend to your audiences and it makes a good light-hearted content which is easy to digest.
Example: Chumbak on their Facebook page, share content which is a mix of honest, adorable and funny! They take on social media to truly engage with their fans through humor. With the fictitious holiday dates they created, give everyone a good laugh and instantly lead to engagement and shows it is a making of a good post.
3. Be Original
Don’t be a fake copy of someone else on social media, be yourself! Your audiences are exposed to so much information every day from numerous brands, for you to stand out ‘Be Original’. Otherwise how will you be able to catch their eye, if you follow the herd and share the same content? If you feel that you are running out of interesting ideas for posts, keep an eye on your competitors and see how what kind of content they are sharing with their users.
Bookmark various blogs – Mashable, Social Media Examiner etc. they are constantly sharing invaluable information regarding social media something might just ignite the inspiration from those sites. Create a post, include meme and share them across.
4. Know the Best Time to Post
It is extremely important to post your content at the right time of the day/hour. What is the use of creating great content if no one is reading it? Your target audiences may be housewives, students and even some spread abroad so you need to constantly share relevant content at the right intervals for them to read it.
Start using tools like Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, Post planner if you are not using them already.
5. Crisis Plan
Problem never comes knocking on your door, so you best be prepared! Many a times you may share a post which be shared at the wrong time/ or it may be misunderstood by someone. These things can get your brand in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, thus always have a crisis plan of action ready and immediately own up for your mistakes. Keep a series of crisis posts ready and saved up in one of your folders, so when trouble comes by you don’t get dumb-founded and lost rather you start rolling out the pre-saved posts with certain tweaks and save the day for your brand.
Example: US Airways had a ton of explaining to do to their followers on Twitter, due to the inappropriate image which got shared from their profile. They immediately took to Twitter, deleted the picture and apologized to their fans. Thus always have a crisis plan set up; you may never know when it hits you!
6. Know the Platform Well
Before you set base on any platform, you must thoroughly research it and understand all the functions of that platform and it’s posting style. Keep up with all the changes of various channels and implement those in your strategy. Every platform has a different posting style compared to other, thus create a content calendar so you know what sort of information you are sharing on other channels. If content creation is important, then distribution is the vessel to the perfect post.
Example: Krispy Kreme India, haven’t truly leveraged the power of Twitter. They only link-back all their posts! Thus it shows low engagement and fewer followers. They need to truly craft posts which elicit a response and increase engagement as well as followers.
The structure of your social media posts plays a significant role on what sort of activity it converts – Engagement, traffic, leads etc. The details mentioned above may be a bit nitpicky but they play a big part in the overall content creation. With the examples mentioned as well will get you inspired and in the right course of creating valuable content for your audiences.
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