The Biggest Factors Affecting Your Social Media Content
A Guide to Optimization
Social media is an extremely versatile tool for businesses to use. It can increase brand awareness, change consumer perceptions, and even directly contribute to your bottom line!
To achieve these goals effectively, it’s important that each of your social posts aligns with your overarching strategy.
Here’s our comprehensive guide where we’ll talk about planning, content creation, timing, and social listening.
Planning
The planning stage involves understanding where you currently stand and creating a strategy that achieves your goals moving forward.
Social Media Audit
Put yourself under the microscope. Start by looking at where your brand is present on social media. It’s important to have this baseline to compare against, making it easier to track improvements over time.
Dive into the details in your social strategy by asking yourself the following questions:
- What kind of content are you posting?
- What is the quality of the imagery and copywriting?
- When and how often do you post?
- How much engagement do posts get?
Answering these questions will build out what your current strategy looks like. It’s then important to apply these to your target market.
Ensure that you know your consumers and that your content strategy aligns with their needs.
Score Some Goals
After locating exactly where you are, it’s easier to see where you’re going. Set SMART goals to ensure you can track your progress and reach goals efficiently.
Goals should be:
S pecific — target a specific area for improvement.
M easurable — quantify an indicator of progress.
A chievable — stretch your abilities but keep your goals realistic.
R elevant — make sure that reaching this goal is what’s needed for your business.
T imely — specify when these goals should be achieved to keep you accountable.
Platform Selection
When you’re creating content, the first factor to consider is what platform you’re posting on. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or YouTube — each platform has different needs and restrictions that you’ll need to pay attention to.
Social media platforms are different from each other, so content created should be unique to each.
Consider the fact that users visit each social platform for different reasons. On Facebook, video content and blog links are extremely popular because the user’s goals are to be entertained, educated, and connect with others. Formats like live video allow users to be a part of something special and achieve all three goals.
On Instagram, visitors are expecting high-quality visual content that is going to wow them. Brands can promote product photos or user-generated media to engage their users. Users also prefer when accounts stick tightly to the brand image by creating a very cohesive aesthetic across their entire catalogue of Instagram posts.
For quick content that humanizes your brand, post an Instagram Story that gives fans a look into how your company operates.
Twitter is a watering hole. You can really cultivate some valuable engagements because that’s where consumers want to be heard. Posting news, GIFs, and polls are great ways to get your followers to weigh in on current events that are related to your brand!
Content Creation
Write a Creative Opener
Copywriting is an art. With so many factors to consider, it’s hard to get creative. Each sentence should make the reader want to read the next one, but it starts with the first. A great hook is very important in getting users to engage with the content.
One technique is to surprise the reader:
“How-to headlines improve your click-through rates by 200%!”
Or tease them with:
“You’ll never guess how this easy headline can improve your click-through rates by 200%!”
Include a Call-to-Action When Appropriate
Tell the reader what you want and they’re more likely to comply. A call-to-action could be a statement or a question urging the user to find out more.
“Click here to find out,” is a short and sweet message that tells the user what to do and exactly what value they get out of it.
Wordstream has more detailed tips on how to write excellent CTAs!
Imagery
It’s important for imagery to catch the eye, especially for highly visual platforms like Instagram. Make sure the images you use are not only relevant to the copy, but might stop a user in their tracks!
Buffer has an excellent guide on their website and provided the infographic above as an overview of the content.
Timing
You’ve created some great content, but you need to make sure people see it! The time you should launch your social posts can vary depending on your industry and target demographic.
There are several tools that allow brands to monitor exactly when users are interacting with your content. Keeping tabs on your audience allows you to adjust your campaigns so you can meet their needs.
Mastering post timing is essential to campaign success — so do your research!
Social Listening
Always keep your eyes on your social media channels. Remember the questions you asked yourself earlier? Ask them again periodically to make sure your campaigns are moving the needle in the right direction. Track the amount of engagement your posts get so you can determine what works best and refine the strategy.
It’s also important to look at how consumers are actually responding to your social media content. Tracking the number of likes and shares is a good indicator, but you can get a better idea of why your fans liked and shared your content by diving into comments or even interacting with your followers.
And there’s even more you can do with the right tools. Instead of creeping your competitors’ social pages, SproutSocial allows you to compare your progress to that of your competitors. You can then dive in yourself and draw insights — what are they doing right and where are the gaps? The opportunities for social listening are endless!
Creating great content on social media is not easy, but it’s a great way to increase brand reach and user engagement. Get in touch with Arcane if you want to grow your business through social media!