Some Thoughts on Creating Good Social Media Content

Social media only thrives on a steady, high-quality content diet

Offering content that is only about your brand or what’s going on inside your business is a good way to lose reader engagement. The goal of social media content marketing is to boost engagement and grow your community. Fans and followers who find your business and brand interesting should want to share your content. If it’s all about you, that’s not going to happen.

The type of content that is most shareable (i.e., viral) depends on your target audience. For example, if you are targeting a group of engineers or technical people, an abstract with links to a whitepaper on new technology or a research article is great. However, that won’t work for all audiences.

Your brand should be likeable. Get creative. Have fun.

Some types of content that promote lots of engagement and sharing include:

  • Lists such as top 10 reasons to… or 5 trends in…
  • Written how to articles and videos
  • Checklists
  • Quizzes and other interactive content
  • Short (under 2-minute) videos
  • Photos with engaging captions or caption contests
  • Links to relevant articles
  • Customer testimonials and first-person stories
  • Educational articles

It’s good to vary the content types to keep your audience engaged. And, sure it’s okay to sprinkle some news about your company—especially philanthropic or community involvement and stories about individual employees—but make sure your content is less than 10 percent about your business operations.

Posting quality content frequently is essential. And it’s easier than you might think.

You’ll get a good mix of content if you post often enough. Your community will be impressed that your business is posting on a regular basis. But, if you don’t post regularly, then your digital strategy will fail. Facebook pages that have posts older than a week make it appear that your business is inattentive or disengaged. If your posts are more than a month old, people may wonder if you are still in business.

Luckily, there are many tools that help you schedule and manage content across social media platforms including within Facebook and Twitter, and the popular Hootsuite. Remember that you (or your content vendor) can create and schedule content once per week or less and have content appear on each social media platform at any frequency you choose (e.g., hourly, twice a day, etc.).