Is your social media content strategy something like posting anything that comes to mind, maybe watching what people engage with? You are not alone. This is something that many entrepreneurs do early in their branding. They post things that relate to their brand, themselves, the world, pop-culture, lunch, and anything else that comes to mind in an effort to populate their social pages.
Social media can be a hard thing to manage. It can be daunting for new entrepreneurs who either don’t know how to articulate their value to their audience clearly or are intimidated by the designing assets needed to stand out in a crowd.
While we know that you should have a strategy for every aspect of your brand first, if you are starting to post on your social channels to build brand awareness, there’s a simple formula for creating excellent social media content to help connect with your customers and build awareness of your brand.
Before posting anything on social media, ask yourself these 5 questions:
1. Is it authentic?
2. Is it shareable?
3. Is it something that will start a conversation?
4. Does it evoke emotion?
5. Does it provide value?
If you create content that doesn’t answer yes to one or more of these questions, skip it. It will clutter your social channels and work against your purpose – to build trust in your brand.
Let’s dive into each of these questions to show how using these parameters can help you create killer social media content for your brand.
Making sure your Social Media Content is on point
1. Is it authentic?
Increasingly, authenticity is a top priority for people interacting with brands in 2021. In SproutSocial’s recent 2021 predictions for marketing, Kamillah Jones said brands should “Reflect on who you are as a brand and take action on who you want to be moving forward.”
While you are trying to introduce people to your brand and build your community, make sure your posts speak to them, not selling to them. Talk about yourself as an owner, but make sure it relates to your business. If you’ve created a skincare line because you have terrible cystic acne, share images about your journey. Show your customers that you understand them because you ARE them. You don’t just want them to purchase from you, and you want to go on the journey together.
2. Is it sharable?
It’s easy as business owners to understand our industries in such a profound way that we can throw out technical terms and statistics at the drop of a hat. Will that statistic or term resonate with your audience? Is it something that can be said differently for people to connect with and tag their friends or share on their pages because it mirrors their sentiments exactly?
Take this post we did as the first post for haircare brand CANE Beauty. We utilized posting on Halloween for their first post to capitalize on the trending holiday hashtag and add some humor to the brand’s introduction.
Within 2 days, the post had over 1400 likes and a number of shares. Using a mix of humor, along with a trending topic, allowed us to create brand awareness for a new business over a month before its formal launch.
3. Is it something that will start a conversation?
Whether your post is a mind-blowing, little known fact or a controversial topic that you would like your customers’ opinion on. IS what you are saying going to get people to engage.
As brands like Instagram continue to test removing functionality such as “likes” from profiles, engagement (shares, comments, and saves) will determine whether pages should rank highly in the algorithm. If your post prompts tens to hundreds of people to leave their opinion, they’ll start looking forward to your posts to engage again.
4. Does it evoke emotion?
People are most likely to connect with something through emotion. You can create a post that reminds them or even makes them hopeful of a great experience. Or you can create a post connecting with a pain point of your customer.
Both positively and negatively triggering posts help to connect with the viewer on a deeper level. Using emotional posts for storytelling or to prompt your viewers to share their experience is a great way to get engagement and do some social listening from your audience.
5. Does it provide value.
As a general rule of thumb, you want 80% of your content to provide value and 20% of your content to be sales. Creating educational content for your audience helps to showcase your industry knowledge and build trust with your audience.
Posts that highlight how to use your products, tips and tricks, answering frequently asked questions, or even shedding light on common industry misconceptions will help position your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
In Conclusion
If you don’t have a clear strategy for your social media, create your posts with intentionality. If you are a cosmetics brand, your customers probably don’t care what you’ve had for lunch or what your husband wore to work today.
By making sure your content is either one or all of these 5 things, you are setting your social media channels up to be a great place for your target audience to learn, exchange opinions, and grow closer to your brand.
If you need help creating a social media strategy or need someone to handle posting on your social media, we’d love to help. Schedule a free consultation with us here.
