Creating engaging social media content is the most important step to grow your business, your followers, and your brand identity.
But why is that?
While almost every business has its own social media account, the vast majority are failing to create meaningful connections with their audience. Their content is sporadic, dull, and lacks a consistent message. The little followers they have are either bored by their posts or scroll past and ignore them altogether.
Engaging content, on the other hand, has the power not only to maintain consumer interest, but also to attract new followers.
Set up your social media accounts
Before opening a social media account, it’s likely you’ve already established a name and implemented some basic branding for your business. If not, your first step should be to finalise these details, then come back to creating your accounts.
There are a few essential elements needed for any social media account, including a name, contact details, website, and biography (or bio). These details tell your audience who and what your business is, how they can get in touch, and how they can find out more information about you. If you have a physical address and point-of-sale (POS) sales, make sure to include your address in your account details.
It’s also important your business is immediately recognisable to customers. This means adopting a unique logo for your profile picture, rather than a generic image of a coffee bean, for example.
Planning your content
Creating social media content that resonates requires planning. This doesn’t mean that you have to write an entire marketing plan for your Instagram account. Rather, it’s a way to organise how, when, and what you’re going to post from day to day.
Having a plan will enable you to consistently create content that’s aligned with your branding, your values, and your goals. Think of it like creating a workout schedule for the gym: you know your plan is to build muscle, but each day you might focus on a different area of your body.
However, so long as you have this central aim in mind when creating the plan, you know that whatever exercises you do at the gym will contribute to the goal of building muscle. In other words, you won’t be sidetracked into workouts that don’t align with this end because you’ve thought about it beforehand.
When creating your plan, it’s also important to be realistic. We know from algorithms that you should be posting frequently – but posting several times a day isn’t sustainable.
Instead, set yourself an achievable target you know you (or your team) will be able to manage long term. That way, you’ll be able to plan ahead with a consistent approach.
Keep your content varied
While all your social media content should ultimately tie back to a central aim, it can become dull and repetitive for followers if you don’t vary what you’re posting. Engaging content needs to be fresh, exciting, and keep customers on their toes.
But how can you vary your content?
Let’s use an example:
John and Mary operate a wholesale coffee roasting business, Classic Coffee, with a team of 10 people. Classic Coffee is centred around environmentally friendly practices and direct partnerships with coffee producers in Nicaragua. They are starting some social media accounts to increase their audience, and sell roasted coffee beans online.
From this example, we know a few things about the business already and can start to create a social media content plan.
Let’s assume John and Mary are able to consistently post on social media around five times per week. If we take the information we already know about them, their plan might look a little something like this:
Using a basic framework such as this will guide you in the creation and posting on social media, providing a varied yet structured plan for maintaining your content.
Once you have such a plan in place, the next step is creating your content and sharing it online.
Interested in learning more about social media strategy and content planning? Contact a member of our team to start tailoring a plan for your digital marketing.
