How do I create content for my social media channels?

Content is king, they say, and it’s not shocking that this king needs a feast every once in a while.

I get it, there is a lot of stress on originality and importance of campaign ideas, but it is not always feasible. Sometimes, you need reliable and relevant content that’s easy to produce. Here are some ideas for you to take note of everything that’s at your disposal to create content that will engage your audience.  

There’s gold in the company cupboard.

 There is. For real. Look under the files and behind your monitor.

Let’s see a few ideas I know work very well; your employees to begin with. People like putting faces to an organisation, so highlighting them and their experience at your company personalises your feed, builds trust and connections with your audience.

Your company news is another one. People like real updates as it tells them where things are going, but it’s also an opportunity to show how you manage new ideas and projects. All your company news should be presented with people at the heart of your organisation; again, it builds trust and can turn dull into interesting pretty quickly. 

Do you have a blog? You should have a blog. It’s increasingly a reliable space to share your ideas and expertise, present new things to people, or just to updates. It’s also great to utilise blogs to share your opinion on practices within the industry, any product changes, or anything you deem worth documenting. These can be channelled well into your social media calendars.

Work with product and idea peeks. If you are an organisation that builds things, sharing progress of these can get people curious and engage with you. Share milestones too. People like seeing progress and results.

You could also launch a contest and give away some of the new stuff-in-the-making. If you’re not a product-focussed business, then what updates are you making to your software or your service offering? Write about it and make it engaging.

You’ve got to interact with your audience

Everyone wants lots of comments and likes, but you have to have content that inspires these interactions. As interactive content goes, videos rule. Video content is consumed quickly and engages more people. Globally, YouTube is consumers' leading source of video content, at 83% - Facebook is second, at 67% [HubSpot].

Live videos are great for interaction too. Invite questions from your audience (and let everyone see your responses too). Live videos on Facebook have an engagement rate of 4.3% compared to 2.2% for non-live videos [Telescope].

Images drive interactive content as well. There is a reason dedicated social media platforms exist around them. Images are a good way to share an update with your audience. A new office? New packaging? New product? A picture is worth a thousand words. Businesses that are on Instagram get up to 37% of their total impressions from Instagram Stories [Social Bakers].
And tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images [Buffer].

You could have fun with your audience and ask them to submit images to you - we call this User-Generated Content (UGC for short). Tie it to a competition and boom! Who doesn’t like a cheeky little activity that could get you a prize? It also lets people feel creative and makes for great content.

Images need not be just static. Memes and GIFs really add that human touch you almost crave for brands to balance out their organisational information. 

Offer tips. Your expertise will always be unique to you. Interact with your audience by sharing tips about using your product, maintenance, upgrades - anything you feel brings value to your audience. 

So, I hope you can see now that everything that you do matters. For example, your interactions with your clients. Feedback and testimonials work really well as social proof. Works like a charm!

Keep up with the market and industry changes.

You know your game, as I am sure your audience expects you to. And markets can be tricky and difficult to understand. Simplify this for people. Offer analysis to difficult problems, remove jargon or just share trends in the industry. An expert’s point of view really gets people to come back for more - it makes your audience trust you too.

Engage any influencers or industry figures that fit well with your organisation. I mean, I wrote a whole blog post about how to choose an influencer!

Influencers can bring you engagement and credibility. Always a win. If you don’t want a consistent face for your organisation, design them as ‘guest’ takeovers of your social channels that leads to an announcement or an event by you.

When it comes to business, they keep telling us that we live in the world of big data. You can help people crack it. You can share analysis that showcases your abilities and expertise.

A good way to do this is an infographic. Infographics travel well and if they are branded, more people will come across you and your work. They’ll also be shared more as it’ll come from a knowledgable source. Infographics have had the biggest increase in usage (65%) amongst marketers in the last four years [Content Marketing Institute].

This should go some way to showing you the bigger picture. I agree that it can be hard to keep with the demands of a social media content creation, but look around you and the spaces you navigate, you will get loads to work with. And remember to keep it fun, engaging and interactive. Good luck!