Content is the name of the game in digital marketing as a whole, and especially in social media marketing. It’s what makes your social media campaigns stand out from the crowd and it gives you a chance for community engagement too – providing a valuable opportunity to connect with your target audiences.
Good social media support from an expert social agency like Seek Social can help you gain traction on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, while bad content can lead to lost opportunities, lost potential customers, and even negative PR in some cases. However, the Seek Social team will show you how to avoid those pitfalls and how to create social media marketing posts that will deliver results in the paragraphs to come!
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In Social Media Marketing & Digital Marketing, 'content is king'.
As the team at our social agency knows all too well, when it comes to digital marketing and social media campaigns, ‘content is king’. This means that your creative strategy and content creation process for your social media channels can’t help but have a big impact on the success or failure of your social media marketing efforts – and in fact they’re often one of the most important parts of an entire digital marketing campaign, let alone just the social strategy!
To ensure that your social media content will be effective and useful to your readers, it needs to be relevant and well-written. It also needs to be engaging with an appropriate amount of text or video (or both). Finally, in order to reach as many people as possible, it’s important that your content can be shared across different social channels such as Facebook and Twitter. How do you ensure that that’s the case though? Well, fear not, as the team from the North West’s leading social agency are going to show you!
Variety is essential
Good social media agencies know that it’s a good idea to mix up the types of posts you put out, not just so that you’re not constantly posting about your business, but also because it’ll make your page more interesting for the reader.
For example if you’re a restaurant, you might try posting a picture of your kitchen staff along with the house special for today, or something else that relates to food and cooking. A fellow social agency might give a shout out to the clients whose projects they’ll be working on today, or if you’re in fashion, you could share some links to articles on style or celebrity-related news items.
Focus on what is relevant to each of the different social media channels out there: Facebook and Twitter are great places for sharing links from other sites as well as images; Instagram works best for visually appealing images; TikTok is perfect for sharing videos, and LinkedIn can be used for industry articles and links posted by others in your field.
Avoid The Boring Stuff
If you (or your chosen social agency if you’re outsourcing) are going to write good content that will help your overall social media marketing strategy succeed, it’s important to avoid being boring. People don’t want to read the same old stuff that they see on every other person’s feed. This includes posts that are way too formal or informal, and anything too controversial – a little controversy can be a good thing for your social strategy, but too much just invites trouble.
In order to be different, try things that other people aren’t doing. Jump on trends or events if they fit into your brand’s niche, but make sure you stay up-to-date so your posts don’t become dated very quickly. You should also think about how your followers will react when they read something—does it resonate with them? If not, then chances are they won’t share it!
It may be tempting at times to just post inspirational quotes or other cliched posts as a matter of routine, but at this social agency we only do so if there is a specific reason for it (e.g. a business milestone) and never simply because “I needed to post and it was there.”
Consider Who Your Audience Is
Any decent social media marketing professional should tell you that you need to know who you are talking to, and that means audience research. After all, if you don’t know who your target audience is, how will you know what their tastes are, what they want, what they like, the content that will resonate with them, and so on? The best way to find out what people want is by talking to them, and you can do just that with good quality social media content you can expect from the content creation team at our social agency.
However, just as you should know what your target audience wants, you should also know what they don’t want too. because someone who isn’t interested in something won’t pursue it, they won’t click, or otherwise engage with it no matter how good the content is. For example: if someone doesn’t like cars but loves motorcycles, then they probably aren’t going to be interested in your latest and greatest post about F1. Start taking about MotoGP and the Isle of Man TT however, and that’s a different story.
Lastly, you do also need to know where they hang out online: This step is crucial because it informs a lot of the other things you need to do when composing social media posts. If you don’t know the various ins and outs and foibles of the platforms where your target audiences hang out online, then you’re going to have a hard time reaching them – even with a good social strategy and highly relevant content!
Consider When You're Posting
You probably don’t need a social media marketing agency to tell you that when you post is important. You probably don’t need the help of a social media marketing agency to understand out that he best time to post on social media is when your audience is online.
You can find out the most popular times for your target market by using a post scheduling tool, or in-platform analytics tools, if your social platforms of choice cater for that. There are many other factors to consider when choosing the optimal time to post however, and these factors include:
- Time of day
- What day it is
- Seasonality – is it the middle of summer? Is it Christmas? Are the kids off school? Each of these examples could result in less traffic and engagement for certain types of business, while being a boom period for others. You need to recognise these periods of boom and bust for your business – then you can strike while the iron is hot and predict when times are likely to be harder.
Consider What You're Posting
Any good social media marketing agency should tell you that it’s important to think about where you’re going to be posting before you start to deploy your creative strategy, and when doing so you should consider the following:
Which social platform are you posting on? Is this a text-based platform (like Facebook or Twitter), or one that focuses more on images (like TikTok or Instagram)?
What is your objective with this post? Do you want it to drive traffic to a website or to other social platforms, drive community engagement, lead generation, or something else entirely?
How often should new content be posted, and your feed updated on a particular social media platform? The Seek Social team know that this can be a tricky question to answer because each social media platform is different, and things only get more complicated if you’re trying to run multiple social campaigns across multiple channels too, since there are so many factors at play.
In any case, you need to watch your analytics like a hawk and keep your content and your strategy flexible, so that you can try things out easily, and change them easily if they don’t work. Remember that even a failed experiment is a good thing, (because now you know what NOT to do), and if you need to, there’s nothing wrong with keeping an organised list of the lessons learned, or of the do’s and don’ts for each platform.
What kind of format does the platform and audience prefer? For each type of media channel used and each platform there will be an optimal way to present your content. For example, you know a tweet when you see it, you know an Instagram post when you see it, and you know a TikTok video when you see it. These posts are all different from each other, but they are all still using the optimal presentation methods for their targeted platform.
Before you start writing content to be used in your social campaigns, you should consider some important things. As a general rule, it’s always best to write with the end point in mind, the campaign objectives that you want to achieve. That is, what are your goals for your social media content? What do you hope to accomplish by posting it?
In addition to considering your campaign objectives though, you should also think about each of these aspects:
Do people typically consume this type of content on the social media platform you intend to post it on? (e.g., you’d tend to post videos to TikTok, images to Instagram, and more text-based content to Facebook or Linkedin). Trying to post using ‘unusual’ formats can work in some cases, but it’s never a guarantee, and the conventions are the conventions for a reason – so unless you have a specific reason for not doing so, give the people what they want!
The media used may also help determine how much information should go into one post vs another — especially if there’s limited space available for your content – for instance Twitter’s character limit.
How would someone else describe the personality of your brand? Is it friendly or professional? Excited and bubbly or more reserved? Consider this when deciding on what types of words and phrases work best for conveying your message, since you need to do this in both an authentic way, and one that resonates with customers who’ve come to expect certain qualities from your brand.
Remember That To Really Gain Traction, You'll Need Engagement Too.
Social media is about building relationships, so engagement is about creating an open two-way dialogue with customers and potential clients. Engagement is a key part of social media marketing, so it’s no good just posting content if you don’t engage with your audience and get them to engage with you in return.
A good way to encourage engagement on social media is by asking questions, either directly in the post itself or in comments on other posts (since people can reply to your comment to engage with you). This will encourage interaction between users, who may feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts on a topic if it has already been discussed by others.
The Other Digital and Social Media Marketing Services Seek Social Can Provide:
However, Seek Social is more than a provider of social media marketing services – we are in fact what’s known as a ‘full service’ digital marketing agency. This means that while our complete service offering does indeed include social media marketing services as laid out above, it also includes all of the other services that fall under the umbrella of digital marketing.
That doesn’t mean we’re a ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ though – since the Seek Social team is actually made up of several smaller teams. For instance SEO has it’s own dedicated team that’s part of the larger whole, and likewise PPC, content creation, web development and design, data science and so on – each of our services a dedicated core of highly qualified professionals that carry out the work that falls in their area(s) of expertise, and they stay within those fields too.
So, unlike with other social agencies, with Seek Social you’ll never have a member of the graphic design team developing your social strategy, or the sales team working on your social media banners. With particular reference to what we’ve been talking about today though, our combination of social media marketing and PPC expertise means that we’re the perfect agency to support you if your social strategy includes a paid social campaign (such as Facebook or Instagram ads) or any other kind of paid media too.