Social media marketing can fool you. With all the hype surrounding it, you might think it is the ‘be all end all’ of your marketing strategy. Many small businesses struggle to keep their following growing and engagement consistent, and don’t create profit opportunities from their social campaigns.
Content strategy is how you transform scattered and unplanned social media marketing into a tool for follows, engagement, and those precious clicks. The best place to start is understanding the three building blocks of social media content: informative, interactive, and promotional posts.
Informative Content
Best for: Gaining an audience
Informative posts provide your audience with insight into your industry. This includes statistics, research, fun facts, and more. Anything that is providing your followers with factual information.
Think about it: Who doesn’t like being “in the know”? Your audience will love knowing fresh and relevant information about your industry from the convenience of their own feed. The trick is to keep it simple, digestible, and unique.
Consider delivering these posts through infographics, creative visuals that demonstrate the information you are aiming to convey. The brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text, which is important to note when your post is in the midst of a sea of content on your followers’ feeds.
Here is an example of an infographic displaying information regarding social media:
Source: WebpageFX
You can also consider sharing links to your company’s own original, informational content. Make it a priority to generate fresh articles on your blog, or discover how to recycle old content for new leads.
Users will begin to feel like your account is the perfect hub of need-to-know knowledge for your field. Suddenly, you are a voice in your industry and a go-to for consumers!
Interactive Content
Best for: Increasing brand awareness and engagement
When you hear interactive content, you probably start thinking: “Is this the key to going viral?” In short, yes!
Interactive content is amazing for keeping brand awareness high and building a connection with your audience. These posts are always engagement focused and are created for the sole purpose of being talked about and shared. Anything eye-catching or thought-provoking is what you are looking for here.
Some examples include quote graphics, opinion posts, pop culture references, quizzes and polls. These are all sources of content that have the potential to resonate with someone and start a conversation. Constructing a conversational caption is also important because it prompts a response. Just try not to be controversial for the sake of being controversial. Keep content relevant to your company’s purpose, and genuine to its voice.
Here is an example of how Satiskin got their viewers involved with their social media. Notice how they ask a question that could start friendly debate amongst their audience:
Source: Satiskin on Facebook
While not every interactive post goes viral, this is the content most likely to make it big.
Promotional Content
Best for: Securing that lead
While it’s important for the majority of your content to be dedicated to your industry as a whole, you can of course sprinkle in promotional posts to reel in those leads. With promotional posts you are able to connect the topics you share on a daily basis with your product/service and educate your audience on exactly what you sell.
Crafting these posts can be tricky. You want to concisely lay out the benefits of your product without sounding like a sales pitch. Here are some quick tips for those delicate promotional posts:
- Avoid using marketing terms and keep the tone leaning on the casual side.
- Demonstrate how your product/service will improve your followers’ lives.
- Use high quality and attention grabbing videos or images for a scroll-stopping effect.
- Tie in the tips from the above two content-types by providing a quick statistic or bold statement to spark some engagement.
- When possible, include a clear call to action so that the consumer can easily move onto the next step.
Here is an example of how to incorporate some of these tips in a promotional post. Note the light tone, clear explanation of the product, quality image and straight-forward call to action:
Source: Quest Nutrition on Facebook
12qInformative, interactive and promotional posts are not the only content types out there but these three foundational posts can be used as introductory tools to strengthen your developing content strategy.
