What makes you stop scrolling on social media? Is it adorable animal photos, relatable memes, hilarious videos, mouth-watering food clips, or trendy fashion tips? Social media is full of endless content designed to captivate and engage us. In fact, the average user spends 145 minutes on social media every day!
In today’s digital age, social media has become an essential tool for businesses to connect with their audiences, build brand awareness and drive engagement. However, with millions of posts flooding social media platforms every day, creating content that stands out can be a daunting task. We’ve put together our expert tips to help you understand what it takes to craft compelling social media content that not only engages your audience but also enhances your brand.
Our Top Tips for Creating Engaging Social Media Content:
1. Understand your audience
Before creating any content, it’s crucial to take the time to gain a strong understanding of your audience. Research their demographics, interests and preferences. Social media analytics tools can help you to gather further insights about your followers, such as their locations, age, gender and active times. These insights will enable you to tailor your content effectively to resonate more with your audience.
2. Embrace storytelling content
People love stories. They tend to be more engaging and memorable compared to other styles of content. Share customer reviews, behind-the-scenes content, and even the journey of your brand or products to create a deeper connection with your audience.
Here’s an example of storytelling content we made for Cycle King & Hawk Cycles. We attended an event to get live social media coverage, where we shared to instagram stories throughout the day, posting behind-the-scenes content of their team. Following the event, we shared a post looking back at the event, which gained significantly higher engagement than the typical sales-related posts. This increase in engagement highlights the audience’s preference for authentic, event-driven content over traditional promotional content.
3. High quality, clear content
High quality images, videos and graphics can significantly increase your engagement. Ensure your content is clear, well-designed, and aligns with your brand guidelines.
4. Be consistent
Consistency is key to building a strong brand presence on social media. This includes maintaining a consistent posting schedule, tone of voice, and style of content. Creating a content calendar can help plan, organise and schedule your posts in advance.
5. Leverage hashtags
Hashtags can increase the visibility of your post and help you reach a broader audience. Make sure to research relevant and popular hashtags in your industry, and include them in your posts. Stick to around 5-6 relevant hashtags per post to help attract the right audience.
The most effective way of discovering relevant hashtags for your business is by searching on the various social media channels to find what is trending. This will help you find hot topics and relevant areas to try and target through hashtags.
6. Add a Call to Action (CTA)
If it’s relevant for your brand, make sure to include a compelling call to action (CTA). These will guide your audience on what to do next, whether that’s visiting your website or signing up for a newsletter. A clear and strong CTA can help to drive engagement on your social channels.
7. Stay up-to-date with social media trends
Social media trends are constantly changing. Make sure you stay up-to-date with the latest trends, features and best practices in Social Media Marketing. You can also experiment with new content such as reels, stories or live videos to help keep your audience engaged and your content fresh.
Engage with your audience
However, social media is not a one-way street. Take the time to engage with your followers and audience, by responding to comments, mentions and messages. You can also use the stories feature on facebook and instagram to ask questions, run polls and encourage discussions and gain feedback from your followers. The more you interact with your audience, the more likely they are to become loyal followers.
Engage with your audience Monitor and analyse your performance
To continually improve your social media strategy, it’s important to monitor and analyse the performance of your content. You can also use social media analytics tools to help you gather insights into your performance, such as engagement, reach, following, and more. This will also help you to identify what works and what doesn’t, so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Examples of great social media content strategies
Go Pro
With over 20 million followers on Instagram, GoPro has a very strong social media strategy. Most of the content they post tends to be slightly lower quality and usually user generated content. This makes it easier for their audience to resonate with the content they post.
Duolingo
Duolingo has a very strong TikTok presence, with 11.8 million followers. They have a very good understanding of their audience, taking part in the latest trends that are popular amongst their audience of Gen Z and Millenials. They’ve been able to effectively target their audience by featuring large mascots in their content and making it very lighthearted, silly and fun.
@duolingo sad g(owl) hours #duoplushie #duolingo #languagelearning #emo ♬ Rio romeo - .𝖒𝖊𝖓'🎧★
Creating a strong social media strategy with compelling content requires a mix of creativity, strategy, and continuous improvement. Social media trends are constantly changing, meaning that just because a concept worked well this month, doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work well again. Gaining a strong understanding of your audience, telling authentic stories and remaining consistent is what will help your brand build a strong and influential presence on social media.
How can redPepper help?
Whether you need full social media management, content creation or strategy work as an extension of your in-house team, we provide social media support tailored to you and your brand to help you grow your business across digital channels. We create and curate bespoke content for your brand in order to connect with your target audience, promote brand awareness, and, ultimately, boost sales! Book a meeting with our expert team today.
