Social Media
How to Create Engaging Content that Stands Out
How can you create engaging social content that stands out? Social media is a mainstay for many brands’ social media strategies. It’s a platform to connect and engage with people. Driving profitable traffic to landing pages, growing conversions, and building an engaged audience are all key factors to helping you succeed.
Are you stuck trying to create content that is driving engagement? This can be either on the post or driving traffic to your website. How you write your posts is a critical factor in your audience engagement. If people are not engaging with your posts, it is less likely that your future posts will reach your followers. Social media platforms have done a great job at building their algorithms to prioritize the post your audience sees based on their engagement and what they care about. What this means is you may spend all this time, effort, and money planning and organizing, only to throw a party no one cares about or shows up to. This can be discouraging and a waste of time. As a small business, time is of the essence. Let’s not have this happen to you. Your content should have a purpose and something your audience likes and engages with.
Think about this party again. What kind of party do you want to host? Who is the audience you want to invite? For me, my audience is geared toward small businesses, business owners, and nonprofits looking to grow their businesses more strategically. One easy way to visualize this is to think about what networks are used and for what purpose. What platform partying are you planning to host, or where would you like to host your parties?
Think of it as more of a professional network with the intent of building connections and networking. Tradeshow. Thought leadership. Industry trends.
This is more in-the-moment content: a cocktail party, breaking news, a live event, and timely and relevant updates.
It can be thought of as your dinner party. Share interesting stories and relevant information in a more casual setting.
Like Facebook. In a casual and more curated visual way. Images are your stars.
You are probably curious about what it takes to create an engaging post. So, you’ll want to take some time to create a strategy around “this party.” Once you know why you want to post, follow these three pillars to help boost engagement, make your content stand out, and get results.
What Should Content Do?
Content should do one of four things: educate, entertain, inspire, and promote. Furthermore, you should split your posts based on these four pillars. This is what content should do for your audience. Once you know what this should do,
The purpose of this is to inspire you with what to post. Now for some fun examples.
Educate
It’s fun to spark curiosity and add to their knowledge bank. This can be done in many ways, such as FAQs, Tips, Did you Know? It can be as simple as picking a theme that is a branch of your brand that would interest your audience and choosing a topic around that.
Entertain
Keeping your audience interested and engaged in what is happening next is intriguing. It doesn’t always have to be funny. For example, unusual stories, behind-the-scenes, before and after series, and more. It’s a fun fact that using emojis adds to the tone and increases visual interest.
Promote
Content here is what most businesses and people are familiar with. This encourages your users to take the next step in doing business with you. A very simple thing to add to your posts is to include some sort of call to action in your posts. What do you want them to do? Tell them. It’s as easy as shop now, followed by a link to shop or check out X, Y, and Z via the link in our bio.
How Should It Be Organized?
Now, you should be asking what to post and identifying content themes to help you organize posts. This can be a mix of content you always have ready to go, like blogs, articles, and interviews, and can be reused. Next, you might be inspired to post content about the time of year. This month is black history month, and International Women’s Day is next. You may decide planning content around holidays could provide value, especially for those whose businesses are profitable during these times. Communities and partnerships are a great way to add to your brand that aligns with your core values while demonstrating your ties to the community and other business partners. Lastly, new trends or promotions you want to share.
How Should It Be Delivered?
Once you know what your content should do and how to organize it, you should also be focused on how it should be delivered. A final step to creating good, engaging content is to mix up the formats in which you want to post the content. Try to think of single or multiple image posts, lives, stories, videos, or TikTok and Insta Reels. Mixing it up is fun to reach people who want to engage in different ways.
Hootsuite or Sprout Social are two social media management tools that can help you schedule or post in batch work so you do not feel reactive daily when posting. They both offer free trials, with Hootsuite offering a free account for those just starting out to help you build consistency. Keep in mind that with free trials, there are limitations to how many posts can be scheduled at a time.
Action Item
You may not be implementing some of these practices yet. However, it can be a good idea to consider how to be more strategic with your social media efforts. It can be overwhelming at times to think of what content to post, especially when I try to plan in advance to avoid any last-minute posting efforts. This guide is a good place to start.
The first step for anyone creating a content calendar is to create one. This will help you be less reactive in coming up with new ideas every day and more proactive in looking at your month coming up and seeing what you are going to post in advance.
Now it’s time to get writing/planning engaging content! Implement these three pillars and let us know if you get results. If you’re still struggling, reach out, and let’s chat about our social media management packages and how we can help take this off your plate.
