Social networks, and other internet platforms like blogs, have become an indispensable part of marketing with shareable social media content, and it’s with good reason! According to Statista, a leading statistics portal, the global social media usage rate was 49% (3.6 billion people) as of January 2020.
By 2025, this figure is expected to rise to nearly 4.41 billion. With this many people spending time online, it’s no wonder that about 91% of business-to-business (B2B) marketers utilize content marketing to reach people online.
Unfortunately, few companies, as well as individuals, have mastered the art of creating interesting and shareable social media content. Simply sharing your content via popular social networks and internet platforms like blogs and discussion forums isn’t enough. Your content won’t fulfill its purpose unless it can attract consumer engagement, no matter where it is published.
By the end of this post, you will be better equipped with an idea of how to produce more compelling content on social media, as well as ways to set yourself apart from your competitors. Creating engaging content for social media means working towards providing additional value for your audience. Using these strategies to deliver content consistently that engages with your audience will help you to create compelling social media content. To ensure your audience is constantly engaged with your brand, it is essential to produce engaging content.
If your content doesn’t seem to attract the level of engagement you desire, then this article is for you. Here are four tips on how to create highly shareable social media content.
1. Use smarter structuring.
Internet users tend to scroll through pages quickly, meaning long paragraphs are often ignored. Make sure that you format your content in such a way that it highlights key information. Some great ways of achieving this formatting include the use of bullet points, numbered lists, infographics, and intriguing headlines.
It is critical that you share different types of social posts in order to capture the attention of your audience and keep them engaged. Ultimately, the best way to discover what types of content drive the most engagement among your audience on social media is to publish them, and constantly test out a few different types to see which ones perform best. In order to build an engaged social media audience, you need to think about the types of content you are sharing, the quality of your content, and how you are motivating your audience to share it.
2. Understand your audience’s needs.
Consumers are always looking for new resources that add actual value to them. As you create your content, keep your audience’s needs in mind and determine how best your content will address them. The bottom line is this: your audience is more likely to share your content if it appeals to their interests.
To understand what interests your audience, you may want to share more relatable content with them, content that they can relate to, and then take action on your social media posts. If you are unsure who your audience is specifically, it is important that you get a good idea of who your audience is before sending your first social posts. Understanding who your audience is, where they are, and what they are expecting to see on social channels are three critical elements to establishing and spreading your content.
3. Engage the audience.
The most shareable social media content has the power to spark a fire, generate discussions, and invoke people to want to speak up. Asking your audience questions and interacting with them in the comment section is an excellent way of engaging with them.
Once you have learned to connect with your audience in a genuine, human, and engaging way, you will see your brand skyrocket in no time. Once you learn how to connect with your audience in an approachable, natural, and engaging way, you will see your brand’s visibility rise in no time.
It is great to have a large following, but if your audience is not engaged with your content, it has a negative effect on the perception of your brand. The perception your audience has about your business or brand online is heavily dependent on the social content that you share.
Video content is becoming increasingly more important in social algorithms, so engaging video content needs to be an important facet of your content marketing strategy. When implemented effectively, engaging video content will boost brand awareness, connect you better with your customers, and convert them into sales and leads easier. Well, as I mentioned before, videos are an effective way of BUILDING brand awareness, engaging your audience, and turning viewers into leads or sales. To get viewers engaged with your content, you have to give something of value to what you are advertising, be it a graphic, live video, or even a meme.
Stories are an excellent way to share interesting and inspiring content, and by adding sticky elements like polls, questions, or quizzes, you are creating meaningful engagement with your audience. Sharing social media icons is a great way to get readers to share their favorite content with their own audiences, giving you more exposure. Shares also provide a little bit of breathing room for your audience away from your brand, so that your audience does not get tired of your content. If you would like to get that extra engagement, plan out a fun, tricky, unique quiz or mystery, and then share the fun on social media.
4. Offer convenient sharing options.
Let’s face it! We all tend to be a little bit lazy, even when it comes to the simplest things. Accordingly, people are more likely to share your content if they can easily access the sharing options. Always include a toolbar with the various social networks in a strategic position for easy access. And with that, you should be one step closer to a phenomenal digital marketing strategy.
While creating and promoting relevant content to your audience is a basis for creating social media content that is shared, the way that you present the content that you are sharing within your social media posts is equally as important. Creating shareable social media content means thinking about how valuable your posts are to your audience (not your brand or your marketing KPI). As we explored above, curating content is an effective way of increasing your authority in the social media space, but only when the sources and content that you choose to share with your audience are both valuable and credible.
Make sure to regularly monitor activity across all of your social media posts and how well they are doing, or not, so that you can make adjustments in content creation and develop content that will ultimately engage your target audience. Check on your social media metrics such as engagement rates and CTRs, or refine your KPIs, to understand which content is working well with your audience and which is not. If you are using hashtags people are not following, or those not related to your content, you might not reach your largest audience. To get the attention of an audience, you have to compete with posts by their friends, DMs from their families, and tons of adorable cat pictures!
Conclusion
Regardless of which ones are performing best, you should incorporate a mixture of the following types of content in order to build a valuable, diverse social media presence for your audience, which will increase the visibility of your brand. By following the steps laid out above, you will be on the path to creating killer content for social media, guaranteed to engage and captivate your audience. Above all, stay authentic, focus on creating video content your audience will find helpful, and take advantage of social media’s growing support for sharing video content.
However, at OCGnow, we understand that creating shareable social media content is easier said than done. If you experience any challenges, give us a shout at (904) 600-3600, and our team of certified digital marketing experts will guide you through it.
This post was originally published on 1/5/21 and updated on 5/17/2022 for accuracy and a larger scope of information.
