Social Media Content Creation: Tips and Tricks for Effective Posting

Social media content creation may feel like one of those dreaded tasks that never go away. After all, sharing unique content daily (or sometimes more often) is challenging, even for the best creators.

However, today’s business owners are almost required to have a social media presence online if they want their audience to find them online. Social media offer businesses the opportunity to build a loyal following and stay visible in a medium known for increasing social proof and increasing dialogue.

Social media is good for content creation because it’s a relatively low-investment performance marketing tactic to share your marketing message with a specific audience and provide real-time feedback on the effectiveness of the message.

It also makes it easy to invite your reader to learn more by engaging with your content or visiting a landing page to opt-in to your email marketing list or take advantage of a special promotion.

Key Takeaways

• Social media content creation is essential for businesses to build a loyal following and engage with their audience, utilizing it as a low-investment marketing tactic that allows for real-time feedback and engagement opportunities.
• A social media content strategy acts as a roadmap for creating and distributing content across selected platforms, tailored to a specific target audience, and includes performance metrics to measure success, ensuring content aligns with business goals.
• Effective social media content should be timely, relevant, authoritative, and emotional to spur engagement and action, with strategies including content recycling, collaboration with other creators, and openness to trying new platforms or features based on evolving social media trends.

What Is a Social Media Content Strategy, and Why Do You Need One?

Creating content for social media without first having a social media content strategy is like starting a marathon without knowing the route or where the finish line is. It’s likely to waste a lot of your time creating content that isn’t useful or relevant to your target customers.

While writing a digital content strategy isn’t as fun as creating engaging content, it’s critical to establish or maintain a social media presence that appeals to new customers, more followers and ultimately drives more conversions. It may or may not be a paid media strategy.

So, what is a social media content strategy? In its most basic form, a social media content strategy is a plan that guides the content you create, the platforms you use, and the performance metrics that will gauge your success.

In other words, it’s a roadmap for how your social media presence will work in coordination with your other marketing channels to meet your key performance indicators and objectives.

Let’s break down the components of the social media content strategy.

Target Audience

Your target audience for your social media content creation is likely slightly different than your overall target audience for your business. While it’s true that 57.6% of the world’s population uses social media, those demographics won’t necessarily align with your primary audience.

For example, if you are a men’s lifestyle brand and your target audience is primarily men over 30, based on what we know about social media demographics, a good portion of those men are unlikely to be on social media.

You can build a social media marketing strategy around this information by precisely knowing your ideal customers, and their likely behaviors and habits. Then, amplify content on the right social media platforms to reach them.

In the case of our example, marketing men’s lifestyle products to the girlfriend, wife, or partner of these men as an excellent gift idea might sell them better than you would’ve if you marketed to your direct demographic.

Social Media Content Creation

The social content piece of your social media content strategy is not necessarily the specific copywriting or imagery you’ll use in your posts but rather the types of content you will create and publish.

For instance, fashion brands are more likely to need video-based social content and lots of imagery in their content strategy. At the same time, accountants typically steer more toward text-based content or curated content from other publishers.

Inside your social media content strategy, plan for the types of content you want to include on your social media channels and retain what you don’t want to publish.

It’s also helpful to separate these content buckets in terms of themes to help ensure you’re covering all the areas of your business.

Some social content options include but are not limited to:

• Text
• Quotes
• Videos
• Images
• Infographics
• Curated resources
• User-submitted content

Social Media Platforms

Once your social media plan has addressed the right audience and identified the types of content you want to publish, it’s critical to narrow down the social media platforms you plan to use.

This decision can be challenging for some business owners, and many of them make mistakes trying to publish on every platform simultaneously.

However, this strategy can often backfire because it’s complicated to create relevant information, publish and engage with content on multiple platforms at once without the help or the services of a social media agency.

The best strategy is to identify the top two or three platforms where your potential customers are likely to be and start with consistent content on those platforms. Because each forum has its algorithms and approach to distributing content, the content you create for each platform should be unique.

For instance, video performs well on Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok, while text and imagery with data or cited sources often do better on LinkedIn. If you are planning to use multiple platforms, your content development strategy should reflect each platform’s preferences.

Performance Metrics

Remember, creating content is not the goal, and content by itself does not ensure that users will see the content or take the desired action you want.

It’s essential to decide which metrics matter to you and how you’ll measure success relative to your business goals. At the end of your social media campaigns, you will know exactly how the posts performed and any needed further adjustments.

Most platforms allow you to monitor analytics directly inside the software, making this an easy task. When deciding on your performance metrics, consider that social media creators designed the platforms to keep people on the platform. Therefore, the process of getting a user to follow a link over to your website is a difficult one, and you should only include it as one of your goals.

Other goals might include engagement rates or the growth of your followers to drive sales ultimately.

Creating Effective Social Media Content

To create compelling social media content, you must first decide what qualifies as effective content. It may seem like semantics, but for some, effective content may be images or videos that evoke emotions around a cause or mission. Yet, for others, it might be defined solely by the number of conversions.

Overall, creating impactful social media content typically means that the content spurs engagement and influences a reader’s chances of taking action. Regardless of your definition of effective, social content creation must be:

• Timely
• Relevant
• Authoritative
• Emotional

Timely – The timing of the content makes sense to the user. If you’re publishing event information the day of the event, it’s probably not as effective as it could have been a few days before the event.

Relevant – The content itself makes sense for your audience. Again, using the men’s fashion brand as an example, if you’re consistently sharing posts about cooking, the effectiveness diminishes because it’s not relevant to your audience.

Authoritative – The content is from a place of authority on the topic or brand. Sharing information in any incorrect or unverified format is ineffective, but it’s also not necessary to have a massive following.

Emotional – The content evokes emotion from the audience. Emotions can range from happy, sad, funny, fear, hunger, or a combination of all of these.

Finding the Best Social Media Content Creation Platforms

One of the most frequently asked questions for social media beginners is which platform they should use to grow their business. The answer is almost always that it depends. Every platform has advantages, and every platform has a unique benefit for some users.

For businesses who want to focus on user volume, Facebook typically outranks all other platforms. Visual brands and companies with a younger following may find success on Instagram and TikTok, while those with primarily business-to-business operations lean toward LinkedIn.

Nearly every company can benefit from a presence on YouTube and Pinterest, the second-largest social search engine. They’re the best friends of SaaS content marketing, digital PR strategy and brand advocacy. Ideally, the best social media platforms are ones where your market is showing up consistently and engaging with your content.

Tips and Tricks for Creating High-Converting Social Media Content

Whether you’re creating text-based posts for Facebook or video reels for TikTok, here are a few tips and tricks for creating high-converting content.

Reuse and Recycle Content

Even those with content strategy plans can tire of creating regular content. Prioritizing reusing and recycling content from other sources will save time and give you or your team a break.

• Are you publishing a 2,500 blog post? Create one social media post for each paragraph.
• Are you sending regular emails to your email list? Summarize those emails into one social media post or record a video of the highlights.
• Are you creating an annual report? Break down the major sections into images or infographics and publish those over a month or two.

Collaborate With Other Creators

Collaborating with other content creators on social media is essential for exposing your content to potential buyers and making it more engaging. By doing cross-promotions or consistent mentions of relevant accounts, your followers are more likely to engage with your content, and you’ll introduce them to someone new.

Offer Social Media Takeovers

Social media takeovers are an excellent way to lighten your load a little and offer followers the same message from a new perspective. If you’re a coffee shop owner, ask a loyal customer to take over your Instagram stories for a day, or if you’re a retail shop, ask an employee to take over TikTok and share some new and fun content.

Ask for Feedback

Instead of constantly coming up with your best guess of what your followers want to hear, ask them. Plan for one post each month (changing up the platform) and ask readers what they want to see more of on your feed.

Be Willing to Try Something New

Be willing to try something new when the data shows it’s necessary. For example, if you haven’t planned to post on Instagram but the platform rolls out a new feature suited to your brand, it might be worth trying it for a short-term evaluation. Or, if a post performs well, be willing to reuse it on another platform.

Final Thoughts On Your Social Media Strategy

The future of social media is unfolding right before eyes. Your strategy must grow with it.

There is constant evolution in social media platforms, and you may no longer be able to use the same strategies that worked when you launched your Facebook page three years ago or even last year.

When you define your audience, evaluate your key objectives, establish a routine for sharing effective and consistent content, and measure the metrics that matter to your business, your social content creation efforts will have a big payoff. 

FAQ

Do you still have some questions? Here are some of the most frequently asked questions by others in your shoes, which might help answer some of yours.