Content That Performs Well on Social Media
While you might think it’s the communal aspect of social media that drives it forward, content is ultimately the gas in the engine. Without content, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube crumble. The question is, are you sharing the right type of content with your followers?
The Best Content for Social Media
Social networking sites are media channels. They give businesses visible platforms through which they can push their brands and engage individuals within their target markets. By sharing the right content, you can accelerate this process and get better results. Here are five types of content to push out on your feeds:
1. Emotional Content
Think back to a time when you saw a piece of content online and were compelled to share it on one of your personal social media accounts. Right before you tapped the share button, what were you feeling? In all likelihood, you were laughing, crying, angry, or excited. In other words, you were emotional. And you aren’t alone in your behavior. People don’t just share content because they think they should. People share content because they feel something at their core.
Successful marketers approach their content strategies on social media through this lens – and you should, too. Viral content almost always creates an emotional experience. Appealing to these emotions will generate superior results for you and your brand.
2. How-To Content
Content isn’t purely emotional. Sometimes it pays to share substantive content that adds tangible value to your followers’ lives. In particular, your brand may benefit from sharing how-to content.
How-to content can rage from something very simple to complex. Consider this post from Kiierr, which gives readers some practical advice on how they can eat their way to thicker, stronger hair. There’s something magnetic about this piece of content. It makes the reader feel in control and, as a result, generates clicks, and conversions for the brand.
The good news is that every brand can develop how-to content. It can come in the form of a podcast, YouTube video, instructional article, or anything in between. Make this a staple of your social media strategy and everything else will fall into place.
3. Visual Content
Visual content stokes curiosity, drives engagement, and pushes people to interact with your brand. While entire networks like Instagram and Snapchat are built on visual content, it also plays an important role on traditional platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Though it comes in all shapes and forms, infographics are among the best types of visual content. This infographic from Rover is a good example of an infographic that’s visually engaging and informative. Notice how it uses compelling imagery in tandem with objective data points to add credibility. Infographics like this perform especially well on Facebook.
4. Interactive Content
People don’t want to merely sit back and watch. They want to participate in content experiences. You can satiate this craving by sharing interactive content that engages your audience in simple, yet effective ways.
Quizzes, surveys, and games are all examples of content types within this category. It’s the sort of content that companies like BuzzFeed have used to establish their brands online. When balanced with other types of content, you can do the same. (Just make sure the interactive content makes sense for your brand. Overstretching will water down your image and produce diminishing results.)
Give Your Social Media Strategy a Boost
In addition to what you post, you also need to think about how often you’re posting content on your social media profiles.
“If you post too infrequently, your audience will forget that you exist and you will quickly fade into the deep dark recesses of their minds,” successful digital marketer Neil Patel writes. “However, if you are posting too often, you will become a complete nuisance and they will dread seeing your posts overcrowding their feed.”
Balance is the operative word. Depending on the platform, Patel and other experts suggest posting a couple of times per day. This doesn’t mean you have to post a brand-new piece of content every time, but you should at least push out some type of post to keep your audience engaged. Over time, the combination of quality and repetition will drive clicks to your content and ultimately feed your business conversion funnel.
