In today’s world, not having a social media presence means you’re an anomaly to society. Everyone’s competing for the small likes, comments, and shares. But with everyone having an account today, there’s a lot of the same content, making it impossible for you to catch your audience’s attention.
With social media, it is important to make fresh new content every day to stay on top of the trends and be visible to all of your audiences. When you add effective content, in some time, the visitors become paying customers. When new people follow you, you start getting paid either by the social platform or by different means of business.
However, if you don’t know how to add effective content to your social media sites and gain all of your audience’s attention, then you can either use social media marketing services or continue with this article if you want to learn many new insights and gain an audience on your own!
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Analyze Your Post’s Anatomy
There are regular posts and then there are interactive posts that bring you all the attention. If you want to publish the latter, you need to understand each little detail and value of every element that goes into posting an effective post.
You can divide a post’s anatomy by dividing all the aspects that you see that might attract a viewer’s attention and compel them to like, comment, share or click to follow an action. Some of these elements are:
1. The Caption
If you’re posting a picture or just a statement, your written content works as the attracting factor. It can be a statement, a question, or even your heading. If you come up with good content, it will generate vast traffic.
However, make sure you keep the content between 15 to 150 words on social platforms as posts under this word count bring in the most clicks.
2. Emojis Play a Big Role
Emojis direct the mood of your posts. When you add emojis to your post, they not only indicate the tone of the content but also visually inject emotions into people. A laughing emoji directs people to laugh, a smirking emoji instigates curiosity and a sad emoji makes people sad.
3. Mentioned Accounts
When people mention other accounts on their posts, they increase reach and visibility. So, whether you mention your own account or someone else’s, you’re increasing the reach and exposure of all the accounts you introduce in our post.
4. Hashtags are the Vibe Today
Hashtags are like the keywords of social media platforms. However, the keywords work their own way on social platforms as well. Hashtags are words or phrases joined together and preceded by the hashtag # symbol.
They are clickable and when you click on them, the social platform shows you all the posts that have used this hashtag, increasing the reach of many people!
5. Image or Video
Most posts are accompanied by one or more images, GIFs, or videos that showcase a brand to its audience. This visual content is always in HD quality and quite compelling that attracting the targeted audience right and left.
6. Any Call to Action
Your post can also contain different calls to action. You can either ask a question, share a link to encourage engagement, or other means of action that compels your audience to either click to learn more, buy something or try something out!
Learn to Create the Perfect Post
There’s no post that can fit all of your social media goals and compel hundreds of followers overnight. You have to be the one to create multiple valuable posts that engage with your target patronage, helping you grow your platform.
When we analyzed the anatomy of the post above, we took apart each feature that is relevant and engages your audience. In order to become popular, you need to focus on each of these aspects. Therefore, let’s focus on how you can improve all the features of your post:
– Headlines or Captions
You can either add a long caption to your post or make it attractive by adding a short headline. The goal is to hook your audience with what you write. You can also make a post attractive by adding both: A secondary headline to the caption of your post.
This headline can secure the attention of your reader before they pass by. So, a headline needs to be attractive enough. Whether you add a question, promise, or fact, the goal is to stop your reader in their tracks and read your entire post.
So, an engaging post’s caption and headline ensure that the post:
- Contains a result or benefit
- Has numbers like percentages, facts, or tips that start with “Top 5 this”
- Includes a sense of urgency that helps you gain ground on your competition
- Sparks curiosity
- Ask a question
– Distinct Characters or Emojis
Emojis and special characters can catch the eye of your audience, put interest and make your content more relatable. Data shows that adding emojis to your content significantly improves your audience engagement. So, put in emojis and bring out the emotions in your readers.
Just remember not to overdo them because every emoji has its own meaning and purpose, so if you want to relate to your audience, use the right ones in the right places.
– Mentioning Accounts Successfully
In order to grow your networks on social media, an effective way is to network with other businesses, influencers, and organizations. When you’re improving on the platform, you can either promote them, thank them for their support, or partner with them.
This way, you’ll be mentioning them on your posts and increase not only theirs but your engagement as well. Interactions on these posts from the mentioned accounts as well as your follower increase a lot of engagement. It can also affect the algorithm of your posts which sometimes makes your post get the top rank on your users’ newsfeeds.
To mention another account on different social platforms, all you have to do is add the @ symbol and write their name or handle to tag them.
– Making the Most of Hashtags
Hashtags as you already know are words or phrases that become famous among a group of people because of their constant use and sometimes even work as the main keyword. Preceded by the symbol of #hashtag, you can make up any different hashtag that becomes immediately searchable on the particular social platform.
Many brands and people make up their own hashtags to represent themselves or a campaign they launch. This way, when people use the same hashtag, you can view all uses by clicking them once!
– Adding the Right Visuals
No one can deny the engagement that visual posts attract. They garner notably more likes, shares, and comments than any post that only contains the text. If you want to improve the value of your posts, try adding in images and videos that are relevant to your content.
The colors, faces, high-contrast graphics, and HD videos are what people want today and after looking at your visual content, that contains all of the above, there’s no way you won’t be increasing your follower count!
– Call to Actions
You can either start your post with a call-to-action, or you can add some sort of call-to-action at the end of the post. For example, on Facebook or Instagram, you can add the link to your website and encourage people to click on it.
You can also add links to shops and motivate people to buy your product. To become famous on social media, you can also encourage your audience to share or retweet your posts in order for you to increase your reach.
Master the Secret to Repurposed and Curated Content
You don’t always have to create content from scratch. Social media and the internet are your lifesavers. Scour the internet and look for the posts and content that your partners and other third parties are posting and then, looking at the content of your own company or business, curate similar content or just reshare theirs to keep your audience in the loop.
Well, you’ll say that if we reshare external content, we’ll end up losing many of our followers to them. But that’s not the case.
– Consequences of Sharing External Content
Not only is this a great way of sharing valuable content with your audience, but sharing third-party blogs, and other forms of content also build trust between your audience and you. You don’t always have to produce your own content and you’ll still be seen as a knowledgeable member of your industry if you post other’s content.
It’s also a good way of keeping your posting schedule in order when you don’t have anything else to post. This way, you don’t lose any followers but gain more trust from them.
– How to Bring Out Internal Content
When you’re looking to post engaging social media posts, one of the best sources is your own organization. So, look into that treasure trove of information and create valuable content from there. Look into your promotional content, articles, blogs, website content, press releases, and other marketing presentations that can give you plenty of content to repurpose and use on your social platforms.
You can take long forms of content and make smaller pieces of social media posts from them. Like take a long how-to blog and turn it into a small top ten list and mention all the important parts. This way you can repurpose a lot of your informational content into social posts. Track how your audience reacts to these posts and then tweak your future content accordingly!
Know About All the Social Networks
When it comes to social networks, different types of people use different platforms to achieve various business or organizational goals. This way, they can behave entirely differently on different platforms.
For example, if a company is looking for employees on LinkedIn, they’ll appear quite formal and informational on the various aspects of their business, whereas, the same company is looking to increase their follower count and attract customers on Instagram. Here they will appear more interactive and post content that attracts their targeted audience, not employees who would want to work with them, but people who might want to buy from them!
Depending on your business, you don’t have to use all of the social networks, doing a little research will help you figure out which social networks your audiences prefer. This way you can effectively target them and save a lot of time.
Instagram is a visual platform that requires you to add an image or video with each post. So, no matter what you post, it is recommended that you make sure that the visual content is bold, colorful, and strong.
One of the most popular and effective ways of gaining an audience on Instagram is through high-quality graphics and short videos. Though you can’t add links in posts, you can encourage audiences to click on links that you add to your bio.
On Twitter, a post is as long as a complete sentence. The audience on the platform is used to short messages. No post is longer than 280 words. Whether you’re posting a video or an image, you need to garner attention using the tight words in the headlines, because your audience is accustomed to these small headlined messages.
LinkedIn is one of the most formal social networking platforms. Here, you have to promote your brand from an organizational perspective. Here you are present to gain followers that may turn into employees or partners in the future. So, you need to keep your tone highly formal and business-like.
What Effective Interactive Content to Put Out?
When it comes to publishing content that attracts an audience, there is merit in providing variety. Different types of posts can help you achieve a number of goals. This is why it is recommended that you strategize the type of content you post.
There are four content pillars that you can direct our content towards:
– Entertaining
Entertaining content should spark interest in your audience. You don’t necessarily always have to make them laugh out loud, it can be intriguing without the laughter punch as well. Even though humor is an effective way to gain some attention, you should produce content related to your field.
Some examples of entertaining content without humor content include unusual stories, before-and-after decoration posts, throwback content, and other similar posts.
– Educational
Educational content should provide value in each sentence. You are posting educational posts to spark curiosity and help your followers gain knowledge. So, whether the content is about your business or relevant to it, you can share it with your audience.
Many pages share educational content in the form of FAQs, did you know question posts, or by adding different tips and lists of things in their posts.
– Promotional
Promotional content is full of content that encourages your audience towards taking the next step. You have to add different types of calls to action to this post to motivate your audience.
However, just a call to action won’t work, you also have to come up with phrases and sentences that spark curiosity and intrigue in your audience that automatically stir up action from them. Some common call-to-action phrases include: buy now, click on the link in our bio, or leave a comment if you agree!
– Inspirational
When you’re posting inspiring content, you’re playing with the emotions of your audience. You want to be extra positive and memorable in your posts. Your posts should have a direct emotional impact on them, coercing them into either clicking on your posts or changing their perspective.
These inspirational posts include ones that contain quotes, some inspiring stories, or something that involves the entire community.
You can use all four of these pillars to construct the different engaging posts on social media. This way, you’ll have a variety of content to post, while also maintaining the tone of your brand.
The Right Time to Post is the Time to Post!
Most of the time, the question is what and where to post. However, it’s mostly followed by a when to post questions. Though the answer to this question depends on the social network you’re posting on and the algorithm of your audience.
The best way to find out the time to post is to use analytics to your advantage. Use the information of your posts in the last 30 days and it will evaluate the actions of your audience, bringing you data and suggestions accordingly.
Based on your goals of whether you want to gain engagement, provide brand awareness or receive traffic, these analytics will offer you different time suggestions for all of those.
Final Words
If you’re just starting out on social media and don’t know how to gain followers or target your audience for your brand, then following this guide will help you effectively. Not only will you be able to create some of the most viral posts, but you’ll also gain many audiences!