5 Tips For Planning Social Media Content To Grow Your Business
As a business owner, social media is one of the leading ways you attract customers and grow your business – not only to get them to initially buy your product, but also to retain their interest and buy-in for the long-term. Having a social media content strategy is the easiest and best way to plan how you’re going to make your content effective, relevant, and viable. There’s no point spending time and energy on content if you’re not creating with interest! Your social media should help cultivate your brand and engage people in what your business is all about.
1. Where does social media fit in your wider marketing plan?
A content strategy allows you to plan for how you will source content ideas and align them with your brand voice and audiences, particularly how you manage the expectations of each audience segment and engage their diverse needs. In creating content without an effective content strategy in place, you run the risk of missing the mark in terms of relevance and losing credibility.
2. Choose Your Channels Wisely
Using a content strategy, you can determine which social media channels work best for you. Not everyone uses every single platform, so choose your presence on social media wisely and go where your future clients already are! For example, if your editing skills aren’t up to scratch, but you can make good quality video content, opt for the built-in video formats of Facebook & Instagram’s IGTV over YouTube’s demand on a high standard of video production. Stick to where your skillset is likely to stand out and align your content plan with each platform's formats.
3. Make Your Content Helpful
Yes, this sounds like groundbreaking advice. But seriously, if there’s nothing in your content that’s worth giving away, there’s nothing worth reading! Your content should be a helpful resource for your audience and prove your worth as an industry expert. Show what you know! When a beauty brand creates content focused on using different products for the desired outcome, they can use a video tutorial or an infographic to break down the process step-by-step while making a discreet reference to their product. The emphasis isn’t on selling their product but showing how their product can achieve what they need. The best way to know when your content is actually helpful is by tracking engagement and creating monthly reports that give feedback into your content plan. What content gets better engagement organically? Who is tagging their friends in the comments? Who’s leaving feedback to say your tips and tools offered a helping hand? Speaking of which…
4. Engagement
Maximise your engagement by diversifying your content, because monotony is never a chord you want to strike! Produce a range of formats to suit your Target Personas and your audience's needs and tastes – over time, their engagement will help you determine what's working for your business. But with growing demand for engagement, you must encourage engagement without ASKING for engagement. Yeah, it sounds more complicated than it is. “Comment below” or “let us know below” are transparent calls-to-action that the digital savvy social media user is wary of. Get the bottom of your content’s objective by signposting as a natural stepping-off-point from your content. It would be best to embed clear and persuasive CTAs, so your user is signposted without coercion. Present your content as being there to serve them, not your business, and serve a compelling CTA that your audience can’t resist. There is nothing more off-putting on social media than content with a CTA that may as well read: “Buy this please.” Social media content is storytelling at its most basic, and while it’s important to remain professional, remember to remain human as well! Keep a conversational tone that fosters trust and reliability- basically, just be yourself!
5. It’s Not Frequency. It’s Timing
Timing is everything. You can research the times in the day when your following is most active, and you can schedule your posts ahead during this time. When you schedule your content in these active windows, you boost your chances of engagement. Each platform has in-built analytical tools to suggest the times your following are active by the majority. Use these insights as a guideline for when to post content organically because knowing the best times to post and scheduling your content accordingly is the secret to engagement. On the subject of time: making your content timely. And by time, we mean relevance. For example, A tequila company targeting Gen-Zers to rebrand tequila as a drink to savour not to shot wouldn’t be on the pulse of audience interests by referring to how stylish Brad Pitt is. Know who your audience is and interact as they do. Make your references and topics of conversation relevant to the right now.
Final Note
Tools like Zym.ai make it easy to measure and monitor your social media performance – all in one place! From creating your Target Personas with our Persona Builder tool and scheduling content to designing your buying funnel and targeting your content accordingly, Zym.ai gives you the means to choose the tools that fit your content strategy. Reporting is time effective, and you don’t have to log in and out of multiple social accounts whilst trying to pull data from multiple sources. You can also make use of our handy social media scheduler and calendar to schedule your posts well ahead of time – leaving you free to concentrate on the content that cuts through the digital noise. Ready to launch your social media content strategy? Take a free 14 day trial of Zym here. Want to find out more about how Zym works? Click here to view the video tour.
