Does social media content always get put to the bottom of your priority list? Are you in need of easy-to-follow guidance and tips to improve it?
Follow our 7-step checklist to get your company bossing social media content…
1. Determine your WHY
Try to think about your goals and objectives for your social media content. What are you trying to achieve? Whether that be selling more products, creating a community or gathering business leads, you should be aware of your WHY in order to know the direction you need to take your social media accounts.
For example, oat drink company Oatly are on a mission to make a statement across the world and they share their opinions far and wide through fun, clever and consistent content. A very different brand, but creatively on-par, is British Gas. Take a look at their socials – you’ll find bold design, topical copy and light humour that hints at the personality behind the brand, without losing the trust of its audience.
2. Think about where your target audience is
Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok…the world of social media has a HUGE audience. But that doesn’t mean your audience is on every channel.
Spend time researching each social media platform and their demographic audience, so that you can ensure you’re not spending time creating content that isn’t reaching your target audience.
Social listening provides a deeper insight into how your customers are thinking and feeling – take a look at this insightful article from Brandwatch.
3. Create a social media content strategy
Creating social media content can be timely, so make things easier for yourself by thinking ahead and putting a monthly social plan in place. Choose a topic or focus for the month that you can use as a stream of content to rely on – you can always fill in the gaps on an ad-hoc basis.
Do you have a company blog? Or maybe an emailer? Pull out creative for your social media posts from your other content. This is what we call pillar content. Repurposing your content across multiple channels makes creating high-quality content efficient and manageable, not to mention it improves consistency across your brand’s online messaging.
4. Think about copy and design
To create any social media content, you have to think about words and images. Think about whether you plan to write the copy in-house or outsource to a professional. You can find plenty of copywriting tips in these quick-fire blogs here and here.
Design complements the copywriting, working together to deliver your brand messaging on-point. Start thinking about if you’ll need to hire a designer or if you want to go down the agency route. If you want to make your social media POP, you’ll need a professional with an eye for detail.
We can help you create innovative and engaging social content with our design services.
5. Build out a social media calendar
Now it’s time to put it altogether into a social media calendar. Mock up a template for the month ahead, decide which posts need to go out on which days then add in your captions and visuals.
Like we said earlier, this is your base layer content – the stuff that you can always rely on if you’re super busy. But if you really want to engage with your audience and put your brand’s personality out there, then you’ll need to do some ad-hoc ‘in the moment’ posting and community engagement too.
Ad hoc posts can focus on anything from a national holiday, a team birthday, a news update or a social outing. Community engagement is where you take time to listen and respond to your audience – whether they’re commenting on your activity or are starting their own conversation where you can add relevance and support (more on this below).
Just make sure your audience remember your name and associate it with valuable content.
6. Scheduling your content
If you’ve created your social media calendar, it’s time to post it. If you’re working in a small team, you might benefit from using a social media scheduling tool like Buffer, Hootsuite or Sendible. These will help you to manage your social media posts without having to login every other day and upload each post individually.
What time of the day should your posts go out? There’s no one answer to this – it’s more about learning from user behaviour. Keep an eye on Instagram Insights and Google Analytics to find out when your audience is engaging or seeing your content.
Want to increase audience engagement? Explore our digital services.
7. Think about engaging with your community
Whether you put community management into your social media plan or not depends how much time you want to invest in these platforms.
Community management is basically all the stuff that happens after you publish a post and how you engage with your audience on social media. This could be anything from liking relevant posts and comments to answering customer questions.
You might have seen the recent Weetabix and Heinz Twitter thread – “Serving up @HeinzUK Beanz on bix for breakfast with a twist”. This caused a social storm with brands commenting like Lidl, Domino’s, Nando’s and Specsavers all getting involved.
Engaging with your audience and other brands in this way helps to maintain and develop your tone and voice, whilst increasing brand awareness among your target audience.
We know what you’re thinking…that sounds like a LOT of work. But once you’ve got going, you’ll reap the benefits of having an effective social media presence – trust us.
Ready to make a difference on your social channels? Get in touch.
