Be valuable, be relevant, be interesting.
Seems like an easy mantra when it comes to creating content, right?
But, if you want to create content that will bring you leads, and build brand-awareness, you need to go above and beyond just that.
So what exactly is “good content?” Guy Kawasaki explains in his most recent book, The Art of Social Media, that good content comes in 4 forms:
- Information: What happened?
- Analysis: What does it mean?
- Assistance: How-to do something better
- Entertainment: What the heck?!
When it comes to the art of content and the science of sharing, you shouldn’t get excited when someone simply likes your post…that’s step one.
Step two is when people start sharing your post. When someone shares your post, that means they find it interesting, and helpful, and they want to tell their networks.
Good job sport, that is worth a pat on the back!
The Art of the Niche
Many companies make one of two assumptions:
- Their audience will only want to read about a narrow selection of subjects
- Their audience needs to be engaged at all costs, so relevancy is secondary to engagement metrics
The second assumption is just plain silly, and hopefully for obvious reasons, so we’ll just gloss over that. But if you need specifics, give us a call and we’ll explain why that is a bad strategy.
The first assumption however, often creates a box that companies get trapped inside of.
It’s important to understand your niche but you should also be thinking about what your target audience’s other interests are.
If you’re a restaurant, your audience are food and beverage enthusiasts, or at least people who are hungry. They’ll want to know about your new menu and what ingredients you use for your food, but did you ever think they also might want to know about things like:
- How To Cut a Cake, The Scientific Way
- What’s The Best Wine To Serve With Breakfast?
- Super Bowl Wing Sauce That’s So Good, You Gotta Tell Somebody!
Be niche to your industry, but be sure to think outside of the box too.
The Origin of Content
The biggest challenge of social media is finding the right content to share. There are two ways to feed your content machine:
- Content Creation
- Content Curation
Content Creation
Content creation involves writing long posts,shorts posts, taking photos, making videos, designing infographics, etc.
We understand most companies think: “we don’t have time to create all this content.”
And in our experience, a lot of companies don’t even see the value in bringing someone on to do this for them.
If this sounds like you, use your time and budget wisely. Instead of looking to blog weekly, think about creating “evergreen” content; content that can be retained, and broken up into smaller pieces throughout the year.
Content Curation
If you can’t create it, sometimes you can get away with just curating it.
Content curation involves finding other people’s good content, summarizing it, and sharing it.
Curation is a win for all entities; Share the stuff, you get traffic and so does the blog/website you found it from.
When you are collecting content, think of the things discussed previously in this post:
- Think about your niche, but also think broadly within your industry.
- The right content should be informational, helpful, analytical, or entertaining.
It’s all about eyeballs
Every post (seriously…every single post) should include imagery.
According to a study by Skyword, “On average, total views [of its clients’ content] increased by 94% if a published article contained a relevant photograph or infographic when compared to articles without an image in the same category.”
This imagery could be a form of picture, graphic, infographic or video. It could be something humorous and relevant, something colorful, something minimal.
Your images are eye-candy that direct readers to your post. Think carefully about what you choose; ‘What kind of eye-candy do you wish your company/brand to showcase?’
If Content Is Published On The Internet, But No One Is There To Read It…
“Content is fire, social is gasoline”
-Jay Baer
Think carefully about your audience when creating or curating content but remember that without a strategy to distribute it across your social channels, your content may go unnoticed.