7 Tips for Creating and Sharing Content on Social Media

Getting a business social media account or four is a great start to building an online presence for your brand. But that’s just the beginning of a very long journey that will involve endless content creation. Small businesses may find it fun or engaging to create branded social media graphics and copy for the first few months. But any content creation agency out there can tell you that social media posts can be hard to keep branded and still innovative over a long period of time. Whether you’re new to posting content or feeling burnt out after doing it for a while, these tips should help kindle that social network fire!

There’s no point in posting something if you don’t have a larger aim. What is the business goal for engaging in social media? Some businesses’ primary objective is to drive traffic to their website. Others seek to create relationships with users so that potential customers will reach out to them for their services. Whatever your aim, make sure it’s specific enough to be measurable and accountable. Setting one or two social media goals and measuring metrics related to those goals should inform your content strategy as well as any decisions about hiring a social content specialist.

Social media and content creation are all about communicating, so it’s essential to understand the people you’re communicating with. Before a social media design agency ever begins putting together social media content creation packages, they first identify the target market of the product in question and the business as a whole. Looking at past engagements and analytics from your sales or social media can give you a starting point on this, as well as secondary research on the type of people your services appeal to. Once you have identified the target audience, look at their other interests. Everything you post should be tailored to their specific demographics and psychographics.

Being trendy isn’t always wise, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore major shifts in culture and, specifically, social media. Any social media content marketing agency would explain the need to keep up with hot topics and current opinions on subjects related to your brand. Pay attention specifically to research on why people are using social media—right now, keeping up with news, finding entertainment, and communicating with others are among the top five. Social listening is an essential part of social media content for small businesses, as it tells you what people might want to hear specifically from your brand. PopURLS and Nuzzel are apps that can help you keep in touch with trending topics in your industry.

Sometimes people just don’t realize what they have in front of them. If you’re unsure what your business personally has to say to the world, make an inventory. There’s likely more going on than you think about—offers, events, and milestones, for instance. Any blog posts you have or plan to write are also great things to promote on social media, driving traffic to your website with helpful information for the user at the same time. Consider making and sharing infographics that would fit the visual nature of most social media platforms.

Unless your current followers share your content a lot, it’s hard to reach new potential customers. That’s why hashtags are useful—they’re a smart categorization method. Nearly every social media platform uses hashtags, and any social media content specialist would tell you to take advantage of them. When people search for a tag about car dealers near them, for instance, you won’t show up in the results unless you’ve tagged relevant posts with hashtags that include your location. Figuring out what kinds of hashtags are being used by your target market can be tricky—make sure to check out what hashtags are being used by others in your industry.

If you still get stumped on content creation and management for your accounts, it’s probably time for a brainstorming session. Look for discussions on topics relevant to your industry and, even more importantly, listen for gaps in the conversation that you can fill in. If you can reliably and consistently provide new information about subjects relating to your services, you run a much better chance of engaging potential customers.

Once you’ve thought up topics, writing down bullet points will only get you so far. Some of the best tools for social media content creation are automation and scheduling apps. With these kinds of software, you can keep your content ideas in one place, create entire posts, save them, schedule them, and automatically post them regardless of whether or not you’re near a computer. Scheduling and automating content helps you use your social media content more strategically and opens more free time for engaging with comments, shares, industry topics, and followers in general.

If done correctly, social media will help your business flourish by increasing its ability to reach others and build its brand. That’s why many businesses hire a social media content creation agency or take time to research and implement a social media strategy on their own. Keep researching, and keep posting!