What Makes a Good Social Media Post?

We all know how important social media is in marketing and how much businesses benefit from it. However, whilst most people are able to use social media platforms for marketing purposes, there are strategies to apply and consider before creating a social media post, in order to get a positive response from your customers and achieve your goals. Although there’s many things to consider, we will focus on 4 key methods that would help you create social media content that’s effective.

Know your audience

To make a successful social media post, you need to know who you are targeting and what they want. You need to know key information such as their age, location, gender, occupation (possibly), which may define how you approach your audience when creating content. To do this, you can use social media built in analytics (which platforms such as Facebook, twitter and Instagram have) to be able to see who engages in the type of content you wish to produce. Doing this gives you the opportunity to see the type of company that make similar content – which will be your competitors. As you see how your competitors approach their audience, you can go down the same path using original ideas to be able to stand out in your own way.

Make unique strategies that applies to your audience

Once you know who your audience are and see what your competitors are doing, you will need to create your own ideas on what you would like to include on your social media post. As you do this, you must bear in mind that each social media platform is different. Therefore, it’s key to produce content that applies to your audience on the social media platform you’re posting on. For example, Instagram is image based. You may need to post something that has less information but create or use an image that’s eye catching and conveys what you want your audience to see. On the other hand, LinkedIn focuses more on content and formal statements that you can back up with image. Therefore, it’s important to have specific strategies for each platform to ensure it is applicable and relevant to your consumers on the appropriate platform.

Prioritise your quality over quantity

Many businesses go with the idea of posting regularly and being ‘present’. Whilst doing this isn’t particularly bad, what tends to happen when we undertake this method is the quality of the content begins to fade. It’s important to put quality over quantity when creating posts as you’d find that some social media platforms tend to suspend accounts due to having low-quality posts and people begin to label your page and posts as spam. You want to put yourself in a position where customers respect your brand and looking forward to your posts more than anything.

Maintain your brand identity at all times

As mentioned already, it’s key to create your own ideas after researching your audience. One of the main reasons for this, is because you need to be able to reflect your brand’s ethos to your audience and ensure they know what you’re all about. Brand identity is key as it’s what separates you from everyone else. When you’re making a social media post, you always have to remember who you’re representing and what you’re all about. This will direct how you wish to be perceived by your audience and in turn gain their attention and trust.

It's important to point out once more, that these 4 points are not the only elements to consider, as there’s many other key points to consider such as measuring your goals and results, remaining professional in your content and comments as well as always making sure to interact with your consumers. Nevertheless, these principals are key when it comes to creating a social media post on any platforms as they are starting points to create successful content.