We all know about the tremendous potential social media marketing can have for growing a brand online. However, with so many brands competing for exposure, making an impact with a social media content strategy can be more than a little challenging.
If you’ve started to roll out your content strategy in earnest but the impact on your KPIs has been a little lackluster, there are a number of quick optimizations you can use to supercharge your content and encourage the results you’re aiming for.
Here’s six of the quickest and easiest practices you can use to improve your social media marketing content strategy.
1. Keep Consistent and Active
The average social media user follows well over 100 different accounts on any given platform, so you’ll need to ensure your profile stands out from the noise if you want to generate meaningful engagement.
Though there’s no single answer to how you can ensure content quality, keeping your profiles consistently active will have a number of benefits for your social media content strategy, including:
- Showing your audience that you’re an authentic presence on the platform and committed to providing them with interesting and entertaining content.
- Maintaining interest and reducing your rate of unfollows.
- Strengthening the relationship with your customers through frequent interactions and two-way communication.
- Establishing yourself as an authority on the topic you’re writing about.
One of the common issues brands face when they first launch social media marketing is struggling to come up with fresh content ideas while trying to maintain a proactive, consistent schedule.
If this sounds all too familiar, we recommend creating a social media content calendar that gives you a long-range view of your future posts, and avoids your posting schedule catching up with you when you’re unprepared.
By looking ahead and keeping your calendar populated with evergreen content, you can ensure a consistent level of posting activity while interspersing posts with more reactive content based on developing news.
2. Enhance Visual Content
The quality of your images and other visual content is going to be a clear signal of your level of professionalism, and whether or not following your account is going to be worth someone’s time.
You may have a long-term vision for hiring a graphic design expert to help consistently build assets that are both high-quality and unique. In the meantime, however, there are plenty of more accessible tools you can use to upgrade the quality of your visual content, and bolster your social media content strategy.
Some of the best free and affordable tools on the market include:
- Google Fonts, a vast typography library that lets you browse and download a diverse range of fonts, giving your visual content a more distinctive character.
- Canva, a popular design tool that has countless free, customizable templates to suit a variety of different uses, including social media posts.
- Coolors, a color palette generator that helps you find harmonious color palettes that are cohesive with your brand and effective for building a sense of familiarity with your audience.
- Picmonkey, free and intuitive photo editing tool for creating unique photo assets.
3. Ensure Two-Way Communication
When someone mentions “content strategy for social media”, your mind probably jumps to photos, infographics, and videos scrolling along in your audience’s feed. However, the effectiveness of your content doesn’t stop at the visual elements.
The conversation that goes on beneath your posts will have a tremendous impact on how much your audience engages with your social media content, and how likely they are to stay in your brand’s orbit in the long run.
By encouraging two-way communication on various social media platforms, you can enhance the value of your content, make your audience feel more valued, and give you a new channel with which to analyze your audience sentiment.
Some of the best ways to generate two-way communication as part of your content strategy include:
- Asking questions and running opinion polls to generate a public conversation around topics that are relevant to your audience.
- Humanize your social media accounts by talking in the first person, sharing behind-the-scenes content from your business, and using humor.
- Responding promptly to questions from your audience, without resorting to generic “cookie cutter” advice.
With these techniques and more, you can consistently attach engaging conversations to all the content you publish, and associate your brand with a higher degree of value in the eyes of your audience.
4. Participate in Trends – But Stay Unique!
Using trending topics as part of your social media content strategy can be an easy yet effective way to increase engagement and make your brand relevant to the conversation, provided it’s approached in the right way.
Set some time aside to analyze active accounts with a topical relation to your brand, along with using in-built social media features that highlight trending topics or third-party tools like Google Trends.
These tools will make it easy to focus on topics that a lot of people are talking about, and take advantage of the buzz by adding your own content to the conversation.
Remember it can be easy to overdo this approach to social media content marketing. Whenever you’re looking to post content related to a particular trend, remember to:
- Keep it timely, and avoid investing in content that seems to be past its peak or tapering off in popularity.
- Only create content related to trends that have an authentic topical relation to your brand, and avoid forcing a square peg into a round hole.
- Make sure your content is authentic and original and not derivative of competitors or accounts in the same industry space.
5. Constantly Improve
When it comes to social media content marketing, nothing is static. There are many different variables that will dictate the success of a given campaign, and what might work for your close competitors might have drastically different effects if you take a similar route.
Ultimately, the most important things you can do to improve your social media content marketing strategy is adopt a habit of constantly analyzing the impact of your content, learning lessons from the data, and improving your campaigns based on these.
Over time, this will better align your marketing with your audience’s behaviors and the nuances of different platforms for better results with every campaign.
Some of the best ways to ensure your content is in a state of constant improvement include:
- Initiating campaigns with clear, measurable goals to enable useful reviews at their conclusion.
- A/B testing variables like posting time, content formats, hashtags, and more to find patterns and determine best practices.
- Paying attention to direct and indirect feedback from your audience to establish what different audiences are most likely to respond to.
- Studying competitor successes and failures to understand the momentum of different content marketing trends.
6. Increase Efficiency With Free Tools
Like any kind of digital marketing, it’s important to have reliable analytics so you can measure the impact of your social media content and make incremental improvements. When you’re just getting started with social media marketing, however, it can be difficult or impossible to decide which paid analytics tools are right for you.
In the meantime, getting familiar with the major social media platforms’ free analytics suites can facilitate real-time monitoring of your content’s performance, empowering you to recognize the common threads between your most successful content and use these to inform your strategy going forward.
While these tools may not give you the same level of detail as paid social media analytics suites, learning how to use them will give you a free and easy way to make decisions based on core engagement metrics, including:
- Audience growth.
- Engagement by way of views, comments, and shares.
- Click-through rate.
- Demographic data.
Although these analytics suites are fairly robust, shifting from one platform to another can quickly pile on the admin hours when analyzing your campaigns. For a user-friendly analytics tool that collates data streams from all your social media platforms, check out our social media analytics suite today!
Of course, the utility of free tools doesn’t stop at analytics. Today, there are an array of free tools to help innovate and support your social media content strategy, like our own great selection of free AI social media tools which have been designed for an array of social media content creation tasks.
Supercharge Your Social Media Content
Building a truly great social media content strategy is never easy. However, by making incremental improvements to various facets of your campaigns and adopting a habit of constant improvement, you’ll soon be able to develop more meaningful interactions with your audience and make it easier to move the needle in your core marketing KPIs.
For more support with your social media marketing, sign up to Highperformr for free and start amplifying your presence across social media platforms.
