Social media is powered by content, and if you want your brand profiles to be a true asset for your marketing, you need to create content that’s up to a competitive standard.
Though maximizing the value of your content calls for long-term analysis, experimentation and improvement, having an established workflow in place can be a big help in making sure you’re starting strong and hitting basic markers for success.
If you’re just getting started with social media marketing, or you’re reviewing your campaigns and want to make sure your workflow is serving its purpose, here’s how to create content for social media that will supercharge engagement and fortify your brand equity.
1. Know Your Buyer Personas
Like many forms of marketing, your success on social media is going to be predicated on how well you understand what your audience is looking for.
You’re probably familiar with a few universal traits that are shared across your whole audience, but segmenting this group into more specific personas will help you fine-tune your content iterations, ensure you’re capturing people’s attention, and giving them a compelling reason to take action.
To improve your workflow, we recommend taking some time to review your audience data, and drawing up detailed buyer personas based on variables such as:
- Preferred social media platforms.
- Role, geographic location, and industry sector.
- Company goals.
- Biggest responsibilities and pain points.
When you start the content creation process in a state of intimate familiarity with the audience segment you’re targeting, you’ll simplify future decision-making and set up your content creation for success.
2. Define Your Content’s Message
Armed with a clear idea of the people you’ll be marketing to, the next step is to define the message you’ll broadcast with your content.
When you’re looking at how to create content for social media, it’s important to focus on messages that will feed directly into a stated goal of your wider campaign.
If, for example, the overarching goal of your social media campaign is to generate sales for a new product you’re rolling out, the message of your content might focus on a particular buyer persona’s common pain points and how the features of your product can help to solve them. If your campaign is focused on brand building, on the other hand, you may want to focus on messaging that showcases your status as a thought leader and highlights a piece of long-form content published on your website.
Having a clearly-defined content message will inform higher-quality content and help you determine how you’ll adapt content to different platforms, which brings us to the next step.
3. Choose the Right Channels
The average person uses an average of 6.7 social media platforms, and your key audience segments are likely to be active on at least a few platforms.
While this may lead you to think your content should be visible everywhere where your audience spends their downtime, posting on every social media channel indiscriminately can make your message too diffuse and lead to wasted time and resources.
Aside from focusing on the platforms where your audience is most active, it’s important to consider the messaging of your content and which platforms are going to give you the best outlet for communicating it.
If you’re looking to build your brand and establish yourself as a thought leader, you’re probably not going to be able to share the core points of a recent case study in a TikTok video. This kind of messaging is better suited to social media platforms that are more conducive to text-heavy content, like LinkedIn. You may also be able to generate engagement by sharing the salient points of your study as part of an eye-catching image on Instagram or Facebook, directing users to the full asset with a “link in bio” caption.
These kinds of considerations will ensure your efforts are focused on the social media platforms that are most likely to foster engagement, and help you avoid wasting time and resources by forcing messaging onto a mismatched platform.
4. Ideate and Brainstorm
Now that you’ve got your messaging and platforms aligned, you’re ready to move on to the most challenging step: ideation and brainstorming.
There’s no easy way of learning how to create content for social media that’s a viral success on any given platform. However, considering your message in the context of several different content forms and creation methods can help lead you to “eureka” moments that will help your ideation flow more naturally.
Some potentially effective approaches to consider include:
- Linking your message to emerging trends that are already picking up traction among your audience.
- Encouraging and incentivizing your audience to create user-generated content that amplifies your message to larger groups of followers.
- Interactive content such as polls and quizzes that invite feedback or offer some fun online activity.
- Collaborating with other brands or individual influencers to pool your expertise and further your content reach.
Coming up with great social media content and maintaining an active brand profile can be challenging at the best of times. For a little extra help on your next campaign, try out our range of free generative AI tools for content creation on X, LinkedIn, Instagram and more.
5. Create and Review
Once you’ve got an idea that you’re happy with, create a detailed brief for your copywriters, graphic designers, and anyone else involved in the project to create the draft versions of your social media content.
To brief your idea effectively, make sure you’re clearly stating the message of your content, the overarching goal that will inform the CTA, and some examples of past or competitor content that can be treated as a “gold standard” of quality.
A good rule of thumb for content creation is to approach it with an attitude that everything can be improved, and that your team isn’t going to hit the perfect iteration on their first attempt. You should have a workflow in place for reviewing content, sharing amends, and approval, ideally in a collaborative workspace like the Highperformr collaboration platform.
Having fresh eyes on a piece of content can help you develop it from an idea to a polished final draft, and highlight good ideas that the original creators may not have considered.
6. Adapt, Post, and Monitor
Once you’re happy with the content, the final stage is to adapt it to the platforms you’re going to target, e.g by cropping images or getting the text under a certain word count, then scheduling it for posting based on any available data that tells you when your audience is most likely to engage.
Once the content is live, your work isn’t quite done. It’s crucial to make sure your social media analytics is set up to measure core engagement metrics, such as impressions, likes, comments and more.
Set a date in the future to review the performance of your content, where you’ll consider how well it’s served your goals, what the successes and failures have been, and how you can use these findings to create better content in the future.
Creating Better Content for Social Media
Learning how to create content for social media that will engage your audience and feed your wider business goals isn’t easy. However, when you follow a methodical workflow, you’ll be able to streamline your time and resources and make sure you’re ticking all the right boxes to maximize your chances of success.
For more support on content creation, scheduling, collaboration and more, sign up to Highperformr for free and see how our tool can help your content creation process.
