Social media strategy has become the highest revenue generation procedure for businesses. According to a survey by Wpromote and Ascend2, 60% of US B2B marketers have claimed it to be the top choice in 2023. At the core of any social media marketing approach lies the content. You use various modes of content to communicate with your target audience and establish meaningful and long-lasting connections.
There are new trends in the social media space every day. To deftly execute social media content marketing, you must be hyper-creative and on the pulse of the latest trends 24/7. But that's quite exacting!
If you need more ideas, you are at the right place. This guide will delve deeper into the nitty-gritty of social media marketing and discover the kind of content you should post on different platforms to attain the highest engagements.
The Most Engaging Types of Social Media Content in 2024
Short-Form Video
Short-form video content has taken the marketing landscape by storm. According to a 2022 report by Wyzowl, 73% of customers prefer short-form videos when searching for products and services.
One of the prime reasons behind this is the current fast-paced lifestyle of most individuals. They prefer something that can describe your product or service in the shortest possible time and in a simple yet effective manner. Short-form videos have the potential to carry all of these characteristics.
Where to Post?
The social media platforms most suited to short-form video content include TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. All these outlets have a significant amount of viewers. They have in-built tools that specially cater to the publishing of short-form videos.
Images
While pictures cannot disseminate information as effectively as a video, their main objective is instantly capturing viewers' attention. Your audiences can glean the necessary details in a flash. You can communicate various overt and subliminal messages using the color palette, composition, textual formats, and other minute details. Images are more appealing than text-based content and have become quite a breeze to produce with the advent of high-quality smartphone cameras.
Where to Post?
Dedicated image-hosting social platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are the best choices. They come with a plethora of native filters, effects, and image-editing tools that are ideal for producing eye-catching pictures. You have the option to create business accounts on both platforms and add tags to your images to monetize them.
Live Video
The live video format gained a lot of popularity during the pandemic and hasn't decreased since then. In 2019, live video viewers in the United States totaled 126.7 million. This number jumped to over 150 million by the end of 2020. By 2024, it's projected to reach 164.6 million. Moreover, businesses have seen clear evidence of live video marketing generating revenue.
The significant advantages of live videos come from their interactibility. Audiences experience the missing human element and can ask questions and engage with the presenters directly through Q&A sessions. It also establishes a communal feeling and makes consumers feel like a part of a giant brand family.
Where to Post?
Many platforms can provide you with live-streaming services. But the best of the bunch include Facebook Live, Instagram Live, LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live, and TikTok Live. If you want to include your current audiences in the live videos, Instagram proves to be the best. It brings your followers into your live sessions by displaying them at the top of their stories.
GIFs/Memes
Do you want to connect with a younger demographic? Use memes and graphics interchange format (GIF) bitmap images. Memes and GIFs are born out of relatability. They depict emotions we all experience but can't quite put into words. When you use memes to advertise your content, the experience you provide is perceived to be personalized. Once you can connect with your audiences, they will be eager to share your content with their friends.
Where to Post?
You can post memes on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Avoid Instagram if you plan to post GIFs since they will be published as short videos. Memes and GIFs have the potential to generate a lot of traffic. This was proven through an experiment by Social Media Today. They posted memes and GIFs for three months, resulting in a 12% increase in traffic.
Text-Based Posts
Text-based posts are the vanilla ice cream of social media content. While mundane, they do have their place in the content space. Their usefulness becomes apparent when trying to establish a consistent brand identity. Your brand's personality is reflected in your text posts.
You need to get creative and add humor and spice to these texts so they don't sound too bland or robotic. Use text-based content when forming direct relationships with your consumers through myriad mediums like emails and messages.
Where to Post?
The usual suspects regarding text-based content include Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Reddit is ideal for Q&As and conversations with fans, while LinkedIn is best for sharing thought leadership and articles within your professional network. Twitter reigns supreme for text-based posts, perfect for sharing concise information and news.
User-Generated Content (UGC)
Always encourage your audiences to create content for your brand. When consumers produce content featuring your products, they give you testimonials and proof that your product/service is trustworthy. It helps to nurture a sense of community among your consumers as well. This fosters trust, influencing the decision of most consumers to choose a brand over its competitors.
Where to Post?
Instagram and TikTok are the best places for users to post their content. They can quickly take pics or create engaging short-form videos for these platforms. However, do not assume that consumers will naturally market your brand for you. Always have some online events or incentives in place to encourage the publication of more UGC.
Long-Form Video
The long-form video has remained a staple marketing tool in the social media realm. Businesses have also maintained their investment in long-form video content. Over the past decade, videos lasting more than 30 minutes experienced a staggering growth of 11,000%, contrasting with the 36% growth observed for videos under 30 minutes.
They best perform when used to provide deep insights into topics or as explainer videos. Long-form videos are apt for behind-the-scenes footage of your product development process. It helps you create a compelling narrative and establish a connection with your audience.
Where to Post?
YouTube is the obvious choice here. Facebook is not far behind, either. When you think about watching a video, your mind naturally drifts to YouTube over any other platform. With a monthly active user base exceeding 2.49 billion, that is no surprise. 47% of all internet users worldwide access YouTube each month.
Audio
In this fast-moving world, many tend to multitask. People put on their headphones, turn on a podcast, and continue doing their tasks. The global number of podcast listeners surpasses 464 million, with projections indicating a rise to 504.9 million by 2024.
The popularity of this and other audio marketing mediums is on the rise. It allows your consumers to listen to what you have to say while they perform different activities. Audio enables you to not only spread your message but also respect your customers' time.
Where to Post?
The primary platforms for audio content are undoubtedly Spotify and Apple Podcasts. But don't shy away from video platforms like YouTube either. You can simply upload a long audio file supported with images in the background.
URL/Links to Other Content
Always interlink your publications to create a network of content for your audiences to explore. For instance, you can post a link to your blogs on your social media posts and vice versa or hyperlink your website in all the content you publish, driving more traffic.
You can also enhance customer convenience by adding direct purchase links to product showcases on your social media handles. It not only drives sales but enhances customer experience as well.
Where to Post?
There is no wrong place to post your links. Wherever you think your potential customers will notice a link, try to plug your website or other content. That said, always ensure that the link you post is relevant to the content you are attaching. LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook are the go-to platforms for posting your links. You can also add links to the video descriptions on YouTube and Instagram.
Best Practices for Creating Social Media Content
Knowing what and where to post are the first steps on your social sales strategy journey. Let's look at some pro tips and practices to help you take your social media content to the next level.
1. Leverage Automation To Create and Post Content
Automation is the big equalizer in the battle between human processing capabilities and the ever-increasing volume of big data. With the growing abilities of artificial intelligence, the automation scene is rumbling on smoothly. Most competent social media management software applications boast automation systems. Highperformr, a leading social media management app, automates your Twitter post scheduling and publishing.
Highperformr's powerful AI coach refines and molds your ideas to suit your unique brand voice. It also comes with relevant and automatic thread creation, which can be delayed according to your chosen duration. It helps you focus on what really matters — your content. Leave the stressful, mundane, and repetitive tasks to AI and engage your creative juices to improve your content manifold.
2. Know Your Audience
Understand your audience's preferences, interests, and motivations for engaging with your brand. Utilize this understanding to craft valuable and resonant content that connects with them effectively. To accumulate these insights, you can take the following steps:
- Put Analytics To Use: Use your website and social media to gain insights into the actions of your audiences. It would help if you viewed what nets the highest KPIs, like click-through rates, engagement rates, and other metrics. This will allow you to understand what sort of content most resonates with your viewers. You can also gather data that indicates the demographic segregation of your consumer base and the type of content that attracts them. Use tools like Google Analytics and Highperformr to monitor essential metrics and generate comprehensive reports for your social media success.
- Find Out What's Working for Your Competitors: Monitor what your top competitors do. See how they are raising the numbers and what's working for them. Explore how you can use these techniques within your business framework. Investigate where you might be falling behind and adjust your brand strategy accordingly.
- Indulge in Feedback, Surveys, and Polls: Customer satisfaction is paramount to business success. Circulating feedback forms, asking for opinions on polls and surveys, and putting valid suggestions into action are some of the finest ways to create positive experiences for your audiences. Moreover, simply asking for feedback is seen as a positive attempt at establishing a dialogue with your consumers.
- Create Buyer Personas: Using the demographic and behavioral data you have accumulated, create ideal buyer personas. Manufacture multiple personas belonging to diverse demographics. Utilize these to tailor experiences according to the preferences of these personas to get close to what your audiences are looking for in your social media posts.
3. Choose the Right Format
Selecting the correct format for the chosen platform and audience demographic is a must. This format varies depending on the platform, target audience, and content type. However, there are some general rules to follow when composing social media content. They are as follows:
- Go against the grain and experiment with different formats to discover what your audience truly appreciates.
- Brevity is usually the way to go unless you are dealing with long-form content or explainer videos.
- Create compelling narratives and stories for your brand and connect them to your posts to resonate with your audiences.
- Calls to action (CTAs) are essential. Allow your audiences to connect with you through multiple touchpoints using CTAs.
- Localizing content opens up new avenues for your business. Using the regional language and cultural references allows you to tap into new markets and reinvigorate cold ones.
4. Use Compelling Visuals
Visuals like images and videos are essential to creating engaging social media content. Please make sure they always align with your brand voice and tone. Consistency is key. Brand consistency increases revenue by 10-20%.
Represent the voice of your brand visually using graphic designs. For instance, if your brand focuses on creativity and innovation, make a free-flowing and colorful design. Conversely, if your brand is all about integrity and heritage, go for tight grid-like designs.
Continually optimize your content for various devices. Businesses often ignore mobile devices, although over 40% of the revenue in leading B2B organizations is generated through mobile phones.
5. Write Engaging Captions
First impressions matter a lot. Captions provide your audiences with instant context as to what the rest of the content is talking about. Remember to keep them short, snappy, and impactful. They should resonate with your audiences and create value by solving a particular problem your customers might be dealing with. Add emojis, hashtags, or even lines from popular memes to increase the relatability of your posts.
6. Use Appropriate Hashtags
Hashtags are not simply a fashionable way of providing context. They help your posts gain visibility. Tweets with hashtags see 200% engagement rates compared to those without. But don't go overboard since one or two hashtags will likely yield higher engagement than three or more.
7. Encourage Engagement and UGC
Foster a positive and active community around your products and services by improving engagement with your audiences and encouraging UGC on your social media handles. You can do the following in this regard:
- Ask questions.
- Answer questions through comments.
- Organize polls and publish the results.
- Organize events, challenges, and competitions.
- Promote UGC.
- Give incentives, like discounts or gifts, to customers who create content representing your brand.
8. Post at the Right Time
Timing is critical when it comes to improving engagement rates. There are specific periods when a portion of your audience will be active. It varies depending on the industry you work in, the platforms you are posting on, your target demographic, geographical locations, and more.
Use social media analytics tools like Highperformr to deduce when certain audience groups are most active and target their temporal junctions. Keep time zones in mind when posting regional content. You can also subvert this issue using automatic post-scheduling that adjusts to different time zones without requiring manual inputs.
9. Post Daily
Consistency is a vital parameter when trying to gain your target audience's attention. Create your personalized content calendar and feed it into auto-posting tools like Highperformr. Let it cycle through different content formats like videos, images, and more to touch various sections of your consumer base.
10. Repurpose Content
Don't simply limit content to one singular platform and format. Use it in many ways. Turn long-form videos into 30-second highlights and post them on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. Take text-based content and repurpose it into a video.
Make sure that you optimize the content for various mediums. For instance, change the aspect ratios to optimal ones, depending on where you post videos or turn rectangular images into square pictures for Instagram.
11. Measure and Analyze Results
Social media analytics play an essential role in helping you understand how successful your social media brand strategy truly is. Mark out some KPIs that are essential to your business. This can include but is not limited to impressions, engagement rates, click-through rates, comments, reposts, and other metrics.
Actively use A/B testing to gather insights into what your customers prefer regarding content. Keep an eye on your competitors and understand what's helping them or harming them in their content strategy.
Take all this info and use it to your advantage to mold your social media content strategy accordingly. The refining process is endless, and you must stay committed to it to ensure sustainability and long-term success.
How Can Highperformr Help Create Social Media Content?
Social media content management is not a simple task. Multiple moving parts can easily complicate the system, even for veterans. This is where Highperformr comes in. As a competent social media management application, it helps you gather cross-platform analytics regarding the content you post. You can efficiently manage, track, and compare metrics across various social accounts for your brand within one platform.
Highperformr stands out with its long list of AI tools, advanced analytics, customizable templates and publishing capabilities tailored to the specific social media platforms you use. It goes beyond basic metrics by offering features like Growth Funnel Analysis and Content Topic Analysis, facilitating the creation of impactful posts effortlessly.
Moreover, a significant portion of repetitive tasks can be automated. Auto-posting enhances engagement and liberates valuable time, allowing for greater creative freedom. Highperformr's robust AI coach customizes and shapes your concepts to match your distinct brand voice.
Don't take our words at face value. Sign up to Highperformr for free today and unlock unprecedented social media success!
