Social media has become an obligatory part of virtually every business's digital marketing strategy, and if careful time and attention aren't devoted to it, brand presence, recognition and ultimately profitability can suffer. Making full use of your social media requires having a regular content publishing schedule to feed your followers and customers with the engagement they want and need.
But it isn’t just volume that’s important, quality factors heavily into how well your posts are received, shared and ultimately how much traffic they generate for your website and business. Below are some ways to make your content more engaging and helpful to your overall marketing objective.
Improve Your Command of the English Language
This could easily be changed to “improve your command of whichever language you happen to be posting and doing business in,” but the principles remain the same. If you want your posts to stand out among the chaos of social media and the easily distracted 21st-century consumers you are trying to reach, your content needs to be on point grammatically and to put language together in ways that are concise, helpful and, hopefully, stimulating to read.
One of the first rules to good writing is word economy, and this is something that is really only possible if you have taken the time to study the language and build your vocabulary. There is all manner of ways that you can improve your vocabulary on a daily basis, including subscribing to language and vocabulary apps, but you can also play online games like Scrabble to help hone your language skills. If you are new to Scrabble and are having a hard time putting together winning combinations, there are tools out there to help you unscramble letters and rack up points.
Make it Argumentative
It is important to note here that being argumentative is much different from being confrontational. Argumentative is a word that has acquired somewhat of a negative connotation in our culture because it implies you won’t just allow other people to have their opinions, but if something is argumentative, it can also simply mean that something attempts to make an argument or statement.
The goal with argumentative content, whether it is an article or piece of media you are sharing, or something you have come up with on your own, is to coax your followers and customers to weigh in and either challenge the argument being made, agree with it, or work on reinterpreting or updating the premises and assumptions an argument is based on. If you get people arguing (with you and with each other), their minds are stimulated and they are truly engaging with your content.
Ask For Opinions
If you are running a business or corporate social media account, or even if it is for personal purposes, you don’t always need to be, or at least you don’t always need to appear to be, a fount of wisdom and authority. While you certainly want to be perceived this way, a good way to get people engaging seriously with your content, whether you are sharing an article or just putting up a few sentence post, is to ask your audience for their opinion.
There is ample psychological literature backing up the fact that people love to share their opinions. In fact, there is little that people love sharing more, especially on social media, where screen-to-screen communication tends to make people much more confident and boisterous. This is especially true if the questions you are asking and the opinions you are soliciting concern polarizing topics.
Conclusion
If you want your content and social media channels to be go-to sources of information, entertainment and diversion for your customers and followers, you need to give them a reason to read, look at and watch what you post and to divert their attention from the myriad other things they could be viewing. Keep the above principles in mind while you are strategizing your upcoming content and be the social media presence that people share, follow and engage with.
Laura Birch is a freelance writer covering digital marketing with a focus on building great content. She also writes about social media trends and pets. When she is not writing, she is reading or taking her dogs to the park.
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