Finding something to publish on your social media channels so that your content is always fresh and interesting for your audience is difficult, but not impossible. People often make a banal mistake and publish content that is neither customized nor optimized for their followers, content that only serves to fill a page that would be empty otherwise. Worse, they often do nothing more than sharing old things, adding no new information. In the age of TV, when the spots were boring one would lower the volume until the program resumed. Or one would even switch to another channel. In the age of social media, things are even worse: if we cause the reader to get bored, the result is that they will abandon our channels to follow the endless other sources that offer more interesting content on the web. Here are a few pointers to avoid that.

If you want to turn your social content strategy around, you need first to take a step back and ask yourself two questions.

One: who is my audience? Define the demographics of your readers and write them down: age, gender, geographical location, interests. It is paramount to always keep front of mind what is your target, who are the people you speak to, with their specific tastes and interests. If you don’t know your readers, how will you be able to entertain them, and to find the right way to do that?

The second question to ask yourself is the following: what does my audience want? The goal of each piece of content is to get read, but to reach that goal you need to give your audience a good reason to stay on your page. You need to win your readers over, but then you also need to keep them engaged.

An example? Give your readers something that they don’t have: a tip, the answer to a problem, or just a reason to laugh out loud. If you can be funny, people will listen to you also when you decide to be serious. But don’t forget to keep in line with your TOV (tone of voice). To wit: if your page usually offers content that is serious in tone, it makes no sense to publish a Ceres-like post; your followers could be confused by it, and you would get the opposite result.

Once you have analyzed your audience, where can you find content that is really interesting and engaging? If you only talk about yourself, of your products and services, it grows old fast. As a matter of fact, this is the best way to make even the most attached followers disappear. Imagine that you want to make a good impression on a person you care a lot for. You invite them out to dinner and you only talk about yourself for hours. Can you see how your date gets bored and wishes they could run away? It’s more or less the same on social media.

When choosing content to publish on your social media channels, keep in mind that, to engage the interest of an audience, each piece of content needs to have at least one of the following components:

1. Educate: the content includes pieces of information that the reader didn’t know about, or only knew superficially.

2. Entertain: the content or story keeps readers entertained and glued to the screen.

3. Inspire: if a piece of content evokes an emotion, it strikes gold. The emotional factor goes often hand in hand with viral content. People share stories that leverage specific moods and feelings. But this doesn’t mean that it’s easy to do it. You need to study, analyze and be very creative.

4. Engage: people are more and more used to interact on social networks. That’s why it is advisable to create polls, quizzes, and to encourage comments to your posts. Your followers will feel they belong with what you offer, and the social media algorithm, be it on Facebook or some other platform, will be grateful.

Oscar Giacomin  / General Manager, Facto Edizioni

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