Stay active on social media. Post more often. Keep your audience engaged. This is the advice you must have heard when stepping into or managing your business’s social networks.
But as a social media manager, posting often, staying active, and engaging your audience is easier said than done. Because all of this requires content, and not just any content, but good, engaging, and valuable content. And how can you create that every day without dedicating your entire life to social media?
We’ll show you how.
In this article, we are revealing some insightful ways you can create excellent content without much effort to keep your social media feed fresh and your audience engaged.
Let’s dive in.
Why do you need more social content?
As a social media marketer, you already know you have to post often on social media. It has been drilled inside your brain, and the thought now runs in your veins. But have you ever wondered why you need more social content?
Higher Conversions
98% of marketers believe they make sales through social media. But to make a sale, you need an engaged audience so that you can convert your followers into leads and then funnel them through conversion. And to engage your audience and keep them engaged, what do you need? You guessed it. More content!
When you post content more often, you increase your brand’s exposure to people. They become more aware of what you offer. Basically, you bring them into the top of your conversion funnel. And when the need arises or is triggered, they immediately think of you and turn into qualified leads, which are then easier to convert.
Higher output greater engagement
A fully engaged customer has a 23% higher share in the revenue. Why? Because engaged audience converts.
Additionally, increased engagement enables you to build a community of your trusted customers to whom you can reach out for feedback and enhance your brand’s approach and boost customer loyalty.
Keeping your audience engaged with good quality content enhances their brand experience, and 86% of people are willing to pay more for a better experience. Do you see how important it is?
When you post content more often, you allow your customers to engage with your brand. With each content that goes live, your brand wins a chance to get likes, shares, comments, or retweets out of your existing and even new customers.
More content, more data
A successful social media marketing strategy is defined by social media analytics and data. You can estimate the importance of social analytics by the fact that 81% of businesses appear to use social publishing and analytics tools.
You publish a post and then track its metrics to see how well it has performed with your audience. If it did good, you do more of what you did in that post. If it didn’t do like you wanted it to, you would optimize your content strategy.
This means social media content is a source of critical data that helps optimize your social content strategy. The more content you post, the more data you can extract and optimize your strategy to create content that resonates with your audience and keeps them engaged.
Improves customer satisfaction
Do you know what your customers want? 64% of people surveyed claimed that they want brands to connect with them. And what’s better than social channels to reach out to and connect with your audience.
As discussed above, high-quality content keeps the audience engaged, and when it keeps on coming regularly, it builds a connection between the brand and its audience. And since customers want you to connect with them, doing exactly that will boost customer satisfaction.
Now you know why you need to post more content on your social media channels. Great. But where exactly do you bring ideas that can keep your content stream flowing like a fire hose? Let’s see how.
How to create more social content?
Creating social content can easily open a rabbit hole and suck your time away. You can spend days on end researching content ideas and creating social posts. But that’s not an efficient way to approach social media marketing.
Here’s how you can craft excellent social posts quickly, and use the saved up time to boost your business, brainstorm ideas, or simply relax:
1- Get organized
All time-saving methods start with getting organized. It helps you see your tasks clearly and work on them on dedicated times to save your entire day from being spent on doing one thing only.
So, create a schedule and set aside a specific time in the day to focus on generating social media content ideas and creating social posts. Have a separate time slot for analyzing your posts’ performance and invest in a social media analytics tool that can help you assess all your social posts’ data through one comprehensive dashboard.
When you have time slots dedicated to each task and a time limit to complete these tasks, you are likely to experience a boost in your productivity and get them done quickly.
Secondly, create a content calendar to see which post will go live when and schedule all your posts using a social media publishing tools.
In this way, you will be able to see how your content looks when arranged in subsequent order, and you will not have to worry about logging in to your accounts every time you need to post.
Organizing your schedule and integrating an automated social publishing tool will help you stay focused and avoid wasting time on unnecessary research. All your tasks will be segregated, your content arranged, and ready to go.
If you think this approach is useless in driving results for your social media, think again. Think results marketing, a social marketing agency, brought excellent results for Lazarex, a non-profit Cancer Foundation.
They developed a strategy that included scheduling and creating a social calendar. And with this strategy, they saw a 242% increase in their Facebook reach, a 553% increase in Twitter reach and a 200% increase in engagement.
2- Collect content ideas
Content idea generation is the most challenging part of a social media content strategy. You open link after link, go through post after post to get inspiration, some relevant post, a quote, but end up with nothing. This wastes a lot of time and drains all your energy.
So, Neil Patel, the digital marketing guru, suggests collecting content ideas as you go. For example, you are scrolling your Instagram, and you see a cute cat video that you think you can repost on your stories later in the week. Save it for use later.
Create a content collection system where you can save all the posts, links, and pictures etc., that you’ve found share-worthy.
Neil Patel uses the Evernote app. You can too.
Dedicate a part of the day to collect content ideas for the entire week. For example, Monday 10 am to 12 noon is your idea collection time. In this time, go through your social accounts, rummage through Google news to find relevant pieces you can share later on, and look through YouTube to find inspiration that can keep your stream running.
Save whatever content you find in this period on a different folder, and then schedule it to go live on your feed as it is. Or use it as an inspiration to quickly create your own content.
Completing the research beforehand and having content ideas handy help you create exceptional content effortlessly.
3- Repurpose your existing content
You spend hours upon hours creating and perfecting a social post, only for it to be missed by your target audience. What do you do? Flush your efforts down the drain? No! You reuse this post.
50% of your articles receive eight or fewer shares. If you have posted something on social media, that doesn’t necessitate that your audience has seen it. Most of the time, they just scroll past it. You have to make your peace with these facts and use them to convince yourself to reuse your existing content.
There are many ways you can reuse and repurpose content.
You can either share the same blog post multiple times, share the same tweet again and again or convert a blog post into an infographic.
When it comes to repurposing, the ideas are unlimited
And repurposing does not only provide you with more content to post. It also helps convert visitors because repurposing helps re-targeting your audience with a post, and there’s a 70% higher chance of converting re-targeting visitors.
Let’s explain it with an example.
Say you created a blog post that did not get too many views. Instead of wailing about lack of views, you reshared the blog post after some time, and it came across people who saw it the first time but scrolled past it. Now, when they see it the second time, they’ll be intrigued. They may scroll past it again. But when they see it the third time, they’ll be compelled, almost convinced, to click it.
So, never ignore the power of repurposing. However, tread carefully with reusing content. You don’t want to come off as spammy, annoying, or lazy.
4- Leverage user-generated content
Customers are 2.4% more likely to view user-generated content as more authentic than brand-curated content. And that’s your cue to rope in your users and leverage UGC to keep your feed brimming with authentic and compelling content without much effort. Or no effort at all. There are many ways you can build upon UGC. You can use your customer reviews and post them on your feed with a compelling caption. Or ask your users to take pictures of your products
and share them with a branded hashtag that you can reshare. Or you can hire influencers to create content for you in exchange for complimentary products (nano influencers may do that, you know).
Here’s how Doritos Canada leveraged UGC with a branded hashtag:
Just make sure to always ask permission before sharing a user’s content and give something in return. For example, you can announce a giveaway contest where the user who created the best branded content wins something. That’s what GoPro did, and it worked wonders for them.
GoPro has always leveraged user-generated content. Their Instagram feed is flooded with content sent in by their customers.
However, at the launch of their Hero8 black and max camera, they started the GoPro Million Dollar Challenge. They asked their users to send in videos shot with Hero8, and all the best video creators will get an equal share of a million dollars.
At the end of the campaign, they created a promotional video by compiling all the user-generated clips and used it on their social channels.
This campaign did not only drive higher sales for the new camera, but it provided GoPro with video content that won them the Shorty Award for Best UGC and, not to forget, lots of free publicity.
Check out their YouTube views:
5- Host an AMA
AMA or ask me anything is a customer or followers engagement tactic native to Reddit. But it has now gained popularity among other social channels as well.
Facebook and Instagram have made it a lot easier for their users to host AMAs. Instagram users use the “Ask Me A Question” story widget to collect questions from their followers and answer them on their stories. This gives them a massive collection of content to keep their audience engaged.
You can plan and launch an AMA campaign in the same way by collecting the questions beforehand through your social channels. Or you can announce that you are going live and, if you are brave enough, field the questions live.
Just make sure to promote your AMA properly, prepare for it, and brainstorm some FAQs that you can answer in case no questions come up (embarrassing).
Hosting AMAs requires minimal effort and is an excellent way to keep your community engaged with authentic and valuable content.
6- Use Memes
If you think meme marketing is a fad, you are mistaken. Memes have taken business social media by storm, and big social media profiles have started using them as an attempt to keep their audience entertained and engaged.
Memes are unmatched when it comes to low-effort content. The template is already there. You just have to fill it in with relevant text. And that too has been made easy with tools like Canva.
You can create memes relevant to your brand or post random memes here and there to engage your audience, help them see your human side, and build a connection.
Here’s how dog products and services provider uses memes:
Just be sure to create original content, even if you use one of the stock memes images. Stay on brand and avoid foul humor, and your audience will love you for your meme marketing!
Here’s how we created a meme in under five minutes using Canva:
Conclusion
Many social media creators struggle with keeping their feed fresh with authentic and valuable content. And rightly so, because creating such content requires extensive research and smart creation tools.
But, there are content ideas that you can execute to keep your social profiles brimming with interesting and engaging content without too much effort or investment.
You can repurpose your existing content, leverage user-generated content, or even include memes in your content strategy.
No matter what you do, always begin with getting organized by creating a content calendar and scheduling your post. And collect content ideas as you see them, so you don’t burn your time and energy in content research.
