10 Tips for Your Social Media Content

Successful social media marketing always demands a steady stream of new content to keep your target audience interested and enthusiastic, but you should also try to avoid making your material too commercial. On social media channels, it’s important to communicate honestly and authentically with your target group. If you can offer your current and prospective customers added value, this will have a positive effect on your company and your products.

Try to feature plenty of informative and entertaining contributions as well as expert advice. In the following article, we offer you some ideas on how to find and generate new topics for your social media presence.

Tip 1: Use existing company knowledge to find suitable topics

Your colleagues from Customer Services and Community Management know exactly which questions and problems are in the minds of your customers. Does one particular question about the correct use of your product frequently come up? If your customers cannot make good use of your product, they will be annoyed and may feel like venting their frustration on social media. It’s always important to keep your customers’ needs in mind, especially when there are problems or concerns.

A sensible approach would be to answer frequently asked questions with appropriate content. For example, create a short video showing a product used correctly, or interview the developer of the product. Once you become an expert on a particular topic, your customers and followers will come back regularly.

Tip 2: Carefully monitor your posts on a consistent basis

Regular monitoring of your social media platforms is an important task. You should analyze how individual posts are received by your target group by checking the number of likes and how many posts have been shared. If your target group proves to be less active around the time of your posts, that is something you should consider as part of your editorial and production plan.

Tip 3: Keep an eye on your competitors

Look carefully at whatever content your competitors are posting online. Whilst you should not recycle any of these articles or ideas, you should analyze and assess how they are received. You can potentially learn a lot from studying your competitors’ material – Facebook has a feature that allows you to automatically monitor your most important competitors.

Tip 4: Focus on what makes you unique

Analyze the strengths of your products and the services you offer together with the specialist expertise of your employees. Once you have worked out your company’s unique selling points, or USPs, you already have your first topics. Now, whenever you develop new production methods or create innovative machines, this too will be worth reporting. The same applies when you open a new branch or launch a subsidiary, or if you expand your business abroad.

Tip 5: Product-related topics

Look carefully at the environment in which your products and services are featured. For example, if you make cookware, then recipes will make excellent supplementary material.  You can publish lots of new recipes during the course of the year. If you build lawn mowers, offer themes based around yards and gardens. If there are interesting developments in your industry, perhaps stringent legal requirements or new policy proposals, you can present the details in a report.

Tip 6: Anniversaries and more

Integrate seasonal themes, holidays and anniversaries into your editorial plan. In addition to featuring your own topics, this will also help you become successfully integrated within the community. It’s important to take note of popular hashtags and use them in your posts. This will help guarantee that your own topics achieve a wider reach.

Tip 7: How does your target group communicate with you?

Attentive listening is your top task on social media. You should regularly read the comments posted under blogs and social media posts and use them as inspiration for new topics. Fans and followers will often immediately comment on some aspect of a topic that has been overlooked in a post, or ask questions that you can then answer in another post.

In addition, pay careful attention to the tone of the comments. This kind of analysis will give you a feel for which topics are working very well with your target group and which are being ignored or viewed critically.

Tip 8: How do your customers locate you?

As part of your monitoring, you should also check which pages your customers are targeting. The topics appearing on these blogs, forums or websites will provide you with more ideas for appropriate content.

Talk to colleagues with a good knowledge of SEO. They can give you tips on which particular terms you should use in your posts.

Tip 9: Forum discussions

Search for your company and products on well-known portals and forums. In what context do you get mentioned? What questions and problems are discussed? Here too, a variety of questions and critical comments can provide you with some fresh approaches.

Tip 10: Deploying clever tools to find suitable content

You will find a variety of tools, apps, and plug-ins on the web to help you research fruitful sources of relevant content. For instance, with Buzzsumo you can easily identify content that is shared via social media. This online service will show you a broad range of articles, videos and other forms of contribution relevant to your chosen keyword that will inspire you with some new ideas. Also, you can see which aspects of topics are of particular interest and which receive relatively little attention. Buzzsumo is available in a free, entry-level version and as a paid service with additional features.

Which topics are best for certain social media channels?

Finding interesting and relevant topics to add value for your target group is an important first step. However, you must then decide which social media platforms to use when publishing your content.

Post more business-related topics on LinkedIn. This network is suitable for well-written text contributions, which may also be a little longer than usual. You can adopt a more playful approach on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. With Facebook, it’s not easy to attract attention due to the high volume of content. For this reason, text contributions alone are often less effective on popular social media platforms. The solution here is to illustrate your article by choosing appropriate images or incorporating a short video.

Instagram focuses on photos and videos, so pictures of texts will gain less attention. Look for a clever choice of hashtags to ensure your contributions are widely distributed. Twitter imposes a natural limit on verbosity by limiting contributions to 140 characters per tweet. Likewise, contributions with links, GIFs, photos or short videos will attract more attention.

Establish the needs and interests of your target group

The key feature of your content marketing should be its focus on your target group. Right from the start, take time to explore the needs and interests of your customers and fans. Provide interesting, up-to-date and useful (but also entertaining) information in a variety of different formats. Also note, and take into consideration, the special features of various social media channels.

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