7 Types Of Social Media Content to Drive Engagement
7 Types Of Social Media Content to Drive Engagement
Uma Bhat
Wed, 07/11/2018 - 15:02
Do people crave for variety when it comes to food? Yes Undoubtedly!
But do you think your social media audience is also craving for variety content every single day? Again undoubtedly yes, they are looking forward to read different types of content on social media.
Time and again it’s been proven that your social media audience is craving for unique, informative, thoughtful and actionable content.
Surprise and offer your social media users with different variety of content instead of serving them with the same content over and over again.
Here are 7 different types of social media content that can evoke action and engagement from your audience.
Content With Incentives
You are creating content with an aim that audience will read and eventually convert into leads. But if you want them to read your content, should you not convince them?
You got to show them the carrot and allow them to chase the carrot. But how do you really encourage your readers to read your content?
According to Levitt and Dubner, they write in their world famous book, ‘Freakonomics’ that there are three kinds of incentives: monetary, social and moral. Content can attract audience with the help of any of these incentives or a combination of these.
Monetary incentives can show how a product or service can save their time and money, or ho w they can increase their sales, how they can make more money using your product, and so on.
Social incentives can motivate your audience who feel belonged to the society and nature. When people who belong to the same society as yours are talking and sharing a word about the latest product that they bought, it is but natural for a human being to accept that as evidence. Content with social proof, where many others already using the products, add the much needed trust factor.
Moral incentive is all about being responsible for your own acts. When audience can associate a product with a social cause, it evokes an interest in supporting the brand that supports the social cause. When there is a content about saving the environment, people with special interest about this topic can easily connect with your content.
The below was a simple yet effective advertisement by P & G to fight gender bias and work towards equality for all.
Content With Visuals
Did you know that eyes can process 36,000 visual messages per hour!! Quite impressive, right?
With so much of content on the social media, you don’t have more than few seconds to catch the attention of your audience. Here visuals play a great role; it will certainly help you to stand out in the crowd.
Visuals can be processed faster and better to produce a stronger reaction when compared to any other type of content. Visuals influence the retention of the information and there by user engagement.
With visuals, you can condense a whole lot of information into a beautiful image that tell a story by itself.
Visual can be in the form on infographics, vidoes, images, gifs and presentations. Not every visual have same effect. An image in a particular place such as the blog banner evokes different reaction compared to the video on Youtube. Use visuals wisely and at appropriate places to enhance the social media engagement.
Related Content: 10 Video Content Marketing Ideas That Every Marketer Should Know
Content With Guidelines
Content that has detailed guides on a particular topic is very popular since it becomes a reference document or a manual for the social media audience who want to learn in depth about a product or service before they buy it. They look out for guidelines mostly just after making half way decisions relating to buy the product. The guides can be a game changer and push the half decision into a decision to buy.
The audiences expect the guidelines to cover many aspects such as the method to use the product, the ingredients of the product, carbon prints, people involved in producing the product, social message, packing, materials that go into producing the product and so on. This guide gives them the confidence regarding the numerous questions that they had in their mind.
For example the below guide on twitter marketing by Sproutsocial will enable you to start using twitter by reading the blog post.
Content With Customer Experiences
Customers are the heart of your brand, and when content is woven around their experiences, it will work wonders.
When you go above and beyond to create delightful customer experiences, this in itself becomes content for your audience. Capturing customer experiences by requesting them to share their feedback and opinion about your products can be useful content strategy.
Convert the satisfactory messages and comments from your customers into testimonials, quotes, interviews, images or even a case study. These experiences when shared on social media tend to become a driving force for many more purchase decisions.
See how Cloohawk converted the positive feedback of its customer, Disability Foundation, into a case study that explains the pain points of the customer and how Cloohawk was able to solve their problems.
5 Ways Hootsuite+Cloohawk Helped Us Drive the Message of Inclusion
Content With Lists
Many times it is the easiest and the most effective way to present your content in the form of clear bulleted list that is to the point and convey the message in short and clear format.
When the content is neatly bulleted and numbered with sub headings, it is easier for the reader to go over the list and pick and choose the bullets that are of importance to the reader thereby reducing the time spent on reading the entire text.
The content presented in the list form makes it easier for the reader to find it while searching on the social media, easier to remember due to its arrangement into bullets and also actionable.
For example when your audience is looking at reasons why they should use social media marketing for their business, it becomes easy if the reasons are listed down.
Content That Evokes Interaction
Earlier it was true that content is the king but now it has travelled further ahead and we can confidently say that ‘Interactive content is the King’.
When you share content that is not just meant to be read, but also needs engagement with the creator of the content, then it qualifies as interactive content.
It’s so true when William Comcowich, CEO of CyberAlert, says,
“Content marketing is less about the words and more about the experiences you create for the audience.”
Interactive content should be able to get the email address of your audience, increase lead generation, improve link building, drive more traffic to your website and eventually more signups.
There are different types of interactive content such as quizzes, polls, surveys, videos, calculators, personality tests, assessments, and much more that you can incorporate into your content strategy.
For example, look at the health survey. It is engaging enough to convince people to complete all the steps.
Content That Evokes Strong Emotions
According to research reports of Wharton Business School, there is a strong relationship between emotion and virality, regardless of whether it is positive or negative.
When a person sees an emotional video, image or text, the content is bound to be shared in their social circles. This type of content has higher chances of creating emotional engagement with your audience.
Create content based on 6 key emotions: joy, surprise, anger, fear, disgust and sadness. Create a unique and strong message that can drive your audience to immediately share without thinking further. When your content triggers emotional response, it is sure to be shared.
For example, the adorable Dear Kitten video series created by BuzzFeed has attracted millions of views on social media.
Conclusion
If you are a social media marketer, then you are constantly looking at your content to check if there are likes, comments, shares and retweets for your posts.
But have you really got the content that gets you the engagement?
Have you really understood the kind of content that gets this social media attention?
When you are eager and want to try out different types of content for your social media marketing strategy, then the above discussed 7 types of content will be able to help you to schedule engaging content on your social pages.
Uma Bhat
Wed, 07/11/2018 - 15:02
Do people crave for variety when it comes to food? Yes Undoubtedly!
But do you think your social media audience is also craving for variety content every single day? Again undoubtedly yes, they are looking forward to read different types of content on social media.
Time and again it’s been proven that your social media audience is craving for unique, informative, thoughtful and actionable content.
Surprise and offer your social media users with different variety of content instead of serving them with the same content over and over again.
Here are 7 different types of social media content that can evoke action and engagement from your audience.
Content With Incentives
You are creating content with an aim that audience will read and eventually convert into leads. But if you want them to read your content, should you not convince them?
You got to show them the carrot and allow them to chase the carrot. But how do you really encourage your readers to read your content?
According to Levitt and Dubner, they write in their world famous book, ‘Freakonomics’ that there are three kinds of incentives: monetary, social and moral. Content can attract audience with the help of any of these incentives or a combination of these.
Monetary incentives can show how a product or service can save their time and money, or ho w they can increase their sales, how they can make more money using your product, and so on.
Social incentives can motivate your audience who feel belonged to the society and nature. When people who belong to the same society as yours are talking and sharing a word about the latest product that they bought, it is but natural for a human being to accept that as evidence. Content with social proof, where many others already using the products, add the much needed trust factor.
Moral incentive is all about being responsible for your own acts. When audience can associate a product with a social cause, it evokes an interest in supporting the brand that supports the social cause. When there is a content about saving the environment, people with special interest about this topic can easily connect with your content.
The below was a simple yet effective advertisement by P & G to fight gender bias and work towards equality for all.
Content With Visuals
Did you know that eyes can process 36,000 visual messages per hour!! Quite impressive, right?
With so much of content on the social media, you don’t have more than few seconds to catch the attention of your audience. Here visuals play a great role; it will certainly help you to stand out in the crowd.
Visuals can be processed faster and better to produce a stronger reaction when compared to any other type of content. Visuals influence the retention of the information and there by user engagement.
With visuals, you can condense a whole lot of information into a beautiful image that tell a story by itself.
Visual can be in the form on infographics, vidoes, images, gifs and presentations. Not every visual have same effect. An image in a particular place such as the blog banner evokes different reaction compared to the video on Youtube. Use visuals wisely and at appropriate places to enhance the social media engagement.
Related Content: 10 Video Content Marketing Ideas That Every Marketer Should Know
Content With Guidelines
Content that has detailed guides on a particular topic is very popular since it becomes a reference document or a manual for the social media audience who want to learn in depth about a product or service before they buy it. They look out for guidelines mostly just after making half way decisions relating to buy the product. The guides can be a game changer and push the half decision into a decision to buy.
The audiences expect the guidelines to cover many aspects such as the method to use the product, the ingredients of the product, carbon prints, people involved in producing the product, social message, packing, materials that go into producing the product and so on. This guide gives them the confidence regarding the numerous questions that they had in their mind.
For example the below guide on twitter marketing by Sproutsocial will enable you to start using twitter by reading the blog post.
Content With Customer Experiences
Customers are the heart of your brand, and when content is woven around their experiences, it will work wonders.
When you go above and beyond to create delightful customer experiences, this in itself becomes content for your audience. Capturing customer experiences by requesting them to share their feedback and opinion about your products can be useful content strategy.
Convert the satisfactory messages and comments from your customers into testimonials, quotes, interviews, images or even a case study. These experiences when shared on social media tend to become a driving force for many more purchase decisions.
See how Cloohawk converted the positive feedback of its customer, Disability Foundation, into a case study that explains the pain points of the customer and how Cloohawk was able to solve their problems.
5 Ways Hootsuite+Cloohawk Helped Us Drive the Message of Inclusion
Content With Lists
Many times it is the easiest and the most effective way to present your content in the form of clear bulleted list that is to the point and convey the message in short and clear format.
When the content is neatly bulleted and numbered with sub headings, it is easier for the reader to go over the list and pick and choose the bullets that are of importance to the reader thereby reducing the time spent on reading the entire text.
The content presented in the list form makes it easier for the reader to find it while searching on the social media, easier to remember due to its arrangement into bullets and also actionable.
For example when your audience is looking at reasons why they should use social media marketing for their business, it becomes easy if the reasons are listed down.
Content That Evokes Interaction
Earlier it was true that content is the king but now it has travelled further ahead and we can confidently say that ‘Interactive content is the King’.
When you share content that is not just meant to be read, but also needs engagement with the creator of the content, then it qualifies as interactive content.
It’s so true when William Comcowich, CEO of CyberAlert, says,
“Content marketing is less about the words and more about the experiences you create for the audience.”
Interactive content should be able to get the email address of your audience, increase lead generation, improve link building, drive more traffic to your website and eventually more signups.
There are different types of interactive content such as quizzes, polls, surveys, videos, calculators, personality tests, assessments, and much more that you can incorporate into your content strategy.
For example, look at the health survey. It is engaging enough to convince people to complete all the steps.
Content That Evokes Strong Emotions
According to research reports of Wharton Business School, there is a strong relationship between emotion and virality, regardless of whether it is positive or negative.
When a person sees an emotional video, image or text, the content is bound to be shared in their social circles. This type of content has higher chances of creating emotional engagement with your audience.
Create content based on 6 key emotions: joy, surprise, anger, fear, disgust and sadness. Create a unique and strong message that can drive your audience to immediately share without thinking further. When your content triggers emotional response, it is sure to be shared.
For example, the adorable Dear Kitten video series created by BuzzFeed has attracted millions of views on social media.
Conclusion
If you are a social media marketer, then you are constantly looking at your content to check if there are likes, comments, shares and retweets for your posts.
But have you really got the content that gets you the engagement?
Have you really understood the kind of content that gets this social media attention?
When you are eager and want to try out different types of content for your social media marketing strategy, then the above discussed 7 types of content will be able to help you to schedule engaging content on your social pages.
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shameel
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