5 Easy Steps on How to Create Powerful Social Content

The content you produce must be able to cut through today's noise and it must stand out from the abundance social media postings online.  Even more important, the content that you produce must be relevant to what you are doing be it a service, a product, or a program.

Stop back and evaluate your service, program, or product.  What problem does it solve?  How does it educate? Does your content entertain the reader?  Your unique high-quality, authentic, content should have 1 of 3 goals: it should either (1) solve a problem, (2) educate, and/or (3) entertain.  

The content you produce should be reflective of your knowledge, experience, education, and practice.  The relevance of your content to the people you would like to work with should be on topic.  So how would you go about producing content that is irresistible and attract the right and perfect people to your tribe?

Here are the nuts and bolts of the 5 simple steps to produce highly engaging, relevant social content.

1. Graphics
2. Copy 
3. Calendar
4. Schedule
5. Production

STEP 1: GRAPHICS

More and more, today's social media platforms is a buffet of visual immersion.

High-quality graphics have become pivotal to the success of any social media platform. You may have about all of one second to grab the attention of the person seeing your content. Users will most likely not click on your post if it doesn’t grab their attention right away.

For this reason, you must have engaging graphics that will grab the users attention immediately upon first glance. 

You may be wondering what type of graphics would do the trick? This really depends on the audience that you are attracting. 

If your service or product is automotive related, you must have content that appeals to the audience who follow an automotive service company.  An example of an appropriate graphic might be a stylish car, or someone under the hood, with an appropriate caption, coupled with content on (for example) how to best take care of the car’s electrical system, or how often one should rotate tires, etc. 

If you have a program on how to meditate, for instance, your graphics and content needs to appeal to the specific person with whom you wish to teach meditation.  The graphic might be someone sitting in lotus position, with a mudra at the beach, and your  content might include the best places to meditate, or breathing techniques, etc.

Regardless of which type of graphic you use, the quality of the graphics is key. Other important factors about graphics that will grab attention are the following: 

1. Clarity - Can you easily tell what the picture is about? Is the graphic a clear visual of your content?
2. Lighting –Is the photo in good lighting? Can you see what it is? 
3. Artistry – Does your graphic draw interest? Is there a style, flavor? 
4. Frame - Do your photos tell a story? Is it on brand and consistent with your marketing message?

Because of the importance of high quality, creative graphics, many applications are now available to meet this need.

Some of my favorite graphics applications are listed below.

1. Photoshop
2. Canva
3. Stencil
4. PickMonkey
5. Word Swag (mobile app)
6. VSCO (mobile app)
7. Afterlight (mobile app)

STEP 2: CONTENT

Because of today's fast-paced technology, content can be easily produced and published online.  Content includes blogs, podcast, videos, e-books, webinars, and any type of knowledge or information that you produce.  Along with keywords which is optimized for search engines, your content sits on your website and attracts to you people who are looking for this information.

All the pages of your website are your content: your home page, about us page, frequently asked questions page, blog and product information, and so on and so forth.  Social media is the extension of your content.  In other words, what you post on your social media platforms:  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and any other channel, are also forms of content.

Content converts browsers into buyers, an audience to followers and followers to raving fans.  In order to win the hearts and minds of your target audience, your content needs to be focused and specific, appealing directly to that audience.  

What you share needs to be relevant and valuable to the people you wish to attract.  Doing so creates trust, credibility, and authority for your business and ultimately, converting your visitors and window shoppers to loyal fans,  buyers, and supporters of your community.

Creating content as the foundation of your marketing plan can:

• Attract customers
• Educate your buyers about the purchase
• Overcome resistance or just objections
• Establish a credibility trust and authority
• Tell your story
• Create buzz on social media platforms
• Gather a tribe of people who are inspired by what you were doing

The rule of thumb is to create really awesome content that is relevant to what you are doing and that would resonate with your ideal customer, those with whom you want to work.  

Once you create awesome content, use this content as the foundation to engage in meaningful conversations with your customers, or your tribe.

FREE DOWNLOAD:  SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT CREATION BEST PRACTICES CHECKLIST

Here are some questions to ask when creating content:

1. Where are your goals in creating the content that you're creating?
2. Who are you? And who do you want to work with? Who is your audience?
3. what is it that you want to chief with your content?
4. When and how are you going to develop content? Which medium platform will you be delivering it will it be in the blog a video and e-book?
5. Where are you going to publish this amazing content?

Related Article:  5 Secrets of Highly Engaged Content You Need to Know

STEP 3: CALENDAR

Marketing is all about getting the word out. Do you have a calendar to guide you on what to post and when to post it? 

All the amazing content that you create must be planned out and scheduled so that there is a variety and mix of interesting content. As you stagger the presentation of your material, you are essentially presenting who and what you are as a brand, or company, in an engaging and interactive way.  

For this reason, your post should include questions, inspiration, interesting facts, curated content, promotional materials, and any other relevant content that would be interesting to your audience.  

There are many ways to calendar your content. A popular formula to use is the 80/20 rule where 80% of the time you are scheduling content that is educational, engaging or entertaining to your audience and 20% of the time, you are promoting your business, service of product.  After all, if we never promote our business, and give a clear call to action, our business will not be self-sustaining.

STEP 4: SCHEDULERS

Consistency is key when it comes to scheduling content on social media.  Posting consistently allows us to break through the algorithms set in place on various social media platforms to assure that our posts get seen, and distributed widely.  When we post consistently, and posts are engaging, social networks will recognize content as relevant.  Relevant, engaging content will always be shown more to those whose interests resonate with what we are posting.

There are two ways to schedule content. 

(1)  Manual

The first method is to go into each social media platform and post our content each and every time, each and every single day when the content is to go out. 

(2)  Schedulers

A smarter easier way to post content is to simply schedule posts through a scheduling such as HootSuite, Buffer or CoSchedule.  

A service called IFTTT which stands for “If That If This Then That” (www.IFTTT.com) is available to streamline your posting efforts. IFTTT is a free automation service that is simply a recipe that runs on triggered commands, enabling an applet to activate when triggered.  There are hundreds of applets to choose from and more are added each day.  For example, a recipe can be set to tell IFTTT that "If I post on Facebook, then automatically post on Twitter."  The use of IFTTT to automate tasks can help save time and energy, and streamline efforts so you can do less, and get more accomplished without stressing.

Related Article:  9 Social Media Schedulers Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know as You and Your Business Grow

STEP 5: PRODUCTION - PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Putting together irresistible social content is simply a process of consolidating items that would make a great post:  

1. Finding the right graphic that is eye catching, attractive and relevant
2. Merging the graphic with the content that would appeal to your audience (your ideal customer, those with whom you want to work),
3. Have a strategy of when and how to post the various content piece you have available, and
4. The action of posting, whether it is done day by day or in bulk.

My secret weapon to content creation on a monthly basis is to do it all in bulk - enough so that I have my graphics, my content, my schedule and my posts done in one sitting.

This could save time and energy, allowing you to be present to engage with your audience as posts get visible, up and running on your social media platforms.

Doing all this can feel overwhelming.  If you are just getting started, the process of pulling in graphics and content, coupled with the decision to choose how to post might feel daunting.