How to Create Social Media Content for 2021

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Using social media effectively can be like learning an entirely new language. There’s a lot to unpack here so grab a beverage and buckle up! We’re going to take you through our tips on how to create social media content for your business. Are you ready? Let’s go!

1. Set Goals for Your Business

Ask yourself: “What do I want to get out of social media?” This will help you define your goals.

Maybe you want to build a strong community around your brand. Or maybe you want to build a dedicated follower base. Or maybe you want to use social media as a new revenue source for your business.

Regardless, your goals will define your content strategy and how much time you’ll need to dedicate to your campaigns.

Sample Social Media Goals for 2021

Increase your brand awareness a.k.a get your name out there! Using social media, regardless of your true goal (revenue, a follower base etc.) social media is a great way to boost your brand’s awareness and build a go-to source for your brand. 

Generate more leads by using social media to let shoppers know about new products, services, or promos. You can plan a campaign that hypes up your upcoming releases or promotions. This will bring more traffic to your social media accounts, thereby increasing your qualified leads.

Grow your brand’s audience by introducing your brand to new people. A key way to do this is by monitoring and listening to conversations circling your industry. So, keep up to date with trending keywords, hashtags and phrases! This will give you an idea of what your (target) audience is saying and can therefore help you reach your target audience faster and better. 

Boost community engagement by exploring ways to grab your audience’s attention. How? Well, by experimenting with messaging and content, that’s how! Even something as simple as asking a question in your caption can increase engagement. Another great way is to promote hashtags and user-generated content. So, if a customer shares their purchase from your site in their Instagram Stories, for instance, share it in yours!

Steer traffic to your website by monitoring your conversions and URL clicks. By doing promotional posts or social ads, you can better determine your ROI from social media.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure to keep it simple and consistent. Pick one or two goals or strategies and stick with ‘em. There’s nothing worse than a brand that’s confused about how to engage with their audience — it makes your audience confused, too!

2. Research Your Audience

This one’s fairly obvious. To build an effective business you need to research your target market. The same goes for social media. Understand their wants and needs and deliver content that fits. Use your social media analytics to understand your users’ demographics.

Remember that different platforms attract different demographics:

  • Facebook and YouTube are both prime places for ads due in part to their high-earning user bases.
  • The majority of Instagram and TikTok users are millennials or Gen Z, signalling the strength of bold, eye-popping content that oozes with personality.
  • Women vastly outnumber men on Pinterest, which is noted to boast the highest average order value for social shoppers.
  • LinkedIn’s user base is well-educated, making it a hub for in-depth, industry-specific content that might be more complicated than what you see on Facebook or Twitter.

Don’t spread yourself too thin. Instead, focus on networks where your core audience is already active.

3. Establish Your Most Important Metrics and KPIs

No matter what you’re selling, your social media strategy should be data-driven.

That means focusing on the social media metrics that matter. Rather than focus on vanity metrics, brands are tasked with digging into data that aligns directly with their goals.

What metrics are we talking about, though? Check out the breakdown below:

  • Reach. Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How far is your content reaching users’ feeds?
  • Clicks. This is the number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks-per-campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
  • Engagement. The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
  • Hashtag performance. What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
  • Organic and paid likes. Given how organic engagement is much harder to gain traction, which is why many brands turn to ads. So, knowing these differences can help you budget both your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.
  • Sentiment. This is the measurement of how users reacted to your content, brand or hashtag. What type of sentiment are people associating with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find out how people are talking about your brand.

4. Determine Your Posting Game Plan

Now you’ve gathered all of your data, you’ve reached the fun part! This is the stage where you can start to think about what you’re going to post and when you’re going to post it. Let your creative juices flow. Here is our overall process alongside any relevant tactics:

Come Up with a Content Theme

It can be very challenging (and not to mention time-consuming) to come up with new content to post daily. Creating a theme gives your social content a weekly structure and gives you the ability to utilize your existing resources. Your theme could be based around a new blog post, a new campaign, upcoming events, industry news, product launches … The list is endless!

Create a Social Media Content Calendar

With multiple channels to think about, it’s easy to lose track of what’s meant to go out, and things can slip through the cracks. Planning content for weeks in advance can also feel overwhelming, which is why a content calendar is your saving grace! We use ours to: 

  • Determine our social schedule timings, following research regarding the optimal days and times to post on each platform. 
  • Plot in the content themes we’ve come up with, informing our posts for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter for upcoming weeks.
  • Plan customized posts for each channel – cross-posting across networks is bad practice. Make sure your posts are customized and optimized for individual platforms, not just copied and pasted!
  • Plan our content objectives. We post a mixture of educational/curated and promotional content.
  • Keep track of blog posts, articles and other resources we’ve posted to avoid reposting.

Create and Curate Engaging Content

Now you’ve established your themes and have your content calendar armed and ready, it should be easy for you to begin creating and curating content. If you’re starting from scratch and you’re not sure what sort of content to post, there are 2 social media rules you can follow to inform your decision:

The Rule of Thirds

  • ⅓ of your posts promote your business
  • ⅓ are posts of ideas from influencers in your industry
  • Finally, ⅓ are posts of personal stories to build your brand

The 80/20 Rule

  • 80% of your posts should inform, educate, or entertain your audience
  • 20% can directly promote your brand.

New, quality content will keep your audience informed and interested, which means they’re more likely to engage with your posts. A few examples of content you could create are:

  1. Videos – Video is dominating the digital landscape right now, which means you’re missing a huge trick if you’re not using it!
  2. Images – office culture photos, product images, pictures from company events. These all help in humanizing your brand. Use high-quality images that follow the size specifications for each platform.
  3. Company news – share exciting news such as new job positions or new employees on your social media feeds. But make sure to personalize it!
  4. Blog posts – If you have a company blog, share the articles to your social media feeds where you can. Use employee amplification to widen your audience further.
  5. Free resources – because who doesn’t love something for free? Whether it’s an e-book or an infographic, your audience will appreciate a free resource.

That’s It!

With these tips to create social media content up your sleeve, you can curate a brand that’s resilient and engaging. 

Are you such a busy bee that these tips seem like a lot to take on? No problem! Reach out to Siva Creative today. We can be your one-stop-shop marketing partner that gets the job done.

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