What is the secret sauce to effective social media content?
I always use the following principles to guide me when creating my personal social media posts, company posts and any posts for my clients – these are good reminders to keep in mind as you’re planning out your content strategy.
- Reuse and repurpose – don’t just publish something once and be done with it – you can get at least three to six posts from every thought leadership piece
- Create once, publish everywhere – but adjust the content and message to the platform (one size doesn’t fit all) and only focus on the social channels where your clients and prospects are
- Visual content – every social media post should be accompanied by a visual period. If you don’t include a visual, the post just don’t get as high engagement levels as it would if it was brought to life with a visual. I use Canva to easily create all of my social media graphics.
- Show vs. tell – write with this concept in mind and you will create more client-centric posts
- Client-centric content – speaking of that, everything you post to social should be helpful and value added. Especially now during the pandemic. All content should be written with your target audience in mind – in their language. This is how you establish yourself as an expert and thought leader on LinkedIn and stand out in a crowded field.
- Evergreen content (timeless content) – Every practice group and industry has those topics that keep coming up – they’re timeless in a sense. I call them gifts that keep giving because you can repost these over and over, and they do well in SEO. Work with different groups to identify these topics and write about them, especially when you have openings in your editorial calendar.
- Value-added content – I covered this above but it’s worth its own bullet because I find so many organizations often post content for the sake of posting without really thinking about why they’re posting it and not keeping their clients’ needs in mind when creating it.
- Use (the right) hashtags – if you know how to use hashtags, they can be an incredibly powerful tool to help you and your content become more discoverable.
I hope this visual helps you!