How Do You Decide What to Post on Each Social Media Platform? [Current Research]

How do you decide what to post on each social media platform?

Do you know what content resonates with people?

Today it’s hard to ignore the power of social media. When 22% of the world’s population uses Facebook, more than 450 million LinkedIn profiles exist and 93% of Pinterest users access their account to make purchases, you can’t afford to miss out.

Unfortunately, jumping head-first into social media and creating an account on every platform might not bring a positive impression on your audience. If you really want to turbo-charge your presence, you’re going to need to prepare a strategy to improve the effectiveness of your content.

ESTABLISH SOCIAL MEDIA GOALS THAT ALIGN WITH YOUR BUSINESS GOALS

First if you want your social media content strategy to have a real impact, you need to make sure the campaign goals align with the ambitions and vision of your company. Think about what you’re content your currently doing in 2018 to enjoy the benefits of social media—even if it’s very little.

What does success look like to you?

For instance, here are a few goals and metric ideas you can choose to align with your business and social media content strategy:

Improving brand awareness: Look at the follower count on each of your social profiles, your mentions, retweets, shares and other engagement metrics.
Generating new leads: Inspect things like downloads for gated content, new leads developed through social media and clicks on your lead-generation social posts.
Driving traffic to your website: Check referral traffic coming from social media in your Google analytics dashboard, along with things like clicks on social posts and bounce rate for social traffic.

THE MOST IMPORTANT CONTENT FOR MARKETERS IS…

Let’s take a look at some current research about content from the Social Media Examiner Industry Report.

The top pick was visual images (32%), down from 41% in 2017. Blogging dropped to 27% from 32% in 2017.

Blogging is more important for B2B marketers (36% say it’s the most important) than B2C marketers (22% claim it’s most important).

B2C marketers place more importance on visual content (36% say it’s the most important) than B2B marketers (25%).

HOW WILL MARKETERS CHANGE THEIR FUTURE CONTENT ACTIVITIES?

Marketers plan to increase their use of:

Videos (77%)
Visuals (68%)
Live video (63%)
Blogging (57%)
And podcasting (25%), in that order.

Here’s a breakdown by form of content:

CONTENT FORMS MARKETERS WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT

Creating videos took first place as the area marketers most want to learn about, followed by live video and creating visuals.

B2C marketers are more interested in learning about using live video (71%) than B2B marketers (63%).

WHAT TO POST ON EACH SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM

The best kind of social media content strategy is the one capturing the interest of your target audience by their network. Targeting every social network without focus will often lead to wasted budgets and confusion. Consider these factors for each network:

Every platform has its own audience. And each audience has their own expectations for the things they want to see on the platform – that can affect how well your social media posts perform.

Here are the general guidelines:

Facebook: Videos and curated content
Instagram: High-res photos, quotes, Stories
Twitter: News, blog posts, and GIFs
LinkedIn: Jobs, company news, and professional content
Pinterest: Infographics and step-by-step photo guides
Google+: Blog posts that you want to rank on Google

Buzzsumo analyzed 68 million Facebook posts and found this trend: videos have higher average engagement than images and links.

TIP:

Upload your videos to Facebook directly. Such videos receive more engagement and shares than YouTube links, according to a quintly study.

What to post on Instagram

Instagram has become a place where people post only the best photos (and videos) on their profile.

After interviewing and surveying 11,000 13 to 24-year-olds around the world, Facebook recommends marketers to “blend in to stand out”:

Instagrammers appreciate aesthetic quality in visual content and will often make the effort to transform the banal into a thing of beauty. Brands seeking to engage teens and young adults will want to offer an organic experience by aiming for quality, too. Images and video will ideally be beautiful, thoughtfully composed and artfully presented.

Here are a few types of high-quality photos you can post to Instagram:

Product photos: If you sell physical products such as fashion or food, you can post high-resolution photos of your product in various settings. Califia Farms (@califiafarms) does a great job with this. (See more examples here from the best brands on Instagram, according to HubSpot.)

Behind-the-scenes: Another popular type of Instagram photos from brands are behind-the-scenes photos. These could be photos of people in the company, events, or the making of a product (e.g. how a dish is prepared).

User-generated content: If you can’t get suitable product photos or enough behind-the-scenes photos like us (a remote company that creates software), you could post user-generated content. User-generated content grew our Instagram account by over 500 percent in a year.

TIP:

While curating amazing user-generated content for your Instagram account, be sure to request permission from the original poster before re-posting it.

Quotes

Motivational and inspirational quotes are one of the most popular content types on Instagram (with more than 42 million posts tagged with #quotes at the time of writing).

A brand that does a great job (creatively) integrating quote posts into their Instagram profile is WeWork (@wework).

If you are unable to get such photos with quotes, you can also create graphics with quotes using free design tools like Canva and Adobe Spark.

Stories

While it’s important to have a consistent theme for your Instagram profile, you can be a little flexible with your Instagram Stories. That’s because they would disappear in 24 hours.

There are many different ways of using Instagram Stories for your marketing. Here are a few examples:

Storytelling
Share how-to tutorials
Promote a blog post
Share a list
Announce limited time offers and promotions
Offer giveaways and discount coupons
Share data, research, and statistics
Share quotes and inspiration
Introduce an Instagram takeover guest
Share announcements, news, and updates

While sharing your Instagram Stories, remember to keep them in line with your Instagram marketing strategy.

TIP:

A fast way to create great-looking Instagram Stories is to start with a template. Here are 10 free customizable Instagram Stories templates you can use.

PURPOSE YOUR CONTENT CREATION

Now you know who you engage with and where you need to create posts, you’ll want to establish a guide to keep your content purposeful and consistent. Although there’s no one-size-fits-all guide to content, ideally, your social media posts should be designed to create emotional bonds with your audience. That means establishing a unique personality and tone of voice.

Find your voice: Content has more volume when it’s fine-tuned to a tone that resonates with your business. Think about what you want your personality to be like and try to make sure it aligns with the platform you’ve chosen. For instance, a professional tone is more appealing on LinkedIn, while a playful tone might work on Snapchat.
Tell a story: Social media is about engaging with your audience, so make sure that you have a strategy for sharing content that aligns with the goals, values and vision of your company. For instance, you should only share content that’s relevant to your industry, aligns with your company ethics and highlights your brand purpose.
Know your competition: Being effective in your social media content strategy is all about making sure you’re better than the competition. Figure out what some of the main players in your organization are doing, then decide how you can do it better. Be careful not to just copy and paste another strategy.

Knowing your tone of voice, story and competition will help you create a more consistent social media strategy.

CREATE A CONSISTENT SCHEDULE

Once you finish researching for the remainder of 2018, you want to publish to the right platforms. Remember, a good social media content strategy needs to be consistent. This helps you keep your customers engaged.

Here’s how to start:

Decide what audience your content is targeting
Choose a topic and a platform for your content
Decide which kind of content you’re going to share (image, infographic, video, blog post, update, etc.)
Evaluate when your target audience is online. For instance, mothers might not browse Twitter much when they’re picking kids up from school, LinkedIn followers might spend less time online during the 9 to 5 and so on.
What are the best time to post on Social Media

TRACK PERFORMANCE & ADJUST

Finally, when you’re actively publishing your content on social media, you’re ready to track your strategy and make changes. Since the most common areas businesses are interested in tracking are engagement, reach and conversions, here are some of the things you’ll need to look out for in 2018:

Engagement: How many people are connecting with you online? Think about retweets, mentions and clicks on social media posts. Comments and shares can be very important too.
Reach: How many people are engaging with your content? You can measure this by assessing how many new connections or followers you’ve gathered over the last month or so.
Conversions: Is your social media content strategy prompting sales? Consider using a social media dashboard to help you measure how many valuable leads are connecting with your company thanks to your posts.

IT’S TIME TO GET INTENTIONAL ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Most people today, just post to post. There boss may tell them to tweet a few times a day, post something of Facebook, yet most don’t have a strategy. Most do not tie social media content to goals and vision of the company.

Most will fail according to current research that says 76% will. BE INTENTIONAL

Some statistics suggest that almost 2 billion users are connecting online and that number is expected to reach 2.5 billion by end of 2018. The question for brands to consider today, is how they’re making the most out of the crowds they can access through their social platform?

A social media content strategy can give you the guidance you need to not only find your ideal audience, but engage with them on a deeper level, building the trust that leads to loyalty, conversions and bigger profits.

About Blair

Blair Evan Ball is a Social Media Coach and founder of Prepare1, a company that works with businesses, individuals and non-profits. He is a former executive with a Fortune 50 company, and his national division did $1Billion+ in sales annually.

Blair has written three e-books: Facebook for Business Made Easy, Facebook Pages for Business Made Easy, and WordPress Blog Setup Made Easy.

Blair also educates, trains entrepreneurs and business professionals how to amplify their brand, increase revenues, and raise more funds.

The Race is ON! | PREPARE | Get into the Game and WIN!