Building an awesome and original repertoire of social media post structures is a great way to cement your social strategy for constant and continual growth.
From the smallest manufacturer to huge multi-national corporations, from the up-and-coming influencer to the biggest name in the social game, we can all struggle when it comes to juggling content originality and posting frequency.
Social media users are in a position where they have a vast amount of different businesses and organisations vying for their attention on a day to day basis. It’s incredibly important to ensure that you grow your pages with the correct audience in mind to ensure you are building a community of advocates for your brand. However, even if you have the most die-hard fan base imaginable, sooner or later repeating the same content is going to turn people away.
Why you need an arsenal of awesome social media post structures
Constant growth requires commitment to your audience. It’s all too easy to get despondent when your likes begin to tot up, but this is dangerous territory – if anything, at this stage marketers need to invest more and more into their posting strategy to ensure that their current audience remains interested and reactive.
Repetitive content turns off consumers, which in turn damages your reach. To keep those guys on your side you need to constantly be reminding them why they liked your brand in the first place. Doing this requires you to use a variety of social media post structures that invite engagement.
Here are a few ideas to help you on your way:
1. Industry expert knowledge and advice
Providing useful advice and guidance can be valuable content for businesses whose audience follow them for their expert knowledge. Couple this with original, expert content from your own blog and you’re on to a winner. This can also be done as single entities without links to external content, however these posts should be limited.
Often marketers can over-rely on tips and advice for social media content, and at this point audience members begin to lose interest. It’s also important that you don’t rely heavily on piggy-backing clichéd post structures such as #WednesdayWisdom, #MondayMotivation and #FridayFeeling.
In small portions these social media post structures can help with reach and engagement, but using them as a primary part of your posting strategy looks lazy and uninspired, a process known at Giraffe Social Media as “Pirate Posting”. Yargh.
2. Topical posts
Using your posts to comment on relevant trending topics when they crop up can be a great way to diversify your strategy and generate significant reach and impact. If you’re savvy enough to make use of the relevant hashtags you put your content in prime position to be discovered by new users.
Be sure you don’t limit yourself to only engage with news and trends from your own industry. Take big media stories such as seasonal events and global tournaments and look these through the lens of your industry. This style of posting often results in a boost in engagement rates because it not only interests your own audience but also wider social media users
3. Start a social face off
If the trending topic allows, a great way to encourage engagement is to structure your post as a head-to-head and ask users to side with their choice. This can also be done with two similar products or aspects of your industry. Not only can this provoke a discussion, it can also provide beneficial insights into your community’s preferences which will help you to tailor your future content as suits.
4. Just do more video
Do more video. Whether it’s raw, behind the scenes footage captured by a member of staff or a high-spec professionally produced video of a day in the life of your business, video gets way more engagement than any other type of content. Visual is integral to catching a user’s’ eye.
Developments in smartphone technology and social networking features have also made the process of doing live video broadcasts 100 times easier. This is something you should certainly be doing as it literally personifies your brand and makes your audience feel they are part of an exclusive group.
5. Pose your questions as fill-in-the-blank responses
Every social media manager worth their salt appreciates the importance of asking questions to provoke engagement from their audience. In order to get the largest amount of responses possible it’s a good idea to make the process of responding require little energy.
Fill-in-the-blank quotes are a great way of achieving this. They provide users with a pre-structured response – and also the opportunity to be humorous, which many find hard to resist.
