Drive traffic to your website with engaging social media content
We all know social media content has a role to play in marketing your business to drive customers to your website. But it’s not about the hard sell. Social media’s primary use is for building a relationship with your audience.
Why use social media?
Rather than being a sales tool, my social media presence exists alongside my website purely to establish Studio V Ink as a credible design resource. I love design, and I hope that what I post and the way I post it conveys that. For me, slow and steady wins the race and I genuinely am trying to create something interesting. There’s nothing worse than feeling as if you are being pressured into buying something and I find nothing puts me off a brand faster than a sense of being taken for a ride. So I only ever use social media to enhance my online presence and to try and give a sense of personality to the studio. I save the selling for my website because by the time a client gets there I know they are looking for a service I provide.
Which brings me to the next point – be original. Your personality shines through when you write with your own voice. That doesn’t mean you can’t cover subjects that have already been covered, just add your own twist and tell it in your own style. I’m writing about my thoughts, feelings and experiences because no one else can.
I also use social media to share relevant and helpful information and to establish trust. Since one of the goals of my website is to create a library of useful small business and design resources to complement my clients’ websites, this makes complete sense to me. I want to help people get the most from their online presence; before, during and after the design process. Trust is vital for this. If clients feel that they are being constantly sold to for the sake of it, then those resources will in turn appear less trustworthy. And, by the way, social media is also a fantastic place to share reviews and testimonials from happy customers.
And I think that this is the key. If you create content purely to drive traffic, sell products or to enhance your site’s SEO, people will sense that! Today’s internet-savvy and scam-aware audiences are not easily fooled. So, in my opinion, the best way to create engaging social media content is… wait for it… to genuinely try to create and share content that is engaging!
That said, I did a bit of Googling and it turns out you can apply some science to it. So, what makes some content go viral while others get tumbleweeds? I stumbled upon an interesting article by Noah Kagan on OkDork sharing data analysis by BuzzSumo. Basically, they analysed social share counts from 100 million online articles over an 8 month period. I digested the findings then turned it into this handy infographic of my key takeaways.
I should say at this point that I’m a sucker for a great infographic. Infographics are an awesome way to condense and communicate complex data in a visually appealing way. Of course, we still need the in depth information in the long form body text, but this way I get to pick out my key points and present them in way that makes them stand out. Bonus points? It’s infinite shareability (is that a word?) also has the potential to go viral!
Anyway, as an experiment I’ve tried to stick to three out of the four. I’ll be honest, I just couldn’t stretch to 2000 words without waffling! I did however, muster up an image which is also the aforementioned bonus point infographic. Plus I’m posting and promoting on a Tuesday. Of course, it also goes without saying that I really hope it isn’t boring!
The ‘How to Create Engaging Social Media Content’ Infographic
In total, the original article and data shares ten ingredients, of which I’ve included four in my infographic. Incidentally, number five is that people love to share lists and – yes, you’ve guessed it – infographics, so I’m not being entirely altruistic here! To read the rest of the ingredients click the link to the original article below.
One small disclaimer from me; Instagram is the visual social media platform I use the most by far and it wasn’t included in the original study, while the now defunct Google+ was. But, with a sample of 100 million posts I’m sure there’s still plenty to learn.
Resources
Download a pdf of the infographic here
Link to the original article here
And for all your infographic needs contact Studio V Ink (we love creating them!).
