Top Tips to Make your Social Media Content more Interesting.
Being present on social media is now not enough to get you results for your business, with the growing number of accounts being created, both genuine and spam ones, having an account with no activity is as about useful as taking photos with the cap still on the lense. You have to work hard to make social media work for you or be very clever with your marketing and be ideally current with content.
The world is a funny place and people do unusual things… Years ago we would have heard rumours or stories about these unusual activities, nowadays they are immediately viewable to us on social media. I’m not sure about you, but I used to love watching Beadle’s ‘You’ve been Framed’ and it was fun to watch the mishaps in peoples lives that they’d captured with their camcorders… Viewers can still get £250 pounds for every clip they send in which get shown on the TV show – Harry Hill is the current presenter I believe. Today, with mobile phone technology allowing us to the ability to record video at our finger tips, many more such you’ve been framed moments are being captured across the world and uploaded to the likes of Youtube every day… Infact whole brands have been born simply by being known as Youtube channels sharing these kind of videos by way of ‘best win and fails of the week’ and similar. Examples include:
FailArmy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCqgztYcyes
MonthlyFails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye7jSAcYNeo
These kind of accounts amass many viewers very quickly on their videos and build a strong subscription number which in turn allows them to generate money via sponsored advertising on their channel/videos.
The point of the above is to show you that business can be generated via social media simply by sharing something that people enjoy, not necessarily sharing something for sale or promoting a service. Content that is enjoyable is one way to attract audiences, also we must look at words such as entertaining, educational, engaging, bizarre, shocking etc.
So, what can you do with your social media activity in order to bring more business your way? Once you have a found a topic you to wish to run with on social media, think about the following tips:
Visual. Make sure that your content is very visual and if you can, use videos. If your budgets do not stretch to doing your own videos, though as mentioned previously you do have video recording facility on your mobile phones, then look for good examples of what you are looking for online, ie YouTube. Do not forget about live video too with the likes of Periscope having made this easier.
Statistics. People like facts and stats so share figures with them. There is nothing like ‘property prices up 7% in Suffolk‘ or ‘Landlord set to pay £25,000 in fines‘ to attract someone’s attention so do some research and find some interesting ones to post.
Humanise. Try and be a person behind the social media accounts you run rather than a business. By your followers getting to know you as a person, you will get an overall better response to content you post and the comments you share. If you have a larger business and multiple people help to run your social media in-house, then try and keep each of them individual characters too so that more than one reputation can be established and built.
Fun. It is good to have a sense of humour when using social media as your followers will never be adverse to having a good laugh at the things you share. We obviously have to be very disciplined when we become the ‘comic’ online as many subjects are very close to people’s hearts, but there is nothing wrong with a warm bit of fun being shared. Show how you are feeling by sharing emoticons with your updates to show how it is you wish your content to be taken, a smiley face is always welcomed.