content

7 Best Practices In Writing Better Social Media Content

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Content writing for social media seems to be a big thing today, especially in building a brand online. From promoting a cause to securing an online fan base, the content plays a critical role. But the ever-changing social media algorithm matched with the fast-phased social media users makes it a lot harder to come up with compelling material.

It would entail time, effort, and even money just to hit the likes and shares that you are aiming for. But without a properly planned content, all your investments would be of no value.

Sure you can use every writing tool available online, like wordcounttool.com, albeit those will only be helpful if matched with clear your goals.

In this post, we will share with you the best practices in writing social media content that will help you build a competitive brand online.

Know Your Audience

Image source: pixabay.com

If you want to write compelling material, then you should know your audience first. Writing while you have your readers in mind will help you adapt to the style that is relevant for them.

If possible, know the demographics of your followers. If you know, for example, the age group of your target readers, then you’ll be able to speak to them effectively.

Speak Like an Expert

You’ll only be able to write material that relates to your audience if you know what you are writing about. Flowery words would be of no use if you’re not getting into the meat of what your readers want to know.

You need to research the topic you want to write about. If you want to write about a product, for instance, familiarize yourself with its specs. This way, you would be able to confidently come up with accurate content.

Observe a Proper Voice

Writing for social media is far way different from doing it for an actual website. Writing for a website needs a professional and formal tone, whereas work done for online media needs a casual voice. You need not do a technical tone, what you need is something your readers can understand.

Remember that the reading habit of users is highly affected by emotion. If you are writing as if you are speaking to your audience, then your material will surely resonate with them.

Also, remember to keep a consistent voice throughout your social media material and posts. Infuse your brand or personality in your interactions on social platforms. This would help your audience connect with your posts emotionally and identify them as yours.

Observe Proper Grammar Usage

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This is a basic rule. Although creating content for social media is not as formal as other kinds of content online, it is still essential to write in a way that conforms to the basic rules of grammar usage. We all know how impatient users are. If your write up doesn’t make sense to your readers, it will be easier for them to scroll down and leave your post.

If you are not confident with your grammar and want to check if you are writing properly, there’s a bunch of tools online that can help you.

Keep it Clear and Concise

Writing long sentences is a taboo when it comes to online media. Just like what I have just done. Instead, I could have just said:

“Writing long sentences is a taboo in writing for social media.”

When creating, most of us are guilty of filling our sentences with unnecessary words. We think that long sentences would impress our readers, but it would not. More often, it will only confuse them and make them lose interest in your content.

The same goes for this type of material. If you want better engagement, you should write clearly and concisely. Remove fillers that complicate what you want to say.

Add Graphics

Most users like visuals. Images, graphics, and videos are of great help if you want to attract more audience to your content. Not only they are more engaging, but they also tend to tell stories quicker than words alone. They can even stand alone and still garner good engagement.

Next time you decide to post, accompany it with striking graphics that would best outline what you want to say.

Optimize Your Content

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Optimizing your posts seems to be a very technical task. But learning just how to do it is a good investment to grow your reach on social media. Try to do search engine optimization (SEO) by adding in your content keywords that people are searching for online. This would help your webpage rank in search engines and have better engagement. Though it may take time to do this, it will surely benefit you in the long run.

Seven Useful Tips Every Content Marketer Must Know

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Content marketing, when used correctly, is truly brilliant at captivating an audience and maximizing business potential. Monitoring the performance of your marketing strategies and techniques is an integral part of the online business and a good way of measuring success. It also allows you to know how sales are performing.

If you have a website you probably got a reason behind the website like your business or a personal endeavor such as merchandise from your YouTube channel? 

Whatever your reason is that you are making a website, you probably are set on bringing people to your site and making them see it is worth something and want to stay? It is a common goal for almost any website owner to want people to see their site and fall in love, but many can easily say it is not so easy to just make a site and draw people in. 

Every good site from big companies or even YouTubers know how to bring in the public to their site with clever hooks and well thought out pages that have a flare, and here are some ways you can do the same. 

Image source: searchenginejournal.com

In a sense, this could be construed as content and perhaps even marketing of a brand of whatever they chose to peddle. Sure enough, they would each run out and get the very things that each of the others found to be the perfect product.

What is content marketing?  Well, content is simply information and marketing is how we choose to present that information to our clients.  Content marketing needs to be done in the most productive and engaging way possible to ensure that the client will want to maintain a relationship with the business after.

How does content marketing work?  How do you engage the client? Let’s look at a few useful tips every content marketer must know.

Useful Tips Every Content Marketer Must Know

In order to reach out and target an audience and gain the attention needed to grow a small business a smart approach to content marketing and blogging is essential. It used to be easy to acquire an audience alone through the publication of high-quality content online, but with greater competition than ever before it has become harder to get heard. Here are our top tips for you.

1. Make Your Own Personal Content

Image source: marketingland.com

Content is key to the business marketing game. You need something original and specific to your own little business so others know you by your products. A major misconception is that small businesses believe you need to be huge before you make content specifically for the company which is incredibly wrong.

2. SEO Techniques

SEO techniques aka “search engine optimization” is how many starting businesses that just made a website get recognized in many search engine searches. This will help people accidentally stumble across your site when searching or see your site when searching things in the market you are in and grow click on your website link intrigued on what you offer. This will take some investment of your time and there are many paths of SEO techniques so you must be careful and choose the path that works perfectly for you and be careful of scams as some people will try to market on the human nature of wanting shortcuts.

3. Personalized touch

Image source: masondigital.com

In their quest to get a more personal experience with their clients, organizations are going for more one on one communication. This will encourage more organizations to get content marketers that will push for one on one touch with their respective customers. Clients are also more inclined to listen to and follow the recommendation of people they perceive as not influencers nor celebrities. Content marketers will cover up for the space that the clients will not fill. 

Most clients take influencers and celebrities as liars. The content that they tend to push is normally is skewed to what the organization wants the public to be informed of.

4. Content Strategy

Image source: zest.london.com

 This is the same concept as making a personal goal calendar but with your business. Set a time limit and set a date for specific content you want to finish to keep the flow of your work at a steady pace. There is a wealth of helpful content marketing and blogging services available online to aid small business to reach a local audience. Automated sales and marketing platforms allow small businesses to directly work with and benefit from the experience and guidance of marketing experts and professionals. Automated sales management and marketing platforms are a fantastic means of giving small business the best head start possible and provide numerous means of assistance.

Understand the mediums that you’re marketing with. Each tool has its own special nuance and you need to find a way to hook that client with appealing content pertinent to that platform.

Value the client’s time.  Within the first few minutes, quickly let the audience know what the purpose is.  Why they’re there. Make it stimulating so they decide it’s worth sticking around for.

 Don’t be comparable to competitors.  Stand out, be unique and unusual. Have your own voice.

Comments” always read and respond to feedback from clients. This is crucial to your business and excellent marketing potential. They will give you suggestions for future marketing strategies by telling you what was good and what was bad. It’s also a great way to build relationships with clients and show them their value.

Technology is raining down on the world in a multitude of large digital droplets. Content marketing is seeing it through the insurgence of video content.  Why is there an increase in the importance of video content?

  • It’s retainable.  Your brain holds onto that memory longer than any other type of content. It remembers the visual.
  • Much more creative.  There are so many things you can do with a video than with stationary content. It catches a viewer’s attention and keeps it. 
  • It’s personable.  There is the opportunity to be charming and hook the client’s attention. This is the most powerful part of your content? he introduction.  
  • It’s lifespan. Video has a long shelf life and doesn’t grow stale. A previous year’s video could be pulled out to promote next year’s show as a marketing ploy.

5. Videos as a Branded Content

Image source: nativeadvertisinginstitute.com

This is when you create content for a client-specific to a brand using video. This can be a little bit tricky. You don’t want to come off as unnatural or as if you’re reading from notes. You want to improvise and be very likable and captivating.

Small online businesses are found in abundance and competition is intense. In an increasingly connected online world, one effective strategy to gain customers is to target them on a geographical and local basis. Localized geographic online marketing is the practice of finding a targeted audience and matching them with products depending on the area where they live.

Many businesses use geographically targeted online marketing strategies to hone in on local audiences. This is done by creating clever market worthy content and blogs and is a proven and intelligent method of securing success in business and generating greater revenue.

Make sure the brand is something that falls in line with what suits you and that meets your channel needs, that you would feel good about sponsoring. It will speak to your reputation.

6. Content Off-Screen

Artificial intelligence is becoming more popular. Apps are being designed that can have a conversation with humans. The information being sought after can easily be acquired from apps in call and response content. In this scenario, content marketing will focus on the algorithms that enhance the desired response from app users. 

7.  Originality

The use of influencers has helped in shaping and getting content marketing to its current place. Yet, their impact will reduce going forward. This will bring a call for more original content. Clients resonate well with what they perceive to be authentic. This is not achievable by the use of celebrities and influencers. 

Clients will also be seeking transparency in content. A word from a fellow client with new information disseminated will have a greater impact. 

Rising Value of Video Content Marketing

Image source: lyfemarketing.com

There are three main objectives with video content marketing.

  • The company objective:  what do you want to happen from this? Are you prepared for the feedback?
  • What do you want to say to the target clients?  What’s your message?
  • Who is your target audience?  Do you know who it is you want to appeal to?

Video is the fastest-growing content platform today. A majority of buying commitments are influenced by brand videos.

Reasons Video Marketing Will Grow

  1. Video is seen and heard, which is automatically held in the memory longer than any other form of information. Brand remembrance can boost sales.
  2. Video is operable on any equipment. This can expand how far the video can go, gives it ease of use, and proves it to be specific for the customer.
  3. Content marketing will help to spread the brand’s gossip all over the world.
Image source strunkmedia.com

The video is a great idea. But how do you go about it if you’re just starting out or if you’re a small business? It’s expensive.  It takes a talented videographer if you want a high-quality piece. It takes costly software and experience operating it sometimes. 

There are great user-friendly systems out there that take the guesswork out for you.  One of the best in the industry so far is Renderforest.

Renderforest is a free, easy-to-use online system. The user can register and begin choosing from a nearly unlimited number of templates to create and edit high-quality videos, slideshows, logos, anything to make promoting your business easier.  There are also paid subscriptions as you advance and opt to go into more professional business mediums. Renderforest definitely saves time, hassle, and expense yet provides the type of work needed to attract clients to your business. This is the technology of the future.

Conclusion

Definitely, every Company should invest in Content marketing. Financing the use of content marketing requires an increase in the organizations’ budgets. It’s prudent for the organization to get content marketer will an array of skills. This translates to having the right market mix. creating the right content marketing strategies for your websites will require you to make the right connections. You need to get involved with the influencers who can help you gain visibility in your niche. While building your content keeping in mind the best practices and be patient with it as it takes time to grow and give profit. 

Instances when SEO could be shown the door with Website Content

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Let’s admit this!

We go the extra mile when it comes to adding SEO tactics in the website content. Because we consider SEO the be-all and end-all of the online content world, as it helps you draw in significant organic traffic and conversions for your online store.  

Img Source: aer.io

But the thing is: SEO is not suitable in all situations.

Here are those five occasions when SEO is not suitable for businesses:

#1. Introducing New Industry Jargons and Concepts

As it turns out, some content marketers want to be the first ones to introduce a new industry phrase before the world comes to know about it. Meaning, the phrase wouldn’t have significant search volume at this point.     

When businesses write about such trends the idea is to talk at length about their special highlights and how it will benefit the world at large. The SEO won’t be on the top of their mind when writing such content.

The best part: Even without adding SEO keywords you will be in the good books of Google because of quality content. And, more importantly, you will attract more inbound links, and will be in a good position to rank well as the keyword phrase gains momentum.

#2. Targeting Traffic via Different Channels

More than anything else, your website content needs to engage and satisfy people when they arrive at your online store via different channels such as:  

  • E-mail marketing
  • Social media
  • Shared links
  • Media relations
  • Paid media

If you are attracting most of the traffic via the above-mentioned search mediums, it doesn’t matter if you have used proper keywords or not in your site?  

So, take some time out and analyze from where you are attracting overall traffic and then nail down the KPIs and channels to drive traffic.

Img Source: medium.com

#3. Low-volume Search Phrases aren’t Worthwhile

Low-volume search mainly comprises long-tail keywords.  And, they are useful only if they could generate high rankings and leads, and especially for companies that have longer sales cycles.  

But these low-volume search phrases are not always relevant or help you convert. To find out more about relevant SEO keywords for your business, you can check out GoodFirms.co.  

Img Source: searchengineland.com

#4. Popular Keywords are too Competitive

You may want to rank higher in SERPs for “inventory management tool’ which according to Wordtracker is searched almost 49,500 times a month. Presently, your site ranks on the first page of Google for keywords that are searched 200 to 300 times a month.

So, building your SEO page strategy around this popular phrase “inventory management tool” is almost impossible?

If a keyword phrase is not within your reach, it’s better to opt for alternative keyword phrases.

Answer these questions when selecting a keyword alternative

  • Can the keyword alternative be made part of the headline?
  • Will it attract good traffic?
  • Will it be relevant for the site?  
Img Source: attorneymarketingnetwork.com

Wrapping Up

There’s no denying that you need to have SEO on top of mind while creating content for your website. But then, there are times when it’s better to put them in the back burner because eventually it’s traffic that matters. And if you are getting them through non-SEO ways, why not try them out.   

Over to you now? Where there instances when you have avoided SEO altogether?  

How to get your brand’s social media activity right

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With over 3.5 billion active users globally, social media is a potentially great avenue for brands to market their products and services. Interest in brands has never been higher, with up to 80% of users on some platforms following at least one brand. The shift towards the use of the internet for many aspects of regular operation has included the business front, and social media represents the marketing channel for brands.

Users have increasingly turned to social media to carry out certain aspects of making purchases. With internet sales at an all-time high, more users are looking to social media to find information about brands and to research product quality. A high number of users are going on social media to seek customer service as well, making it an ideal platform for brands to build on relationships with current clients and develop great brand awareness among potential customers.

Marketing on social media can be challenging for brands that generally do not have a large following. You need to maintain high interaction levels while maintaining professionalism in your relationship with your potential and existing clients. These are some of the basic rules of running a social media page for your brand.

Do diversify your content

Social media activity for brands is a dynamic and evolving process that involves user interaction and engagement, as well as regular posts. Having attracted users’ interest in your brand, you need to find a way to maintain your following. You can do this by sharing interactive, informative and entertaining content.

You may need to consider diversifying your content to keep it exciting for users. You should not be limited in your presentations, and may consider a variety of formats to help to appeal to users in different ways. You should also attach links and embed other brands’ content. Aside from keeping your content diverse, it will help develop brand partnerships, which can increase growth levels for your own.

Do interact with your followers

Your business could grow exponentially by interacting and engaging with your followers. More people are using the internet for customer support, and these customers are more likely to develop a loyal following for brands that offer solutions to their issues. You will stand to grow your brand and increase revenues, as well as develop products and services that suit customer needs by interacting with your followers.

Don’t ignore negative comments

You will not develop a great reputation by ignoring users who may have negative reviews or comments. These users are part of your following, and could be turned into loyal customers by offering appropriate and professional responses to their problems. Ignoring their comments could have a ripple effect, with users’ trust levels in your brand dropping. You should train your team to handle such posts, since this will prevent any careless response that might have harmful implications for your brand.

Don’t excessively market your brand

Your followers are highly likely interested in your brand. They could already be well informed about your products and services, especially when their interest in your brand was developed as a result of a social media marketing strategy. They will not be likely to make more purchases because of an increase in the number of brand advertisements and posts they view.

If anything, overly marketing your brand could push away potential clients. Your brand page will become repetitive and lack sufficient content to maintain user interest. You should strike a balance between interesting content and advertisements to prevent losing your followers.

Do delegate your tasks to a social media team

Having a social media page requires brands maintain high levels of activity, with regular posts and sustained interactions with users. More people are looking to the internet for customer support, research and other important factors that will contribute to their decision to make a purchase. Brands with an active and positive social media presence will be more likely to attract these new users.

You can maintain high trust levels in your brand and attract new followers by delegating your tasks to a social media team. They will be able to handle large traffic levels across multiple platforms, ensuring you maintain a great relationship with your potential clients.

Do consider paid options

Raising your profile through organic campaigns can work, but it will usually take a long time. You should consider taking advantage of some of the paid options available to help increase your brand’s visibility and improve your ability to meet the expected business goals. Paid options vary across social media platforms, and you may need to consider your desired goal and social media platform before choosing a suitable paid advertising strategy.

Some platforms will be extremely difficult to successfully market your brand on because of the challenges that may face relatively new pages. On Instagram, for instance, your follower base will only grow when users notice some interest in your brand. You can consider automatic likes and views to help raise your profile. Ask for auto likes instagram app – free trial to help get your activity on the platform rolling.

Do set up across multiple platforms

Your brand’s visibility will be maximized by setting up pages across different social media platforms. You will be able to reach more potential customers across different channels, which could drive up sales and revenues from each one. Having multiple platforms also allows brands to carry out coordinated efforts, which are more appealing to internet users and may attract a higher following.

While it can be beneficial to take advantage of different platforms, it can also be costly to offer substandard service on either one. You should make sure that you have the capacity to handle all interactions and engagements across different platforms. This way, you will not stand the risk of developing a bad reputation and losing out on potential l clients.

Do monitor your competitors’ social media activity

Your social media presence does not have to be about the competition. However, monitoring their activity will help your brand take advantage of any slip-ups and flaws in their quality and service provision levels, which could help raise your own brand’s profile. Keeping up with the competition also allows you to react to any new product releases, promotions and offers to maintain user loyalty.