5 Tactics That Will Allow You to Create Contagious Social Media Content

5 Tactics That Will Allow You to Create Contagious Social Media Content

The power of social media is undeniable, especially when you consider how many millions of people use different social media platforms. Facebook and YouTube are among some of the most popular platforms, with 73% of the population defaulting to YouTube and 68% choosing to use Facebook.

As a business owner, those millions of social media users should immediately translate to potential consumers. Of course, capturing the interest of such a large potential consumer base is not as easy as piecing together content, putting it online, and hoping people will share it. If you want to improve your social media ROI, you need to stand out from the crowd.

You need to go beyond the desire to churn out average content so you can offer something that is engaging and worth sharing. Creating content like that means you have to get inside your audience’s head. You need to understand what they find attractive about online content. Most importantly, offer plenty of interaction and humanize yourself in their eyes rather than making it all about your brand.

Understand Psychological Influences

You can have helpful information, naturally appearing keywords, a proper layout, and still fall short on engagement and shares. You have to ask yourself, psychologically speaking, what convinces people to engage with your content. An analysis of over one million articles found that answer.

Simply put, content that received the highest engagement and shares included authoritative information. In other words, the writer backed everything up with research that the reader could use to fact-check. In this day and age, the Internet makes everyone a self-proclaimed expert. If you wish to set yourself apart from the crowd, your content should always refer to proven industry experts.

Make it Interactive

Interactive content inspires engagement. Providing interactive opportunities entices people to share your content with others who might find it useful. Creating killer social media content that is interactive does not mean you have to start from scratch, either. You likely already have content in place that you can repurpose with a level of interaction.

There are plenty of ways you can implement interaction, such as with a calculator. If you run a real estate business, you can repurpose old content about mortgage rates. Include a calculator that lets the reader determine what their interest rate might be. Your audience finds interactive tools, quizzes, images, and videos to be some of the most useful, shareable content on the web.

Put Social Media Validation to Use

By this point, you have excellent social media content complete with authoritative links and interactive opportunities. What more could your audience want? Social media users focus on validation. If a Facebook user sees a post that already has a like or two, they are more likely to give it a favorable vote, too.

In other words, you have to give your content a positive nudge in the right direction. Share your content, encourage those likes, and your level of engagement will soon rise. Start with your friends and family. In most situations, they are likely to support you and give you the starting upvote you need to attract a broader audience.

Target an Emotional Response

Maximize the emotional response your audience has when reading your content. Establishing your brand within your content is essential, but you should keep it light. Material filled with heavy branding seems more like spam than engaging content that is worth sharing. However, posts, blogs, articles or ads that elicit an emotional response encourage a higher level of engagement, particularly those related to:

• Amazement
• Astonishment
• Curiosity
• Interest
• Uncertainty

When you target your audience’s emotional reaction, you are giving them a reason to connect with one another, not just your brand. Social media platforms encourage connections, and that should be the goal of your content. Encourage people to connect with one another through something emotional so that they will share your content over and over again.

Be a Part of Something

Invest in something philanthropic and address that in your social media content. For instance, if you are passionate about assisting children with cancer, you can use that as leverage. Many organizations offer to donate a certain amount for every comment on a picture or post. Some will also provide a specific amount of donations for every share they receive.

People often want to give, but not everyone has the means to do it. If they discover they can give to a meaningful charity by engaging with your content and sharing it, they will. Here is an example of a post created by Surf Dog Ricochet & Aqua Dog Cori. The original post encouraged likes, comments, and shares by offering to donate bowls of dog food to shelter animals. The post reached 4.4K likes, 4k shares, and 20k comments.

It is entirely possible for you to achieve the same results if you are part of something, too. Find something that matters to you, and it will increase engagement. By promoting something you care about, it gives the audience a chance to get to know you better as a person rather than just a brand. As such, your social media content will experience more engagement and more shares.

There are so many tactics you can use to create engaging, shareable content. Make sure you try out different ways to make your content as contagious as possible. The more strategies you try, the easier it will be for you to gauge what works best with your specific audience. If you are ready to invest in the engagement level of your content, get in touch with Focused Content today. We can discuss your social media content needs and deliver the quality you want and need.

This post was written for Alt Creative by Catherine Lamb. Learn more about her at: https://www.facebook.com/CathyLambContent