For modern brands, learning how to navigate content marketing and social media marketing campaigns is crucial — but many don’t know where to get started. If that sounds like you, don’t worry! This guide offers tips to roll out a successful marketing strategy and includes social media tools and creator platforms you can use to make amazing content your customers will love.
What Is a Social Media Content Creator?
With so much happening on social media these days, there is one point where people sometimes get confused — and that’s the difference between influencers and content creators. In fact, it’s possible to be both a content creator and an influencer, but the primary difference is that influencers use their leverage to create trust and brand awareness. Content creators may use their influence, or they may work behind the scenes to provide the content that brands need to popularize their products and services.
Content creators’ skills run the gamut. They’re writers, graphic designers, photographers, videographers, and video editors. While they may not leverage their own social influence, they are highly skilled in the social realm nonetheless — and that’s because they’re designing content that needs to perform well in this space.
Where will you find the work of content creators? Just about everywhere, including today’s top social platforms:
- TikTok
- YouTube
- Snapchat
The list above features social platforms where content can be created, but creators also produce websites, email newsletters, print materials, books — you name it.
7 Social Media Content Creation Best Practices
Learning how to market effectively on social media can be tricky. Here are a few tips and best practices to follow so that you can make the most of your marketing efforts.
1) Understand Your Target Audience
This is perhaps the most important part of content creation. When you understand your audience, you’ll know which platforms they frequent, and thus, which ones you should focus on. You’ll also know the types of content they like best, which is vital since content must gain traction to be effective.
There are several things you can do to understand who your audience is. Start by creating buyer personas. Personas are incredibly useful tools, and to put one together, you’ll need to gather a lot of information, including demographics, market research, research from focus groups, social analytics, and so on. Many brands pay third parties to do this portion of the task since it requires a lot of legwork.
From there, you can create the persona. Make sure that it outlines who your audience really is: age, gender distribution, net worth, typical careers, favorite social platforms, favorite products, things your audience needs and wants, their pain points, and even their interests and hobbies. All of this together will give you insights into the section of the population that represents your audience.
From there, you can further refine your understanding. Hold one-on-one interviews to really get a feeling for your audience rather than working from statistics alone. It’s also worthwhile to check out your competitors. Learn the secrets behind their success in order to create your own success.
2) Schedule Your Social Content Ahead of Time
Scheduling social content is about more than preparedness and organization — though you shouldn’t overlook either of those things. But there are other benefits:
- Establish your cadence: People are creatures of routine, and as your brand takes off, if you keep publishing times and places consistent, people will know when and where to look for your content, which is a key part of building engagement.
- Map holidays and events: Brands often do special things for holidays, major launches, and so on. Add these things to your schedule so that you have plenty of time to prepare the content for them.
- Avoid real-time blunders: You’ve seen them before. Well-meaning social media managers occasionally post off-the-cuff remarks that accidentally end up generating controversy. Schedules help you avoid this problem because they give you the chance to think things through before posting. It also gives your social media team members time to look things over for errors.
- Create balance: If you haven’t heard of the “411 Rule,” it’s basically a metric that helps you create balance. It’s a content strategy you can follow so that you can ensure that you’re providing interesting content without overselling. The idea is to publish four educational or entertaining posts for each soft promotional post and each hard promotional post. Naturally, a schedule helps you keep this balance.
3) Stay Engaged With Your Audience
Engaged audiences are happy audiences! Keeping people engaged spreads the word about your brand farther, faster — sometimes even at viral speed. All of those likes, comments, clicks, and mentions add up over time.
That’s why engagement is important, but how do you foster it? In the most basic sense, all you need to do is interact with your audience. That means replying to comments on occasion, highlighting valued customers, or even creating experiences in which they can participate — like giveaways, for example.
4) Keep Up With the Latest Trends
In the realm of social media, few things are as off-putting as off-trend content. This is because off-trend content speaks to a marketing team that is out of touch with its audience. It leads people to believe that you’re just there to sell, and haven’t taken the time to figure out what it is that they really care about.
Fortunately, keeping up with trends is relatively easy. On the platforms that you use, you can browse and follow popular hashtags for insights. You can also dive deeper. Take a look at the people who are liking, commenting, and sharing your content — then look at the things they’re liking and sharing to see what is trending in their neck of the woods.
5) Take a Storytelling Approach Over Selling
The old ways of selling — sales pitches, ads are thrown in your face, aggressive “buy it now” language — are so outdated that they’re just not as effective anymore. In fact, these tactics can actually hurt brands more than they will help.
Brand storytelling is the new way to market, and it’s relatively easy to do, too. When you’re creating your brand’s story, you’re doing more than giving customers a reason to buy. You’re also giving them a look at where you came from, where you’re planning to go, and the challenges in your path, past and present. Storytelling is not only captivating, but it’s humanizing. When people can connect with you on a human level, they’re more likely to offer their support.
6) Provide Data and References Whenever Possible
We’re in an increasingly data-driven world, one where people have 24/7 access to just about any type of information imaginable — and nothing is worse for your reputation than inaccurate facts or dubious sources. Wherever possible, provide data and credible sources to back up your facts and keep your reputation positive.
7) Repurpose Your Content
On the surface, repurposing sounds like rehashing the same old things over and over, which most audiences will find tiring. But repurposing content is different from rehashing in that it’s not about repeating. Rather, repurposing content reinforces your message while increasing your marketing team’s efficiency.
Even better, repurposing gives you a much broader reach. Publishing a piece of content on Facebook only reaches those who frequent Facebook. But if you repurpose that content into a shorter format for Twitter, or an infographic that you can pair with a tweet, or a video for YouTube, that opens you up to a brand new audience.
A Roundup of the Best Social Media Content Creation Tools
Looking for a few tools to help you out with content creation? Read below for some picks that will cover everything from finding creators to developing your own animations.
Popular Pays: For Managing Your Influencer Marketing Efforts
Popular Pays is a platform designed to help you manage influencer and creator relationships. It’s a collaboration tool designed to bring brands, creators, and influencers together — on both a small scale and an enterprise scale. It’s an essential tool for the modern marketer. Check it out here!
Unique Features
- Provides access to a database of more than 85,000+ content creators and influencers.
- Allows you to chat with influencers and creators to learn more about them.
- Provides tools for developing your campaign.
- Build a content library, track content performance, and analyze statistics.
Jasper (Formerly Jarvis): For Creating Social Copy
Need to automate? Then you need Jasper (formerly Jarvis). This is a tool that puts artificial intelligence to work so that you can design headlines, ad copy, and more.
Unique Features
- Create content quickly with Boss Mode, which can develop original content up to five times faster.
- Collaborate with your team via on-platform projects and folders.
- Works with Surfer SEO to optimize content.
- Translate content into 25 different languages.
Canva: For Designing Social-Ready Images
Images are a requirement for content — and Canva is designed to help you quickly easily create images that are ready for prime time. No need for design experience or expensive software suites!
Unique Features
- Offers a huge selection of design products suited not only to social media, but to print marketing, merchandise, and more.
- Online video recorder makes video creation simple.
- Simple tools let you cut videos to the right size for TikTok, Instagram, and elsewhere.
- Create dynamic videos and presentations with text animation, textures, and more.
Powtoon: For Creating Videos and Animation
Wouldn’t it be nice to hire an animation studio to create some of your content? With Powtoon, you don’t have to. This app lets you create an animated experience online without animation or design experience.
Unique Features
- Cloud-based app allows you to create videos, images, characters, and animations from anywhere.
- Collaborative tools allow your team to work together on projects.
- When you’ve finished an animated project, you can use Powtoon’s tools to share it to social media easily.
Grammarly: For Checking Grammar and Enhancing Voice and Style
Avoid typos, grammar errors, and clean up your writing style using Grammarly. This is especially important if you’re using AI-based tools like Jasper, which can sometimes create unnatural-sounding language.
Unique Features
- Grammarly is super flexible, allowing you to integrate it with Word, Google Docs, Slack, most mail apps, and social media platforms.
- Analyze not only grammar, but style — helping you to create clear, concise verbiage.
- Use the plagiarism checker to make sure the content you’ve created is completely unique.
Create Engaging Social Media Content With Popular Pays
Ready to step up your social strategy? Then it’s time to connect with the creators who can make your content, and the influencers who know your audience best. Check out Popular Pays to get started. Feel free to get in touch with our team or request a demo here.