How to Create Useful Content for Social Media

{Image from Anthony Perez on Flickr}

How many times have you clicked on a blog or website and been disappointed with the content? How many times have you followed someone on Twitter or “liked” someone on Facebook to find that they don’t share valuable content? Don’t you just love people who send out automated tweets and never reply to anyone? Hmmm, I didn’t think so—me neither.

You usually get one shot to make an impression—and that shot usually doesn’t last more than 15 seconds. If the reader doesn’t find anything entertaining or informative on your site, you’ve got major problems. They’ll click away, and you’ve lost someone who you could’ve made a fan.

You shouldn’t be out to impress everyone that stumbles across your blog or website—but you do want to impress your target market and potential customers. You want them to find content that wows them, leaving them wanting more and more. You want them to subscribe to your RSS feed and your newsletter.

There’s a lot of noise in social media. “There are over 200 million internet blogs, and that number is rapidly increasing.” {From: Success Secrets of the Social Media Marketing Superstars by Mitch Meyerson} That means you have to stand out, and you do this by writing useful content that your target market cares about.

5 Questions to Ask to Create Useful Content Your Readers Will Devour

1. Who am I doing this for? Whether you’re writing a blog post, making a new video, tweeting, or posting a new Facebook status, you should know who you’re doing it for. To do this, you must know your target market, and more specifically, your target customer.
2. How can I help my target audience solve their problems? Brainstorm a list of problems that your target audience struggles with, and figure out how you can help them solve those problems. Build your content around these solutions. I came up with the idea for this social media blog series after realizing that many people in my target audience struggle with social media. They want to know what platforms to use, how to use social media effectively, and how it can help their business success. Well, I’m not a social media expert, so I gathered a group of creative women that also had similar audiences with similar problems to put together content that offered solutions. That makes this useful content.
3. What goal do I want to reach with my content? This isn’t a question you need to ponder with every tweet you send, but you should consider this question for each blog post. Are you out to sell your new ebook? Are you trying to connect with your customers? Is your goal to get readers to sign up for your newsletter? Keep this goal in mind when you develop your content.
4. Am I building trust with this content? When you constantly push your product at me, you’re annoying and untrustworthy. But, when you provide me with content that teaches me something or makes me relate to you, you’re building trust. I’m much more likely to buy your product if you provide me with useful content before trying to sell me something. This is one reason that so many successful entrepreneurs offer free ebooks—to build trust and show their customers that they know what they’re talking about.
5. Does this content engage my audience? If you really want to create compelling content that will be spread across social media platforms, you should try to engage your audience. You can do this by ending the post with a question or call to action. When you leave your reader with a question or motivate them to do something, you keep them thinking about your post after they’re done reading it.

7 More Tips to Creating Useful Content that Wins You Fans

1. Be authentic. This doesn’t mean you need to tell me your thoughts on Obama’s healthcare plan and the amount of times your child threw up last week on your jewelry blog. Just be yourself—but always think about the personal information that you share. Scott Stratten recommends that you “never put something on a social media site (or anywhere online) that you do not want seen on a billboard with your name, your picture, your company logo, and your phone number on it, with your mom driving by while sitting shotgun.” (From Unmarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging)
2. Don’t repeat yourself and remove unnecessary words. Your customers are busy, so make sure every word counts and adds something valuable.
3. Check for spelling and grammatical errors before publishing. I know this is obvious, and kinda goes against what I said in tip #2, but it’s important. If your post has multiple errors, it takes away from your credibility. Everybody makes mistakes—I know I do—but you can prevent a lot of them by double checking before posting.
4. Stop publishing content just to publish it. Many people get wrapped up in the idea that they have to post on their blogs every day, so they post half-assed content. If you have to choose between writing three amazing posts and five so-so posts, ALWAYS choose the three amazing posts. But try to stay consistent. This means you should decide your posting schedule, and stick to it. Be realistic when you decide how often you should post, and remember that there are extremely successful bloggers who only post two or three times per week…think Chris Guillebeau from The Art of Nonconformity.
5. Ask your readers what they want more of and what they want you to keep doing. You can gain so much knowledge on what your readers want by asking those two simple questions. If you’re brave, consider asking your audience what you should stop doing.
6. Reread your content out loud before you hit post. When you read something out loud, you’ll notice the awkward sentences and catch mistakes that you didn’t the first time.
7. Reward your existing readers. Don’t always aim your content at getting new readers, because your current readers are going to be your biggest fans. This is extremely important to consider when you send out your newsletter. Give those readers a reason to open your newsletter when it’s sitting among 50 other unread messages.

Show off your best content. Once you’ve developed content that your readers respond to, make sure it doesn’t get buried in your blog’s archives. One simple way to do this is to add a feature to your sidebar that shows your most popular posts. You can see I’ve done this on the sidebar of this blog where it lists, “Reader Favorites.” When a new reader stumbles onto your site, you’ll have a better chance at wowing her if you point her to your best work.

Don’t be one those bloggers that just adds white noise to the internet. Don’t be one of those people who sends spam to her customers, peers, and friends on twitter and Facebook. Give your audience a reason to listen to you—provide them with useful, compelling content.

*This post is one piece of a social media blog series involving 9 other creative women. If you missed it, check out the introduction here to see where you can find the other posts in this series.