Social media content tips - 10 tips on how to win on social media

While there’s no fail-safe formula for creating great social media content – engagement is reactive after all – figuring out how to win on social media as a brand or company is definitely a step-by-step process. Carefully planning and implementing strategies with consistency helps the YesMore Team to deliver best-in-class content for our clients.

If you’re looking for social media content tips to use in house, we’ve pulled together ten of the steps our community managers follow across three key stages of production. But if you’re still not sure where to start after reading this, you can brief your social media content needs to our team.

Figuring out how to win on social media as a brand or company is a step-by-step process that requires careful planning and implementation

Define your social media content themes

Defining your brand strategy on social should start with picking the themes around which to create your content. These are the three steps we use to start the process.

1. Pick keywords: Keyword research is essential if you want to compete in your market. Google Trends will allow you to see the popularity of terms over time. However, ensure you’re selecting words which are niche, without getting too granular – leave this for your hashtags. We recommend writing out your brand’s positioning in one line – it’s likely you’ve just included your two main keywords. For example if you’re an organic wine brand who’s looking to become the party drink of the summer; ‘organic wine’ and ‘party drink’ are a great place to start.

2. Define the bigger picture: When you’re shooting, designing or searching for relevant content by users, your themes will help define the look and feel. For the above example, think about the aspiration you’re visualising and the themes that are part of this. BBQ, picnic, sunshine or friends could all work for the above example.

3. Start acquiring content: With your keywords defined, now you know how your original pictures or UGC should look, or what to search for if using stock images. If you buy a content package with us, we’ll look to provide you with 20 set-ups at a location which matches your themes.

When selecting keywords for your content strategy, ensure you’re selecting words which are niche, without getting too granular - leave this for your hashtags

Work on your social media tone of voice

Instagram and Facebook are visual platforms, but captions and titles are what drives clicks to buy or use your product. Engaging with your users by replying to their comments, DMs and messages is also essential for building your brand. So how should you speak to users? Here’s our top tips for defining a TOV.

1. Define your customer profile: Knowing who your audience is and what will resonate with them is the best place to start to understand your TOV. Create a detailed profile of your existing or target customer base, from age to location, interests to habits.

2. Create a style guide: Having hard and fast rules for how you talk to your audience is important for consistency, especially if multiple people post or interact with your audience. Use your style guide to define the dos, don’ts and musts of interaction with your audience. Remember to update it over time based on what led to the most positive engagement.

3. Remember to be relatable: In our planning social media content blog we talked about why you should avoid giving your followers the hard-sell. While some content should tell your customers where to buy your product and how it works, remember the other reasons they’re coming to your channel: to be  entertained, to learn something or be rewarded or see the value they add. Sounding like a human or group of like-minded individuals is the best way to be relatable and make your channel a great place to be.

Knowing who your audience is and what will resonate with them is the best place to start to understand your TOV

Create a social media content calendar

Once you’ve created content and know how you’re going to talk about it, you need to plan when you’re going to post it. This is how we recommend using a content calendar.

1. Use the same template every time: Your content calendar should contain columns based on the channels you use and your content pillars, so you know each month how much content to create and in which formats.

2. Make equal space for visuals and words: What your content looks like and sounds like is equally important – so ensure there’s equal space for these two elements in your calendar. Also make space to select your Instagram tags, because the more people that can discover your content, the better it will perform.

3. Decide on the cadence of your posts: Over time you’ll learn how often to post based on your engagement rate and follow-unfollow behaviour. You can use these learnings to add your content to your calendar at the relevant regular intervals, and on the days when your audience are online the most – which you should be able to see in your analytics. Adding note-worthy dates will also help you to plan additional posts or specific campaigns.

4. Plan ahead: Batch creating and planning your content ahead of time is the easiest way to ensure it’s best in class. With your template and cadence set, you know what you need and when, so you can create content ahead of time. We recommend doing this two weeks or even a month ahead so you have enough time to review it.