Written By: Tatiana Skomski, Account Supervisor for the PRSA Portland Metro Account

 

It is nine o’clock on an average Wednesday morning, and you are standing in line at Starbucks desperately waiting for your first latte of the day. You pull out your phone and start scrolling through your Instagram feed. You usually do not look at a picture for more than a few seconds, but something catches your eye. You stop, analyze the picture and want to learn more. Why is this?

 

What made that piece of content stand out to you enough to stop and do something? Ultimately, making the viewer stop and look is the goal for companies and organizations engaging in strategic social media content.

 

When you think about what makes a company’s social media content stand out, you are thinking about the strategy. Here are a few helpful tips to help you accomplish tangible results:

 

Keep it simple. The content you post should be simple and easy for your audience to understand. If your content is an image, keep it clean and cohesive with your brand’s colors and fonts. If your content is text for Twitter or Facebook, get to the point right away, and make sure your content uses simple language. People’s attention spans for content on social media, for the most part, are very small. Therefore, it is critical that you make the most amount of impact with the least amount of words possible.

 

Know when your audience is online. Use analytical tools, such as Sprout Social for Twitter and Insights for Facebook, in order to understand when your audience is online and engaging with your content. If you are posting at the wrong time, people will miss your content, and they will not be able to participate in the conversation. This is a critical part of social media strategy. It can make the difference between having 20 people engage with your post versus 100.

 

Quality over quantity. Always. Having 100,000 Twitter followers who do not engage in your posts versus having 50,000 loyal and consistently engaged followers will not do much for your brand on social media. It is more important to target the right audience for your brand, instead of worrying about having the highest number of followers possible. People will ignore your content if you just blast it out to mass audiences. In order to boost engagement, create smart, well-thought-out material that will speak directly to key stakeholders. In order to create this content, research is key. You need to learn and understand as much as you possibly can about your company’s key publics. Therefore, you are able to think like the people you are trying to reach, and in turn, you can create content that they will be more interested in participating in.

 

Creating a strong social media strategy can seem like a confusing and daunting task, but with these three tips in mind, you can execute the process more easily. The next time you are creating content for your brand’s social media, remember what makes you stop and pay attention when you are scrolling through your own newsfeed.

 

Tatiana Skomski is a senior at the University of Oregon pursuing her Bachelor of Arts in public relations. She is originally from San Diego and her interests lie in the areas of brand management, social media strategy and corporate communications. She enjoys practicing yoga and spending time with her dog. Follow her on Twitter.

Follow the rest of the PRSA Portland Metro Team!

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