8 Key Ingredients for your social media posts

What key ingredients go into making a great social media post? And more importantly, how do you make your post reach the right audience and be seen and engaged with by those looking for your service or products?

I understand how it can be very frustrating to learn how to post on social media platforms effectively, especially trying to reach your ideal audience, engaging with them and then converting them is one of the biggest issue some of my clients come to me with, especially as a lot of startups/entrepreneurs embarking on their dream careers are past the 40+ mark, and beginning to use unfamiliar social media platforms for the first time.

There are currently around 50+ social media platforms of some kind out there to choose from and only a few will sit nicely with what you offer, you can Snap a chat, Tweet a tweet, let rip with your favourite shots on Insta, create a community on Facebook, Pin your entire interior design ideas on Pinterest, connect with your future boss on LinkedIn, share content on Tumblr, go round in circles on Google+ and let Foursquare tell you where to eat! Each platform has its unique users and many have lots of different users all looking and behaving differently. We touch on looking at who’s looking at Ingredient 6 so let’s move on.

The aim of this article is to help you to break down the process of creating a post, briefly explaining how you can identify who’s on what platform and what ingredients you should aim to include whilst sharing your content. Spend some time, if you can working through the free mini-workbook available with this post as it goes into the ingredient points in more depth. Please leave any comments at the end and I’ll be happy to help.

Ingredient No 1 – Define your TARGET Audience

Sending your post out to the whole wide world when you are aiming at a specific group is a common problem business owners come across when they embark on a social media campaign and spending some time to identify your target audience is a must if you want your post to be seen and interacted with by your ideal audience. If you would like help to identify your ideal audience download the Essential guide to posting on social media.

Ingredient No 2 – IDENTIFY Your Objectives or goal

If you post to your social media platforms without clear objectives, you may as well not bother posting in the first place. Having an idea about why your posting and what you want to achieve is essential to any social media marketing campaign. The most common objectives for any campaign consist of

• To increase brand VISIBILITY and REACH – To put your product or service in front of more people.
• Increase TRAFFIC to your website or landing page – Increase click through rates from your post to a specific page.
• Increase ENGAGEMENT – Share great content with a question or Poll to increase engagement between you and your followers.
• Generate LEADS – Offer small snippets of information which will entice your followers to buy or sign up for a product or service from you.
• Improve SALES – Actually, link your post to your sales page and create a window which generates real money being exchanged. 
• Learn more about your AUDIENCE – Use polls to ask questions about what your audience wants or needs.
• Run GIVEAWAYS – Competitions, sign up, sweepstakes

Ingredient No 3 – Always include a URL (uniform resource identifier) or Link to post.

It is essential to add a link to your website or landing page URL (LINK) to take your audience to further information, sign up forms, sales pages or event registration form.

Ingredient No 4 – Use Eye-Popping Graphics, Videos or GIF’s

Supporting your content with an eye catching image which resonates your call to action is essential. You can also post videos to social media and create and post GIF’s which will increase your posts attractiveness. If you do not have access to good high quality images, try using Pixabay.com, you can access royalty free stock photos and videos.

Ingredient No 5 – Create great attention grabbing call to actions

Spend some time creating 2-4 lines which will entice your reader to take notice and click through from your post to your landing page. Remember the maximum character count for Twitter is 140 characters of which your link will take up 23 characters of. Your images don’t count towards your number count.

Ingredient No 6 – Check out your INSIGHTS

After a couple of days, view the insights from your post to assess whether the post is achieving your goal and reaching the right audience.

Ingredient No 7 – Split TEST

Try sending out 2 posts with the same content but a different image or video or Gif and work out which one is working better, has more engagement or reach by viewing the insights of both.

Ingredient No 8 – Don’t send the same post out across different platforms

By all means, use the same image or video but change the content and mix it up a bit across the different social media platforms you are using.

To download the extended version of this blog post and gain access to the 8 key ingredients please click here