Post What You Would Want to Read

So why is self-promoting wrong?

The answer is that it’s not offering any value. People do not want to go out of their way to be advertised to and they don’t want adverts showing up in their home feeds alongside posts from their friends and family! This will simply demonstrate a lack of understanding on your part (hurting your reputation) and it will frustrate your visitors likely motivating them to simply unsubscribe and leave.

 And can you imagine anyone clicking on a post about why you’re the best accounting company in the [INSERT AREA] region? No, didn’t think so.

The best way to get a good idea of whether your posts are ticking the right boxes is simply to ask yourself: would you read it? If this came up on your home feed, how would you feel? If you’d be pleased and then go on to read it and possibly share it, then it’s an ideal choice for your own social media channel!

But if you’d ignore it, or worse yet feel frustrated, then that’s a sign you shouldn’t do the same. Look at your own history on these sites and ask yourself why you clicked on the links you did and shared the things you did. What are the best posts you’ve seen in your niche lately? Why? What can you do to emulate their success?

The key here is to remember that your audience are real people who have the agency to follow whatever they want and leave when they want. Thus, you need to get inside their heads. Often that just means putting yourself in their shoes, but another option is to create your fictional ‘persona’.

A persona is a buyer biography – an imaginary individual that you will consider to be your ideal customer. By getting inside their heads, you can know precisely what kind of content you should be creating/sharing, and you can speak directly to that person with things that will interest them.

One way to do this is to think of someone in your own life who would be your ideal customer. I sell fitness products for instance and I have a few friends who always want to get into shape and are always asking for advice but who never put the time in to get the results they need.

They are the ideal customer for a fitness eBook or a protein shake and so I keep them in mind whenever I create content for my social media pages – I write to them and write in a way that will get them interested and engaged!

 Learn How to Create Titles That Grab Attention

Writing content and sharing posts that can do this is the crucial skill you need to develop if you’re going to build and grow your social media channels. But there is nowhere where this is more important than in the titles of your posts.

Your title is your first impression – it’s like wearing the right suit to an interview.

 In this case, if you want people to read your content, then you need to make sure you are creating great titles that will really stand out and sound fascinating, unique and exciting. We can see this when we look at clickbait and that’s the reason that clickbait has become some popular.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, a clickbait title is a title that is designed to grab attention and encourage clicks. Often, it does this by piquing the interest of the reader with mystery or shocking statement. In other cases, the language might even be intentionally strange, such that people will be interested to click it and find out what’s going on.

 Here are some examples:

"Fitness Trainers Hate Him! Find Out How This Man Has Been Overturning Centuries of Fitness Advice”

Or

“Try This One Weird Trick to Get Rid of Bodyfat!”

Or

“This Man Told Me His Secret to Making Money Online… What Happened Next Will Shock You”

Or

“10 Tricks to Look Sexier Instantly. Number Four Changed My Life!”

In each case, there is some mystery. Who is this man who fitness trainers hate? What’s so special about number four? What’s the ‘weird trick’? These titles invite clicks because they sound and look interesting and readers can’t help but want to know more.

What’s more, is that the titles all allude to the fact that the information can somehow change their lives or at least be shocking and controversial. In either case, this information doesn’t sound boring – it sounds engaging and enticing and it’s very hard to keep on scrolling past. Especially if you combine it with an image of someone looking very attractive, or before and after pictures showing an incredible body transformation!

 Understanding the ‘Value Proposition’

Something to understand as you’re doing all this is what your value proposition is. Your value proposition should go beyond just your social media. This is rather the entire ethos behind your brand, and it should be the reason your business exists: your ‘why’.

So, what does all that mean? Essentially, it means that you should be aiming to sell more than just a product or a service, you should be selling a dream, an idea or something that can one way or another, improve people’s lives.

The old saying goes that you ‘don’t sell hats, you sell warm head.

What this means, is that what you sell is more than the sum of its parts. What you sell is the result and the way that result makes you feel. And this is what will provide the emotion behind your products – the emotion that drives people to want to buy from you.

If we were going to apply this to selling something like a fitness eBook, then your ‘value proposition’ would be the feeling of being healthy, sexy and strong. Get your viewers to imagine what it would be like to have a six pack, to have muscles and to have the confidence and energy levels that come with that.

Likewise, if you’re selling a make money program, then your value proposition should come from what it would be like to have lots of cash, no money problems and the ability to travel and buy nice clothes. It would be the attention that would get you from the opposite sex too.

When you can tap into the ‘value proposition’ of your business, then you can find an emotional hook for your posts that will be relevant and that will make people stand up and take notice.

Check out this for a two-minute ritual you can do just before bed to shed pounds.