Take your social media engagement to the next level
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Most businesses don’t realise the full potential of social media. They post sporadically, without a clear strategy, and wonder why they’re not getting the results they want.
Social media is one of the most powerful communication tools out there. It has the ability to reach a large number of people quickly and easily. However, in order to make the most of social media, you need to create content that is both engaging and exciting for your followers.
By using interesting and eye-catching visuals, adding punchy captions, and using hashtags to help your posts reach a wider audience, you can take your social media posts to a whole new level! This will help you attract more followers, and ultimately, more customers.
It can be difficult to come up with interesting ideas for your social media posts, make them look great and remember to post them on time. Talking about time, when even is the best time to post on social media?
The secret ingredients for a winning social post are not so secret after all. A good strategy, proper planning and a couple of hours at the start of the month are everything you need to take your social media engagement to the next level.
What if I told you that you could create a whole month's worth of posts including images, captions and scheduling posts, in less than 2 hours?
And not just any old posts, but high-quality & engaging content that your followers will love!
Would you be interested?
If you’re nodding your head right now, then I have something special for you. This article is going to teach you exactly how to do that. read on to find out how.
Contents
Why it's important to have a social media strategy
How many times have you randomly posted throughout the week and can't work out why your efforts are not getting noticed? If you don't have a strategy, then it's likely that your social media posts are not reaching the right people, at the right time. Maybe you are not posting about what everyone wants to see, you could be posting at the wrong time or maybe your captions just aren't closing the deal and getting your followers to take the actions you want them to take.
As a business, you need to have a social media strategy. This means having a plan of what you want to achieve with your social media posts, and how you're going to go about achieving it.
Your strategy should consider your business goals, your target audience, and the platforms that you are going to use. Once you have a clear strategy in place, it will be much easier to come up with ideas for your social media posts. That's just the start of it. Next, you need to find out what your target audience is actually interested in seeing and the times they are most active and likely to engage with your posts. Thankfully, there are some really handy hacks we can use to find all of this out!
How to come up with ideas for social media posts
The best way to come up with a content plan is to find out the most popular questions surrounding your business & products. After all, if a lot of people are searching for answers about your products, there is a high chance that your followers want to know those answers too. They might not even know that they want to know, but if you can provide them with the answers, you're sure to get their attention!
But how do you find ideas for social media posts?
Answer the Public: This little-known tool is an absolute gold mine! it's free to use and in less than 30 seconds you can find yourself a list of trending questions in your niche. to get started, head to a website called Answer the Public.
Now, this is important. I know I said it was free, but it's not unlimited, so use your searches wisely. You can perform two searches each day for free. It doesn't sound like a lot, but, when you see the amount of information you get from just one search you will realise that just one search is more than enough. Just remember to not use it like a Google search. Really think about what you are going to ask. The best way to get started is to use your main keyword. Not sure about Keywords? you can learn all about them here in this article.
Follow along with this tutorial and let me show you how you are going to get your post topics for the next month.
I'm going to plan out 30 days of content for an Organic Chocolate company. Watch this video to see how I do it.
Did you see how easy that was? I entered my main keyword 'Organic Chocolate' and I got shown a list of questions that people are searching for. They take their data from the two most popular search engines, Google and Bing. Based on your keyword, they harvest the 'people also asked' questions that the search engines would show you if you were to perform the search on their platform.
They present you with these cool-looking data clouds, that surround basic question words, how, why, when, etc... with the answers that relate to them. But let's be real, they are pretty impossible to read!
If you want to know what the questions are, you can click on any of the questions and a list will pop up.
If you want to get really geeky with it, you can download the data as a CSV file. This is great if you want to keep all of your post ideas in one place. As you saw in the video, I clicked on the download CSV button in the top right, and I got a handy spreadsheet with the data laid out in a really easy-to-read format.
Choosing the right questions to turn into social media posts
Now I have this extensive list, it's time to look through and choose the questions most relevant to my business. I'm looking for questions that relate to my products and niche. Questions that my target audience would be interested in. I'm also looking for questions that I can answer easily and within the word limit of a social media post.
I went through the list and picked out some of the best questions that I will be able to answer. Remember, you don't have to answer all of the questions. Just pick out the ones that will be most beneficial to your business.
I am planning one month of posts. For this business and I am going to post three times a week, so I will need 12 questions in total.
Here are the questions I chose:
Is organic chocolate good for you?
Is organic chocolate fair trade?
Does organic chocolate taste different?
How to make organic chocolate chip cookies?
What is organic chocolate?
Is organic chocolate vegan?
Organic chocolate vs regular?
Best organic chocolate bars.
Organic chocolate latte.
Buy organic chocolate online.
Best organic chocolate.
Does organic chocolate have dairy?
You will notice that there is a wide range of questions, with varying degrees of intent. Some of the questions are targeted at people who are curious about organic chocolate, while others are from people who are looking to buy organic chocolate right now.
This is intentional. I want to engage with people who are interested in the product, as well as those who are ready to make a purchase. By providing a mix of content, I am catering to both types of audiences.
Now that I have my questions, it's time to start creating my posts.
How to create high-quality images that engage your followers
As I touched on earlier, one of the most important aspects of a successful social media post is the visual element. People are far more likely to engage with a post that has an interesting image or video than one that doesn't.
There are a few things to consider when choosing or creating images for your posts. Firstly, they need to be of high quality. This means that they should be in focus, well-lit, and free from any distractions. Secondly, they need to be relevant to the text of your post. The image should help to illustrate your point or tell a story.
If you're not a confident photographer, there are plenty of online tools that you can use to create professional-looking images. Canva is a great option for creating social media graphics, and they have a huge library of royalty-free photos that you can use. They have also got loads of premium features, we have partnered up with Canva to give you a 30-day free trial for the pro plan so you can try it out.
Video can have a real impact on a timeline full of images. People love to watch a video and it's a great way to capture attention. If you're not sure where to start, there are plenty of online tutorials that can help you to create high-quality videos for your social media posts. I created this one, for my fictional organic chocolate brand, with Canva in less than 20 minutes.
Creating engaging and exciting content for your social media posts doesn't have to be difficult. By using interesting visuals and punchy captions, you can take your posts to a whole new level!
As I touched on earlier, one of the most important aspects of a successful social media post is the visual element. People are far more likely to engage with a post that has an interesting image or video than one that doesn't. The most popular types of posts are:
How-to videos
User-generated content
Review videos
They are all very easy to create and can be done with little to no budget. Get your images/video, load them into Canva, and use the graphic design tools to make them pop. If you're interested in learning more about editing photos using Canva you can read this article.
The importance of the caption
The caption is your chance to engage with your followers and get them interested in your post. A good caption will be punchy, to the point, and make use of relevant hashtags. Captions should be no longer than two or three sentences, as people are far more likely to skim a caption than read it in full.
Here are a few tips for writing captions that will engage your followers:
Use emojis to break up the text and add personality to your posts
Ask questions to encourage interaction
Use hashtags to reach a wider audience
Use call-to-actions to encourage people to take action
But we have got 12 posts to write captions for here. How are we going to do that quickly and without repetition? We're going to hire a professional copywriter! Well, not really, but the next best thing. We are going to use an AI writing tool that can create well-written, keyword-rich captions for our social media posts!
Jasper AI is the best there is and it's really easy to use. I've put together a short demo video, creating captions for the questions we found using Answer the Public.
See how easy that was!! I just kept hitting run, and Jasper AI did all of the work for us.
These captions were generated using Jasper's long-form editor. It's a premium feature available on the Boss Mode plan. I have partnered up with the team at Jasper and you can get 10,000 free words, so you can try out all of the cool features.
I started out by entering some basic info into the explainer boxes on the left.
In the content brief, I told Jasper that I was writing social media posts.
In the tone of voice, I went for fun and informative, but you can write anything here, so if you want your posts to be in the voice of the Queen of England then go for it and see how it turns out.
Keywords! It's important to include them in your social media posts. I put in my main keyword, Organic Chocolate. Jasper will see that and try to use it where it's appropriate.
What do I do if the output by Jasper isn't quite right? Here's a video of a caption I wasn't happy with.
The software didn't know the actual answer to the question. Here's what I did.
Add more details to the explainer box. I told Jasper that My organic chocolate is vegan.
I added Vegan into the keywords list
After adding these extra details, Jasper knew exactly how to answer the question.
Do you think Jasper could save you a lot of time? If you want to try it out for yourself, here's the link again. You'll get 10,000 free words to try out all of the features.
Finding the best time to post on social media
The best time to post on social media depends on a number of factors, including your audience, your content, and your goals. However, there are some general guidelines that you can follow to ensure that your posts are seen by as many people as possible.
To start with, you need to consider what time zone your audience is in. If most of your followers are in the same time zone as you, then you can use scheduling software like the free one by Metricool, to schedule your posts for times when they are likely to be online. The Metricool scheduling calendar pulls in loads of data from your social accounts and shows you exactly when the most active times are for your users, for each platform.
Next, you need to think about the content of your posts. If you're sharing photos or videos, then people are more likely to engage with them during their free time, such as in the evening or at weekends. However, if you're sharing links to articles or blog posts, then people are more likely to click on them during their commute or lunch break.
Using scheduling software makes it really easy to schedule your posts in advance. There are a few out there, including Facebook's own Meta Business Suite, which offers the ability to schedule Facebook and Instagram posts. I recently wrote about the differences between Meta Business Suite and Metricool, you can find that article here.
So, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of when the best time to post on social media is. However, by taking into account your audience, your content, and your goals, you can use Metricool's scheduling calendar to schedule your posts for times when they are most likely to be seen and engaged. It's completely free, so if you want to try Metricool, here's a link to their website.
So there you have it. Four great tools to level up your social media. And, if you want to try them out for yourself, here are the links again:
With a little bit of strategic planning, and a lot of insider information you can create all of your social media posts for the month in one go! Just imagine all of the extra work you can get done with all of that free time.
Do you have any other tips for creating great social media posts? Let us know in the comments below.
NX digital is a UK-based website designer and Wix Partner. If you need help with your Wix website or SEO, get in touch. We offer free consultations and are always happy to help.
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