There are lots of ways to engage your audience. Types of content that you can create and upload are pretty vast: articles or blogs, videos, images, GIFs, podcasts, the list goes on and on. But what is the best way to growth hack your way on social networks? Let's find out.
Articles and Blogs
One of the most time-consuming but informative and quite effective methods of engaging your audience is writing articles or running a blog. Fitting almost every industry, it's a good way to gain a good following on your social media and achieve other goals that you might have: be it a lead generation or simply informing. The thing is, it requires skill and time. As I said, writing is somewhat time-consuming. You may need to hire a professional to do that, that's another thing about it. Now for the engagement: you can't just write about anything you want. You need specific articles about what's trending right now, that's where you'll see results. Not all people are willing to read a lot though, so you might need to do some testing on length and style. Maybe it's something your audience doesn't want to see and you need to come up with something that will be easier on their minds and eyes.
Videos
Videos share the first place for time-consuming, but there's a lot of variables that can influence how much effort you'll need to put into it. The most popular format today that will probably stick for a while is shorts. TikToks and those alike are dominating all the social networks, being one of the most effective ways to talk to your followers. Shorts will be undeniably very easy to watch through and soak in all the information, but they have one big minus: fading away. They do so rather quickly as most of the videos do, but I'd say much faster. You'll need to do a lot of those, and with every new one, the previous will be slowly forgotten.
Images & GIFs
Pictures can be rather low-effort depending on what you'll be posting. Sometimes it can work with something just right off the internet, but most of the time is much better to do graphics in-house. It's not that much about your audience appreciating the extra effort but about remembering you. See, everything that you post must be branded and done with your style. Get proper branding and follow the guidelines, and slowly but surely you'll build your social networks in a way that people will remember. GIFs are mostly used for memes & reactions in comments and there's not much use for them in other cases. The main reason for that is them being too low-quality and you don't want to post such a thing on any of your business pages. It must be said, however, that images alone are not enough to gain enough growth or engagement: they are a good complement to the written stuff but there's not much they can do on their own besides being eye candy for a few seconds.
Podcasts
Even if taking into account the popular podcasts and other types of audio media have gained over the past few years, I still consider them to be a niche. There's not much you can do with them honestly, and there's a very limited amount of people that will be willing to listen to those. It takes too much time to record these, and chances are the results won't be good. That highly depends on what you are doing, of course, because there's always a place for a good podcast in the entertainment industry or something in the spirit of meditation.
Tips
We've covered the most popular content types, but there are still some things to cover. Here are some tips to consider if you're interested in boosting your social networks:
- Know Your Audience. Depending on the industry you're in, your audience will be very different. Take your time to look at their profiles and create a User Persona — a somewhat ideal customer of yours that you can use as a reference. 2. Do Tests. It can be simple A/B testing of what type of content gets the most engagement, or something more advanced. Either way, there's no way around some research. 3. Hire a Professional. When you do find the perfect content for your company, it probably is best to hire a professional for creating it. It's much better to invest in quality content than cheap out and post something that will not be good or speak to your audience at all.
