Create Content: How to keep your fans engaged

I was asked this question in my Facebook Group: It’s All About Digital Marketing and I thought it was an interesting one to share here with you guys. The questions was simple; “how to find sources to create content to keep your fans interested? In other words, I manage multiple social media accounts for my clients. How do I create better social media content for them? What are the best sources for inspiration that’s always up-to-date?”

Here’s my reply to the group. I wanted to share it here as I think a lot of people might be in the same boat:

A great question from Abdul Aziz in the group and this is the first in the list of responses to your suggestions.

To get us started here, let’s look at what our Social Media (SM) really is and why we’re all using it! Our SM profiles and platforms are not about US! They are about our audience. We use them to find, build and engage with an audience. If we try to build our SM for ourselves, we’re going to neglect them.

So maybe the real question here is simply:

Before you create content, ask yourself: “What does my audience want?”

What better content could there possibly be, than engaging content that our audience wants to see?

So, what is this illusive and mystical content?

Well that’s where you need to roll up your sleeves and put in some elbow grease.

You need to start figuring out what your audience wants and here’s how you are going to do it:

1. Check your SM profiles and see what your most engaging content has been in the last 6 months.

This sounds sooooo simple, but yet far too many people, and companies, forget to do it. Go back through your posts, you can do this in FB Insights, TW Analytics etc and dig deep in to what has worked for you and what hasn’t. This will help you discover patterns. Do videos get more engagement than text? Are blog post links getting lots of clicks? Do your images really get your audience sharing? It’s a great place to start figuring out what your audience want to see. Once you’ve discovered the medium of the posts, then you can look at the content. Figure out if people like getting involved with useful content, helpful guides, simple links, infographics, video tutorials etc.

2. Do the research!

Don’t be lazy and presume to know what your audience wants. Chances are they don’t NEED your product right now. But they might soon. What can you do to help them? What are their biggest struggles? Where do they need help? You can go online, start to read up on forums related to your products/services, check out Quora and get involved in answering some questions, have a look at Reddit and find some threads that are relevant to your industry. You want to put yourself in their shoes for a day. What are the biggest pain points that you can help them with right now!

3. Ask yourself one question, before posting anything to any SM profiles:

“Am I adding MASSIVE VALUE to my audience?” The bulk of what you post MUST add value to your audience. If you’re not adding value then you are simply posting for the sake of posting. Try to come up with ideas for guides, freebies, blog posts that will help them with something related to the product/service that you offer. You are trying to build a relationship with these people, and one of the best ways to do this is to give away useful, VALUABLE information. I’m not saying give away everything for free, but you will find that you build up a better relationship, and response, once your audience starts to trust and believe in you and what you offer.

4. DO NOT simply post special offers/your products.

The SELL, SELL, SELL approach does not work! SM is not a direct selling tool. If you use that as an approach you become as annoying as those people that incessantly call me telling me I’ve been in an accident in the last 2 years. NO I HAVEN’T!

Think about them, not what you are trying to achieve.

5. Be Patient!

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but neither was any good SM presence/network. If you think that posting 10 things online is going to get you a sale, then you haven’t understood what SM is. We started this group in 2016, we’ve pushed probably close to 100 pieces of content to the group, all free, all to try to help you guys, and we very rarely push anything that we actually do. As a result we now have 540+ people on this group, getting involved in the conversations and helping us with our content creation.

6. Ask them!

It seems so obvious, but seriously, go to your audience and ask them what they need help with, ask them what you can do for them, for free. The reason I am writing this post is simply because I asked the question and Abdul answered. So here we are. Why can’t you do the same? On TW you can run polls really easily too. Push it out there, find out what you make their lives better.

7. Stick to it!

Set yourself a Content Plan; what you are going to post and when. Use a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer to really make sure that you are consistently up to date online. In your content marketing plan, set yourself a mini contract. For example, every week 5 posts on FB, 14 on TW, 3 on LI, etc etc. Then stick to it. Create content, schedule it and then you can relax. You will then know that you are always in advance and that’s half the battle.

8. Find a few easy to use tools to create beautiful content.

Things like Canva, WordSwag are super simple to use compared to Photoshop for example. Use these to create content that looks good and define your style with their help! You can then look to create PDF Ebooks later on and other things, but there are outsourcers, software and even automated systems to help you do this.

9. Don’t give up!

Seriously… Don’t! There’s a recurring theme in a few of these points, but I really mean this. Push through, even if you aren’t getting results, keep going, keep posting, keep sharing content, keep engaging and reply to everyone, good, bad, negative, keep it going. It can be really tough but don’t get disheartened. I’ve seen SM profiles really take off months after they were started. Consistently be working on them, plan in advance, post regularly, you just need to keep going.

I hope this helps to answer Abdul’s question (and maybe yours too). At the end of the day this is really important. You want to create content for your audience, not for you, not because you want to.

Think about this when you create content.

The last time you went to a wedding was there a DJ?

You need to imagine you are a DJ at a wedding. You may love Rock n Roll, but the Bride & Groom have decided they want nothing but classic cheese 80’s music. So what do you do?

You play the classic cheesy 80’s music because it’s not about you, it’s about the Bride & Groom and their guests.

Not for you!

Be the DJ… Find out what they want to listen to and play those tracks!

PS: If you’re not sure how you can use Facebook to help your business, why not check out our introduction email What Is Facebook Marketing?