General Tips for Attention-Grabbing Social Media Posts
1. Brand Your Social Media Posts
You want your customers and fans to instantly recognize your posts in their social media feed. Where possible, use aspects of your brand to help mark your posts out as yours. If you’re adding text to a photo, for instance, you could use your brand fonts and colors.
2. Keep Sentences and Paragraphs Short
Shorter is usually better on social media. If your social media posts are long screeds of text, they’re going to be all too easy to scroll past. Keep it snappy: don’t use more words than you need to. Break up long sentences and paragraphs, too, just as you would in your blog content.
Add Humor (if Appropriate for Your Brand)
Funny social media posts are often the ones that get the most attention on social media. If you want your post to go viral, humor is a great way to do that. Just make sure you’re using humor in a way that’s appropriate to your brand and your audience.
4. Include Trigger Words
Using trigger words in your social media posts can be a great way to grab attention. Trigger words are ones that tap into emotions and help your audience to know that you really get their problems and struggles. You can find a handy list of trigger words here.
5. Only Post Once or Twice Per Day
Are you trying to improve engagement by posting multiple times per day on social media? If you’re sending out tweets every hour or adding new photos to Instagram constantly, then you may struggle to get any attention because you’re sharing too much. Try posting once or twice a day instead on most social media platforms and track your results.
6. Tag Influencers in Your Niche
While you won’t want to do this with every post, tagging influencers in relevant social media posts can hugely increase how much attention you get. People scrolling through will spot the name of someone they know (bonus points if the influencer is in a photo with your post) – and the influencer may well reshare your post, hugely boosting your potential audience.
Key findings
Brands are no strangers to social. But, by and large, brands have only just begun to realize the value of truly connecting with consumers and treating social as more than a channel for promotion. Here are the top five findings from our research on the business value of building connections through social channels:
- People believe brands and social media can power connections. Despite feelings of division, 91% of people believe in social’s power to connect people. More specifically, 78% of consumers want brands to use social to help people connect with each other.
- Social is the number one channel for brands to connect with consumers. When asked which communication channels give brands the best opportunity to connect with their customers, survey respondents ranked social media as number one.
- Connection breeds loyalty and bottom line growth. Investing in relationships with consumers directly impacts business revenue and strengthens customer loyalty. When customers feel connected to brands, more than half of consumers (57%) will increase their spending with that brand and 76% will buy from them over a competitor.
- Real people are the key to authentic relationships. Consumers want to learn more about the people behind their favorite brands. Seventy percent of consumers, for example, report feeling more connected when a brand’s CEO is active on social. Additionally, 72% of consumers report feeling similarly when employees share information about a brand online.
- People want brands to connect them to other people. And they don’t mean only those with similar mindsets. Sixty-two percent believe social can unify people of different backgrounds and beliefs, and more than half (52%) expressed interest in connecting with individuals different from them.
52 Content Ideas For Businesses to Post on Social Media
1. Your Company’s Blog Posts
Does your business have a blog? The best way to get your blog seen is to share it on your own social media platforms. You know it’s relevant to your business because it came from your business. Be sure the content you’re writing for your business blog is valuable and will connect with your audience.
2. Posts Showing Your Company’s Culture
What better way to showcase your business than by sharing a culture post? A culture post is an image or article that highlights what your business is all about. It could be a behind-the-scenes image of your employees doing something quirky, or an article about how your business does something a certain way.
3. Industry News
In raw numbers, news articles get more social shares than any other type of article. Most businesses that produce content are focusing on deep, long-form content rather than as-it-happens breaking news. Create a list of news sources in your industry. This could include trade publications or websites. Then, find those sources on Twitter and follow them. When they share something interesting, retweet it to your followers or share it on another social network, like Facebook or Google+.
4. Curated Content
Content curation is simply sharing the content of others in your niche. Sometimes, the things you want to share with your audience have already been written. Rather than spending the time crafting an in-depth post, you can quickly share one that’s already been written (by giving them credit, of course). At CoSchedule, we use our handy-dandy Chrome Extension tool to help with our content curation. Here’s an example of a post we shared from Kissmetrics:
5. Question Posts
Not everything you share on social media has to be a blog post or article. Get your audience talking and engaging with one another by asking a burning question. For example, you could ask, “What sort of content should I blog about next?” It’s the best way to know what your audience really wants to read. Asking a fun question or creating a Twitter poll is a good way to get your audience’s insights.
6. Product/Company Videos
Visuals are eye-catching when your audience is scrolling through their news feed. It’s been proven time and time again that visuals help improve engagement, but what about videos? Research shows that videos have a 135% greater organic reach compared to photos. That’s a crazy high number. Take advantage of this organic reach opportunity by sharing videos about your company or a new product you have.
7. Customer Reviews and Testimonials
Does your company have dedicated fans? Let their voices be heard and share their thoughts on your social media. You can do this by retweeting their kind words or creating a graphic with their testimonial directly on it. Don’t forget to include their name/handle!
8. Quick Tips and Advice
Aside from sharing an entire “How to” post giving in-depth tips and advice, you can share a few tips that you think are the MOST important. Sharing a simple tidbit is an easy way to share valuable information with your audience. Here at CoSchedule, we call them “Pro Tips”.
9. Memes or GIFs
Aside from sharing images to your social media, you can use memes and GIFs when publishing your content. This adds a fun spin to your plain post and will be too irresistible for your audience to scroll past.
Memes and GIFs are extremely popular on social media, even among top companies. At CoSchedule, we’ve recently started using memes and GIFs on Twitter and have found that they receive far more likes and retweets than regular images.
10. Contest Posts
Encouraging people to participate in a social media contest related to your brand will boost engagement with those who are already followers. They can help you increase subscribers by requiring those who don’t follow or like your page to do so in order to participate.
11. Holiday Posts
No matter where you live, holidays are a big deal. Show your holiday spirit by sharing a holiday-related post on your business page. Whether it be an image, video, or article, your audience will appreciate that your business has real people that also get excited about holidays! Starbucks is known for getting exceptionally excited during Christmas season.
12. Photos From Company Events
We discussed sharing culture posts that showcase your company’s personality, but you can take that a step further by sharing photos from a company event. If your business hosts a charity event or fundraiser, a great way to spread awareness is by sharing it on social media.
13. Post an Answer to a Commonly Asked Question
Are you receiving the same question over and over again from your audience? Instead of constantly responding to this question one by one, solve it once and for all by sharing a post with the answer.
Sources:
https://www.seohorizon.com/social/attention-grabbing-social-media-posts/
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/social-media-connection/
https://coschedule.com/blog/social-media-post-ideas