Posting on social media is a very important requirement that every online marketer must master just as publishing on social media is a very vital promotional tool for every small business owner who wants to promote his products or services himself through social media.
Therefore, we wrote this distinguished article that will discuss:
- Practical steps to publish professional content for social media (before, during and after publishing the content).
- How to understand audience and set the objectives of the content and marketing plan.
- Types of social media content and the difference between each type.
- The difference between effective social media content – which achieves the expected goals of it – and ineffective.
- How to set the desired goals of social media content.
You can find all this and more in this exclusive guide from the CoursNews Website, which is lovingly prepared for you by experts in e-marketing and social media in the Arab world.
Prepare your cup of coffee, bring a paper and a pen, and start reading the article that you will not need anything else, what are you waiting for?
Pre-publication: Yes, publishing is not the first step
Contrary to what is expected, actually starting to publish is never the first step in the process of publishing on your social media, or even in publishing any content on the Internet.
Before you start posting on any of the social media sites, you must get to know the audience you are targeting, Target Audience, in order to publish appropriate content that can be interacted with by this audience.
You also need to be aware of the purpose behind this content, the action you want the recipient of the content to perform or the message you want to communicate.
This is in order to choose the appropriate type of content. Yes, the content – whether social media content or otherwise – has several types that we will discuss during this article.
All this is in addition to analyzing competitors, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, learning from them and shortening efforts first, and then outperforming them after that.
Let’s take a look at each of these points separately:
First: Get to know the target audience
You must define your target audience, know it very well, and understand its nature, interests, preferences, and problems.
Because this will help you understand his mind, and publish professional content on social media that is able to influence him to achieve your marketing goals.
For example, the language you would use if your target audience were teenagers from 14 to 22 years old, other than the language you would use if your target audience were startup managers, and so on.
The matter will affect the look and sound of the content, the tone of voice, the choice of the platforms on which you will publish this content, the designs, the method of presentation, and dozens of other important things.
And you can learn more through our important article: How to determine the target audience (in practical steps)
I also advise you to set up personas for your clients, in order to make it easier for yourself to target your audience if they are several segments and not from one segment.
Second: Setting goals for the content
There should be no marketing act without one or more marketing objectives intended for it, in order to measure its effectiveness and how to improve it.
The marketing objectives behind the content of social media platforms vary, including:
- Increase engagement with the page or brand.
- Achieving sales from clients.
- Increase brand awareness.
- Convert a large amount of visitors or traffic to your website.
And many other goals, each of which has a different nature and the nature of distinctive content to achieve.
In order not to confuse you, the social media content of a page or person does not have to have one goal. On the contrary, there is usually a set of goals that are being worked on in parallel.
I advise you here to apply the Smart strategy for setting goals, as the goal must have these characteristics:
- The letter “S” stands for Specific.
- The letter “M” stands for Measurable.
- The letter “A” stands for Achievable.
- The letter “R” stands for Relevant, relevant to your goal.
- The letter “T” stands for Timely.
In the case of preparing content for publication on social media, for example, do not make your goal to be famous for your page, but to increase the number of followers of your page on Facebook to 1000 followers within two months, and so on.
Third: Determine the appropriate content type
Depending on your marketing goal and your target audience, you will be able to determine the type of content that you must provide to them in order to achieve your marketing goals.
We can divide social media content – or content in general – into five types, which are:
The first type: Brand Awareness content
Awareness content is usually the content that is used in order to draw people’s attention to the existence of a brand – be it a company, product provider or even an individual -.
This content is simply your way of saying that you exist, and this type has a large number of forms, of which the most famous of all: story and storytelling.
The second type: Engagement content
All content is certainly aimed at interaction, otherwise it is ineffective, but what I mean by this type is the content whose primary goal is for your audience to interact with, and to spread on the social media platform on which you post it.
The most important forms of this content are humorous posts such as memes, contests, or giveaways.
Although this content is useful and required, limiting your content plan to it is completely useless, and in many cases harmful.
The third type: Sales content
Selling or sales content is the one that focuses primarily on your products and getting people to buy them, and it depends heavily on the customer experience.
It is worth mentioning here; That not all your publications and content should be of this type, as people get tired of it, and it may cause excessive use in reducing sales.
The fourth type: lead generation content
A very important type of lead generation content that helps you reach a segment of customers who are interested in your products or services.
If you are interested in how to attract and collect leads, let us know in the comments below, and we will dedicate an entire article on this and its best strategies.
Fifth type: Informative or educational content
And at the end of our list comes educational content – like the one we offer in Gainers – that helps your marketing plan in many ways.
For example if you use this type in your social media content plan, you will be able to stand out among your competitors as an expert, and your customers’ trust in you will increase a lot, and you will create loyalty towards your brand.
Try the educational content and you will be impressed with its results.
Fourth: Focus on the Customer Journey
If you want to publish professional content on social media for an online store, company, or even yourself and the services you provide, and you want the customer to take a specific action.
You must pay attention to the Customer Journey and its five stages:
- The first stage: Awareness, in which the customer has a problem that he wants to solve.
- The second stage: interest, in which he follows up on the services and products that you provide.
- The third stage: Decision, in which the customer makes the decision to use your products and services.
- The fourth stage: Purchase, the stage of the act of purchasing itself and evaluating your product or service.
- The fifth stage: Advocacy or loyalty, the stage in which you try to make the customer loyal to your brand or what you offer.
Thus you must prepare your content in accordance with the way you prepare your content.
Fifth: Competitors Analysis
The last thing we will discuss at the stage before publishing content on social media is analyzing competitors and learning from them, as this simple act will help you:
- Shorten your search effort by understanding what your competitors – especially the successful ones – have done.
- Get to know how they prepare their content and the interaction of the audience – especially if they are your target segment – with it.
- Understand the strengths and weaknesses of their implementation plan and business model, and use this to your advantage.
- Inspiring content ideas from their content and implementing them better and more effectively.
Content preparation and publishing stage
Now, after all these efforts and steps that you have taken, the process of preparing and publishing content will become much easier, as you will be aware of your marketing goals and your target customers.
You can imagine that you are talking to your friends in a coffee shop face-to-face with words, terms, and techniques that you know will appeal to them.
But despite the simplicity of the matter here, you have to be very careful about the nature of each of the social media platforms that you post on.
Where, as you know, the platforms differ greatly from each other, and each of them has its own algorithms that contribute to the spread or extinction of your content.
For example when you post content to:
Facebook: Make sure it has an appropriate structure to grab the attention of followers, and that it be accompanied by an attention-grabbing design or even a professional video.
Twitter: Be as brief as possible and use the right hashtags to ensure that your tweets reach your target audience.
Instagram: Instagram is now more of a video platform than a photo platform, so be sure to upload your short and medium length videos on it.
Youtube: There are a lot of important tips that I cannot summarize, but you can find them in the profit from YouTube section.
TikTok: Make sure the clips are as short as possible, and use images, music, and effects that are appropriate for the group you target.
LinkedIn: Try to make posts as official as possible, and use some appropriate images and designs with them.
Pinterest: Be sure to design images with effective size, division, and colors on this platform, with the addition of the appropriate Caption, as the Pinterest platform may double your sales.
*** It should be noted here that the pre-publication stage will determine for you which platforms are appropriate for your content and on which the audience you target resides.
Before I go beyond this stage, there are some points that I must discuss with you, which will help you prepare smart, professional content for social media that achieves your marketing goals.
1. Use a Content Calendar
To take care of all those details that we mentioned in the step before publishing professional content for social media, you must have a way to organize the content.
The best way, in my opinion, is the Content Calendar, which whether you prepare it on Excel, Notion, Trello, or other tools will benefit you.
Also, evaluating the content will help your marketing team with you in publishing professional content on social media that suits your efforts and the brand you represent.
And if you want to know more about the content calendar and how to set up a professional one tell us in the comments, and we will dedicate a whole article about it.
2. Planning the content before preparing and publishing it
Here, I mean by content planning; Outlines that will help you focus and prepare the content in the best way possible.
As it is difficult – at least for me – to prepare everything in a session or even in one day, so it is useful for me to outline the guidelines that will help me prepare the content later.
3. Interest in developing a distinctive style
You must develop a distinctive style for the brand that this social media content is from Most of it, in order to distinguish it among followers on social media platforms.
You also have to develop your own unique style, as there are plenty of content writers and social media specialists online.
And if you want to stand out and stand out among them, you have to invest in yourself, and you can read: How to build your own style of writing in 13 practical steps.
4. Use storytelling
The story is one of the most powerful marketing methods that humans have used since time immemorial to influence others, as we, as humans, have a weak point towards stories.
Every online marketer and social media specialist must take advantage of this point to infiltrate the mind and heart of his followers.
And if you’re interested and excited about how the story can be used in marketing, let us know in the comments below, and we’ll be dedicating an article to it very soon.
5. Exploit psychological tricks like FOMO
There are many tricks that you should use especially if you are publishing social media content for e-commerce and selling on the Internet.
The most famous of all is Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) used by professional online stores.
Where you push followers to buy through the use of limited offers and discounts, for example, or by showing that the quantity of the product is very small.
To learn more about FOMO and other psychological marketing tricks, I advise you to read: Marketing Psychology (7 Very Effective Psychological Marketing Tricks)
6. Grab attention with the first line or seconds of your video (USE THE HOOK)
Curiosity is a great force to use in your social media content, where with thousands upon hundreds of thousands of accounts and endless scrolling you have to catch the focus of your followers.
This is through the visual aspect – which we will talk about shortly – and also the curiosity that you can ignite by using vague or interesting sentences in a way that makes the reader urgently need to stop at your post and read it.
Among the most famous tricks in this aspect: the use of a hook that captures the focus and attention of your target audience through a phrase that they cannot resist.
How do you do this? You will definitely know when you understand your target audience well, and get to know their way of thinking and how you can influence them.
7. Attention to the visual aspect of social media content
Text On Visuals is one of the very important details of success on social media today, which, by the nature of its development, has become visual even if it relies on texts.
When you browse Facebook, you will find yourself scrolling through the posts without focusing on all of them, but as you flip through, you will find a design for a post that attracts you and pushes you to stop and read the content of this post.
Therefore, you have to work with the designer well, and provide him with everything he needs to design this image that attracts your target audience.
Where you must provide him with everything he asks for, from the Design Brief to the Text On Visual that we talked about at the beginning of this point.
And if you must do all this yourself, you can use the Canva tool.
8. Using templates and frameworks
There are a lot of ideas, but there is very, very little time and effort to implement them, so you should, in every possible way, reduce the effort and time required to implement them.
Therefore, with experience and work, you will create many templates and frameworks for yourself that facilitate your work and shorten your thinking process.
From the beginning, focus on creating and developing it for you so that you leave more time for the thinking and creativity that is so much needed in your work.
9. Quality Before Quantity
A big mistake that many people make – I myself used to make it – is the illusion of quantity, and that if you do not produce a large amount of content, you will have failed and already been late.
But this is not true, although the amount of content and continuity in publishing it is required today on social media, poor content will harm you more than it benefits you.
And don’t get me wrong here, I’m not telling you not to produce a lot of content, but I’m telling you if you have to choose between a lot of low-quality content and a little high-quality content, always choose quality.
10. Start writing and then edit
This problem confronts me and all content writers I know – and I am sure it faces those I do not know as well – which is that their minds are crowded with ideas, but they do not know where to start writing or how to write.
The solution to this problem is simply to start writing and then edit and edit later after you release all your ideas in the Word file.
Believe it or not my dear reader, I ran into this ridiculous problem in this article:
Where after watching 4 courses, watching about 21 videos on YouTube, and reading about 37 guides without telling you about my personal experience and the lessons I learned during my work, my mind was so crowded and confused that I couldn’t write.
But as soon as I started writing and dropped all ideas on the paper, things began to become clear little by little, and even the scattered and confused parts I modified, clarified, rewritten and put in their correct places.
11. Learn to use hashtags correctly
The hashtag is one of the powerful social media tools that if you use it well, you will be able to multiply the impact and spread of your content on social media.
Therefore, it is an essential pillar of preparing professional content for social media, and I advise you to read: Guide to using hashtags on social media professionally, published in the winners.
12. Two-Way Content
A big mistake that many marketers and social media specialists make is that they do not allow the reader a space to express himself.
This is a big problem as marketing and content is a way of communicating between two parties, so you have to leave room and opportunity for your followers to talk to you.
Rather, you have to help him by asking for his opinion, listening to him, and encouraging him to make his comments and suggestions. Try it and you will not regret it.
13. Choosing the right CTA
Choosing and using a call to action is an indispensable part of publishing professional content on social media.
As this CTA may be the investigator for your various marketing results that you seek, whether it is achieving follow-ups or collecting customers potential or other things.
Tip: Be careful and choose the right CTA for your marketing objective and target audience.
14. Use an appropriate tool to schedule content
Finally – and I hope you don’t get bored of me – don’t forget to use the Scheduling Tool for your social media posts.
This is because it will help you save a lot of time in publishing your content, responding and interacting with your followers, and many of it has other powerful features, such as:
Respond to messages from social media accounts all from one place, manage paid advertising campaigns, analyze your social media results, suggest the best times to post on your accounts, …… etc.
For example, you can use the Hootsuite tool, or if it is too expensive for you, there are alternatives to it such as Buffer and Later.
But for a moment after preparing professional content for social media, there is still one last step.
Post-content stage (follow-up, interaction and analysis)
That said and after publishing the content, there is a final step that will not help you prepare the content itself, but will help you most in achieving the marketing results you desire.
After you publish your content, you must:
1. Monitor and analyze your content and the extent to which you are achieving your marketing goals
After all the effort you have made to prepare this dish, do not spoil it for the remaining few sprinkles of salt. Do not forget, after publishing your content on social media, to follow it.
Yes, do not forget to follow it and see how popular your followers are with it and how well it achieves the desired marketing goals, and make comparisons between it and the results and nature of your previous content.
2. Follow and respond to your followers comments on your content
Also, do not neglect your followers, their comments, and their messages, as their response to your content is an integral part of the process of publishing professional content on social media.
Respond to them and benefit from them and understand their point of view, as well as do not forget to take advantage of their suggestions if they presented them to you, because they are more valuable than thousands of dollars of consulting and marketing studies.
3. Improve your content and learn from your mistakes
Also, work on improving your content after publishing it, as you will see that there are experiments that did not succeed and did not perform what was required of them. Study them and understand why they did not achieve their goals.
Do not despair if you make a mistake, everyone makes mistakes and fails, and the experience that you want to gain will only come from trial and error, so do not worry, you are on the right track.
4. Developing a Content Strategy
Finally – and I hope you are continuing to read – take advantage of all the previous points in preparing a comprehensive content strategy that you can use in the coming times and even with your accounts and other customers.
In the future, we can talk about content strategies, whether general or specific to social media, and how to do one of them.
The most frequently asked questions about preparing professional content for social media
1. Why is it important to publish professional content on social media?
It is very important that you publish high quality social media content, and this is because it will help you:
1. Increase your followers and attract potential customers.
2. Demonstrate yourself as an expert in your industry, which is likely to be crowded with competition.
3. Build trust and a close relationship between you and your followers and make them loyal to your brand.
4. Increase your profits whether intangible, such as fame, or material, such as sales.
In addition to dozens of other countless benefits.
2. What are the steps to publish professional content on social media?
There are three basic steps to publishing professional content on social media:
- The first step: understand your target audience and your marketing goals well.
- Second Step: Prepare and publish content.
- The third step: Monitor, analyze and improve it after it is published.
To learn about these steps in detail, read this article now.
3. What are the types of social media content?
There are five basic types of content on social media, namely:
1. Brand Awareness content.
2. Engagement content.
3. Sales content.
4. Lead generation content.
5. Informative or Educational content.
4. What are the most important points that will help you publish professional content on social media?
There are several things besides the content that you should take care of in your posts on social media, as follows:
- Develop a distinctive style that makes your readers stand out from the crowd.
- Use your hook to grab your readers’ attention.
- Using storytelling to influence your followers.
- Exploit psychological tricks like FOMO in your content.
- Pay attention and focus to the visual content in your posts.
- Use hashtags correctly in your posts.
- Choose the right CTA for your posts and marketing goals.
- To learn about these points and more, read this article now.
Conclusion
In this article, we have discussed everything you need to know about how to post on social media in a professional marketing manner… from understanding the target audience to monitoring and improving your content.
In the end, I hope that you enjoyed and benefited from the article, and that it affects your career as a content writer, social media specialist, or even a business or store owner.
And if you have a question of any kind regarding publishing on social media professionally, ask it in the comments below, and I will answer it as soon as possible.
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