It is easy to simply post a link with a sentence on to your various business Twitter, Facebook, or other social media accounts, but that defeats the purpose of “social media. It is called “social” for a reason, you want to create content that is engaging, informative and will inspire conversation among your clients and your followers. The question remains, – How do you create this kind of shareable content? How do you find content that is valuable to post?

Here are 5 tips for successful social media content creation.

1. Listen to Your Audience

Your followers and clients are your biggest advocates. What you are posting on your various social media sites should be relevant to your business which means it should represent what they are interested in hearing about. Pay attention to the posts that gain the most attention, most likes, most shares and comments and use this feedback to structure future content. If your followers love trivia questions but don’t enjoy links then perhaps a Trivia Tuesday is a great idea.

2. Use Humor

Although it is wonderful to be informative and provide knowledge on your products/services, it is important to remain lighthearted and fun on your social media pages. Most people go onto social media sites for entertainment and enjoy humorous content. Find a way to incorporate this type of fun content in a way that makes sense for your business.

*Please, don’t post cat photos daily. Yes, a cute cat photo will make even the grumpiest customer smile, but it isn’t professional to be posting only funny animal photos unless it makes complete sense for your business.

3. Make Sharing Simple

This tip is pretty self explanatory. If you want people to share your content, make it easy to do so. If someone finds your content interesting but you have no social media icons with descriptions already plugged in, you can bet that most people won’t take the extra step to copy the link and write up their own description. Let’s be honest, we can be pretty lazy sometimes.

Make sure each piece of content you write has easy-to-find social sharing buttons at the top of the page or underneath the article.  Also, the meta description should be correct as this will appear as a preview when shared on your social media.

4. Use Emotion

People want to be able to relate to you. If you are a flat, selling machine then they won’t feel the connection. Use your personality and emotions in your posts to reach out and touch them. When a customer reaches out to you really listen, show empathy if they are having a hard time, and connecting with people through nostalgia and feelings will encourage them to connect and eventually like and share your content.

5. Have A Strategy

If you just send out a bunch of content without a plan then you won’t meet your expectations. You should have a plan of attack before creating and posting social media content for who you would like to reach and the results you would like to achieve.  Using the metrics from your previous posts will help you adjust your strategy for how you target customers online and how to write content for future social media pages.

If you follow these five tips you will be able to more successfully create social media content that your followers and customers can relate to and want to share. Being engaged and joining in with the conversation will further encourage activity on your pages.