Did you know there are over 4.5 billion active social media users?

Social media has made it easier for companies to target consumers and increase brand awareness. In fact, your customers will likely expect an active social media presence.

But while big companies have the resources to get their social media strategy right, small businesses can struggle utilizing it properly, often leading to frustration and abandonment.

In this article, we’re going to share information on how to create effective social media content. Hopefully, this will help provide a guide to starting, or re-starting, your social media marketing.

Determine What Your Followers Like

It can be easy to try and mirror what big brands are doing, but this can be harmful. Yes, companies such as Coca-Cola and Nike often succeed with social media campaigns, but that’s because they know their audience. They’ve spent a lot of time and money figuring out what works and what doesn’t, where as a small business is likely still experimenting.

Post regularly and try different things to see what your users engage most with. For example do they like pictures or videos? Do they like gifs? Or do they prefer links to external sources?

When you figure this out, you’ve already won half the battle.

Be Professional

You can often tell who’s a successful company and who’s a one-man band working out of their bedroom by the quality of content and the language used. When customers scroll through your social media, they should feel impressed. Focus on the quality of the posts so your audience feels that time and effort went into them.

That doesn’t mean you can’t be personal and humanize your company, even with a little humor. But posting random pictures and videos just for the sake of it likely won’t increase engagement as users scroll past them.

Plan Ahead

It’s a great idea to use a schedule to map out your content and when you’ll be posting. Big brands and influencers often figure out the best time of the day or week in which to post by measuring their audience engagement.

Try posting at different times throughout the day and see which posts are well received by your audience. If you post only a few times per week, try figuring out what content works best on different days.

You should also take note of important dates and holidays such as Christmas and the 4th of July and create awesome content for these days well in advance.

As you can see, there is a method to the madness and social media doesn’t have to be frustrating. If you take your time in getting to know your audience and produce great content, you’re likely to succeed.