These social platforms know that for people to spend time on them, the content needs to be engaging, so, it’s in everyone’s interest to reward engaging content with wider reach.
There is so much complexity around social media algorithms and how to hack them to increase your reach, it could easily become your full-time job. My advice is just focus on making the best content you can, content that is going to resonate with your audience. As the old adage goes, content is King. But what do I mean by ‘the best content’ and how do you produce it? Well, I’ve narrowed it down to these easy to remember 4 letters, A.R.S.E. Authentic, relevant, short and episodic.
Authentic content means it’s from the heart, if it’s video content, it’s not over edited and not over produced. Just film using your phone and adding some branding and music is perfect.
Relevance means it provides value to the audience, and that value is either to educate, or to entertain. If your content doesn’t do either, then it probably has no relevance to your audience. Social Media is not the best place for sales messages or self-indulgent content, that just talks about your product or service. You should always be mindful of what’s in it for an audience and what value they are getting. Your content also needs to be as short as it possibly can be while still being able to provide value. In other words, no written waffle and not wasting time with over produced videos. Nobody cares about your drone shots, fancy editing or long intro sequences. Just get straight to the point. It’s the same with text.
Finally episodic, creating one single post is not going to move the needle. You need to create regular social posts, either weekly or even daily to capture an audience’s attention. Your content needs to feel familiar to people, just like a TV series. The way you do that is by branding up your videos or written posts. You can create brands like ‘Testimonial Tuesday’ or ‘Fitness Friday’ (of course using you or your businesses areas of expertise) Your content needs to be familiar to people, so they know what they’re going to get. Spend half an hour on TikTok and you will see lots of examples of episodic formats, either branded or by using audio themes. So, next time you’re thinking about social media, ask yourself this. Does my content pass the A.R.S.E test?
