What is Social Media Content?

We all know what content is. Anything that helps communicate a message is content, be it textual or visual. But what about social media content? Is it any different from ordinary content – the kind you come across in newspapers, magazines, books, or on television and radio? Does social media content not communicate, or does it communicate differently from other kind of content?

Well, there are no simple answers to these questions. Social media content is, in some ways, like any other content, in the sense that it communicates or conveys a message to a specified target group or audience.

But in many other ways, the connotation of social media content is quite different. That’s because social media content, unlike ordinary content, doesn’t simply communicate a message, but rather, it goes somewhat beyond communication or expression to promote the message too. It wouldn’t therefore be wrong to term it as social media marketing content.

So what does social media content do?

As mentioned, it does much more than convey your message to your audience. It helps ensure that the message has an impact on your audience, which then decides to share it with others, thus creating a network of sorts to market your message. Now that message could relate to your business or career or product. By building a network to spread the message, social media works to promote your product/business/career.

It’s designed differently

Given this focus of social media content on marketing, it is but natural that the content should be designed in an exciting and interesting manner in order to appeal to the senses of your audience. The content should be such that it connects with your audience and leaves an impact on their minds and hearts. A natural corollary to this is that social media content has a distinctive look and feel about it.

In other words, it’s crafted or designed in a different manner from the ordinary kind of content that we’ve been exposed to all our lives, at least till the time that social media made an advent into our lives.

It’s crisper and visually appealing

The key to the development of social media content is to make it crisp, to-the-point and visually appealing. The social media is a visual medium, thus requiring content that matches the visual taste of the audience. So it’s more about images, videos, infographics etc, rather than being about reams and reams of text. The reason is simple – you can’t really read too much on a screen, apart from the fact that your eye is more likely to stop on a visual piece of content.

Considering the huge amount of content that’s perpetually passing through a social media platform, it’s important therefore to keep the content visual to the extent possible, with the text, where necessarily used, also crisp and precise.

Clear and succinct

Taking the earlier argument forward, you also need to keep in mind that clarity is a must in social media content. Content exposure on social media, lot of which gets accessed on the mobile phone, is limited, which means there’s very little time for the viewer to go through it. So details should be kept to the minimal, with communication focused on crisp points instead of elaborative content.

Make it engaging

You obviously need to engage with your audiences through your social media content. For that it’s important to ensure that the content is engaging. Perhaps you could make it newsy, so that it captures the attention of your audience. Or maybe a wisp of humor would do the trick. Either way, your audience should feel they’re getting some return of investment from it. Keep your content factual and packed with useful information, which your audience will lap up and find of some use.

Conclusion

Quite evidently, there’s much more to social media content then merely packing in a whole lot of information into words. You need to ascertain what your audience is going to connect with, and what it’s going to find useful. And once you’ve done that it’s time to package that information in a way that your audience is going to find easy to assimilate and appealing enough to act on it. You could check out Social Media Business Blueprint to discover more about social media content, and how to make it give you the best ROI.