Social Media 101 – How to Create Content with Purpose

If social media is part of your business marketing strategy, keeping your social media following engaged is vital. The best way to do this is to create content that serves some purpose to your followers. Purposeful social media content is how you begin to demonstrate your value to your audience. ✨

Let’s look at four purposes that your social media content should serve:

1) To Inform. One of the main reasons people log on to social media is to obtain information that will in some way improve their lives. When the information is valuable (and free), followers tend to engage with it even more.

Here’s a great example of content that serves to inform or educate from an Instagram account run by a Trinidadian psychologist who provides useful psychological tips.

2) To Entertain. People love to be entertained in some way. While humour is very useful in this regard, entertainment using social media content can come in other forms, such as drama or sentimentality. Regardless of the chosen form, entertainment triggers certain emotions which act as a glue between your business’s social media account and your followers.

This post by a visual effects artist shows how to create entertaining content. It showcases his talent without ever mentioning the word “buy”.

3) To Inspire. Be it a timely reminder or a new perspective, motivation is a powerful force. It is not likely that we forget the source of motivation, so if your account can serve as a de facto mentor inspiring your followers, engagement will be a natural result.  

For instance, this therapist offers inspiring quotes to lift the spirit.

4) To Build Connection. The above three points all serve to build some form of connection, which results in engagement, but there is also the kind of connection that comes from shared experiences. Personal stories serve to remind followers that there’s a human being behind the account. This human touch is important especially for service-based businesses since people like to have an idea of who they are working with.

The caption on this post is a good example of a business owner expressing that type of vulnerability that builds connection. 

In future articles, we’ll examine how to be consistent with posting social media content as well as how to identify and speak to your ideal clients.