Educate, entertain, engage & inspire — Part 01 Creating social media content that matters
Creating a Social Media strategy that fits your brand, gets your message across, and resonates with your followers comes with a lot of challenges. In a world that is overloaded with content, we are being bombarded with countless posts and ads on a daily basis. So it is no secret that getting the attention of the viewer might seem like an impossible task.
If your brand’s social media content mainly contains posts directly advertising your products and services then this blogpost is ESPECIALLY for you! I don’t want to be a buzzkill, but I have to be: Yes, I know that you want to market your products or services, and yes, I also know that your content needs to fit into your brand identity. However, only posting about your products and services to tell your followers how awesome your brand is might not be the best way to go.
Now you might ask yourself “But Linda, what else should I be talking about, if not my products and services?” Don’t you worry, I’ve got you covered. In this blogpost we will be talking about the mysterious “E”s and “I”s of social media marketing and about creating social media content that matters.
Whether there are three, four, or five “E”s and “I”s that are important for a social media content strategy, is well debated throughout the marketing community. But to keep the peace, I decided to settle in the middle and will tell you about the 4 “E”s and “I”s of a social media content strategy. The main point of this concept is, to create content that matters and is valuable for the viewer. And how do you do that? Your posts should aim for one of those things:
EDUCATE, ENTERTAIN, ENGAGE & INSPIRE
Educate, entertain, engage and inspire — in a nutshell, those are communication goals that can be taken as a reference to create meaningful content that adds value to your general social media strategy. And that, my friends, is how you engage your target audience on social media — by providing content your followers can directly benefit from, in some way or another. Because needless to say, in this day and age, having bomb product photos with a bland caption on your Instagram page is seldom enough. Now I know, this is easier said than done, and yes, there are many many more steps to create a coherent social media content strategy, but the “E”s and “I”s of social media content strategy can act as a guideline and starting point to create content. Especially for small businesses and start-ups, without the funds for a social media specialist, this very simple strategy can help to not fall into the trap of running out of topics to post.
Now, we’ve heard enough about this abstract concept of adding value to your social media post, how do we put what we’ve learned into action?
In the next blog post, I will show you how you can level up your content game by giving you an easy step-by-step guide on how you can implement those communication goals into your social media strategy.
Educate, entertain, engage & inspire — Part 02 A step by step guide
Here you can find out more about the different“E”s and “I”s of Social media:
Educate, Entertain or Inspire: The Marketing Holy Grail
Before You Sell: Educate, Entertain, Engage, Inspire
These 6 Types of Content Will Boost Your Traffic and Engagement. Here’s How to Do Them Right