A Guide To Boost Your Social Media Content

Social Media is embedded within our lives. In addition to our physical presence, we have a digital footprint and a virtual extension of ourselves online. For marketers, this means this has changed where and how we communicate and connect with our potential customers. Anyone can be a Social Media content creator.

At Best Practice, we wanted to use Social Media to increase brand awareness and provide informative, educational and entertaining posts for our audience. So our team created 36,000 posts for various social media platforms last year. You do not need to create this many posts to see results. The main thing is to remain consistent, engage with your audience, and post informative, educational and entertaining content.

Identify Your Audience

Before creating Social Media content, you will need to think about who your audience is, what they need help with and their desires. Humans are influenced heavily by how things make them feel. Keep this in mind when creating content.

Next, identify what type of content appeals most to your audience, which platforms they mostly hang out on, for example, Youtube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook and what time of day they are usually active.

Don't worry; you can make an informed decision and experiment as you go along to fine-tune your strategy and content ideas for your audience.

Let's build your Social Media toolkit!

Writing For Content

You don't have to be a professional writer! If your grammar needs work, look no further than using Grammarly. This freemium website will check your content for correctness, clarity, engagement, delivery and if it matches up to your style.

Need to paraphrase a sentence?

Check out Quillbot! 

Creating Graphics

If you haven't heard of Canva, you've heard it now!

 Canva believes that you don't need to be a graphic designer to create professional, engaging and exciting graphics. Canva is very easy to navigate and provides professional and creative templates unique to the platform you will post it on. I encourage you to check out its fantastic features. On a side note, it removes the background from any image with a click of a button—an excellent function for marketing a product.

 If you would like to create logos, I suggest using Adobe Illustrator- it's a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud and allows you to create vector graphics. Unfortunately, you will have to pay a subscription for this one. Still, it is very much worth it if you're creating a wide variety of content. It comes with many more powerful programs for creators, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects.

Creating A Video

Video Editing Software

At Best Practice, we use Adobe Premiere Pro. Like I said before, it is an investment; however, if you would like to try a trial, then click here. 

There are free alternatives and if you're interested in learning more, click here.

Adobe Premiere Pro is a powerful video editing software and gives you access to various features, such as effects, editing tools and much more!

Animation

If you fancy animation, a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite is Adobe Animate, Adobe Character Animator, and Adobe After Effects. Click here for free alternatives.

For creating 3D animation, although it is paid, Maya is an excellent program to use. A free and yet still powerful alternative to check out is Blender. 

Stock Footage

If you're looking for stock videos to make your videos more interesting, check out Storyblocks, they provide royalty-free video content which you can use for your b-roll footage. This platform is a paid subscription. If you're looking for a free alternative, Canva has a reasonably sized library of stock videos and images which you can choose from.

Royalty-Free Audio

For royalty-free music and SFX, I recommend getting a subscription to Artlist. You'll gain a vast range of audio to use for your video to make it sound more professional and entertaining.

Creating A Podcast

To record our Podcast, The Kobi Simmat Audio Experience, we use a program called Studio One by Presonus. This version is free. However, there are professional versions that you can purchase.

 We use a Shure SM7B dynamic studio microphone to capture the audio, plugging it into a Cloudlifter CL-2 Mic Activator. The Cloudlifter boosts the gain of the audio.

We plug the analog audio into a Focusrite 2i2 Audio Interface, and this then plugs into our Mac that runs the PreSonus Studio One Digital Audio Workstation Program.

Once the episode is recorded, we go back into Studio One and edit the audio, adding intro, outro and additional audio and music to complete the podcast.

The podcast is then exported and uploaded to all podcast platforms via Anchor, a podcast distribution website.

Although we use a lot of tech gear, you can easily use your phone or laptop to record audio. 

Scheduling Posts

At Best Practice, we use Hootsuite to schedule our posts for Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. Scheduling platforms allow you to post automatically throughout the week and further into the future. Hootsuite is a paid service. However, there are free alternatives such as, Later, but they do come with restrictions.

I hope my Social Media content guide is helpful and motivates you to get creative, connect and engage with your audience online. Whether you're a giant organisation or a small business owner, Social Media allows you to communicate with people from all walks of life and different areas of the world. Not only can you communicate your brand's message and what you offer, but you're also able to create a community and make a real difference. With great influence comes great responsibility, be careful what messages you put out there.

Thanks again for your time, and I'll see you in the next piece.

Kobi Simmat - Director & CEO of the Best Practice Group.