If you are like me and trying to get more exposure as a content creator, you are always browsing the web to look up any information and guides that may help. Among all the guides I have read, I seem to run into the same top two tips:
– Using Social Media
– Knowing Your Audience
Social Media
There’s just one problem with these guides. They don’t tell you how to build a social media presence if you don’t have one already. And they don’t tell you what to do after you know, imagine, target, etc. your primary audience group. Here is what I learned so far in my daily grind. Hopefully it will be of some use to you guys.
Break down the basic “container” for content on that platform.
For building a social media presence and using it effectively, you need to understand what the user of that platform wants. For example, for both Twitter and Instagram, I have found that using static images get more engagements than using video. If I do use video, it has to be short, no longer than one minute. The reason is that people are scrolling through their feed and they do not want to spend too much time on each post they see, especially if they do not know who you are. In order to catch and retain their attention, you need to keep your content on these social media platforms short . It needs to be able to be consumed and processed in a short amount of time.
Decide the general subject matter for that piece of content.
In order to decide what the subject matter for your content is after deciding the general “container” (i.e. static image, gif, short video, long term video, music video, vlog, etc.), you need to see what actually gets engagements on that platform. The easiest way to do this is to browse the platform and look for content creators that have a slightly larger audience and slightly faster rate of growth than you. You don’t want to look at content creators with a much larger audience than you (unreliable data set) and content creators with the same audience and growth rate (no growth in that data set). This will give you a general idea of what subject matters to use as well as how to frame it along with what hashtags will work.
Knowing Your Audience
Another method is to use the available data sets for each platform to your advantage. For example, Twitter shows hash tags that are trending. For YouTube, you can use the auto-completed phrases to help you see what type of content has the most demand for a certain topic. For Astroneer, one of the most used words were Tips and Tricks. So I targeted that audience by making guide videos with the words Tips and Tricks in my title and my hash tags. This helped me reach a very wide audience where as before I had a total of around 10 views for each Astroneer video beforehand. Using the autocomplete to help me know what subject matters were in demand increased it to around 10 views per day. I didn’t know my primary audience but I did find an audience on YouTube by figuring out that they wanted help on games and providing content of value to them.
If you provide content that has value to the consumer, they will engage with you.
Don’t focus on using click bait or jumping on a trend. Focus on providing value to the audience and don’t waste their time. That depends on what the audience wants. It could be entertainment in the form of memes. It could be information that they find useful in a concise format. Find out what they want using the methods outlined above. If your main focus is providing value to the audience, they will notice it and appreciate it. It won’t happen overnight and it will take time but you will gain something others don’t have, consumer loyalty.
Hopefully I managed to elucidate the most commonly seen tips in guides and provide a more practical approach. If you would like more clarification or a break down of methods I used, please feel free to leave a comment down below or reach me on Social Media. I’ll will certainly try my best to help. Thank you for dropping by and reading my blog, I really do appreciate it! If there’s any way I can help or if there is a certain topic you would like me to cover, please feel free to let me know. Thank you and once again, catch you guys next time.
Ducky Obrien 