Now that you know where you want to start and you have your business profile set up, and why people follow organizations what do you do next? – Create content.

Content is what you post on social media. It is everything from photos, videos, links, promotions, polls, inspirational quotes, infographics, promotions, blog posts, articles and more.

The biggest way that you can turn off a customer or follower is to constantly post about yourself. On social media, people want something with value, something they can engage with and learn from. Can you help solve a problem, educate, entertain or start a conversation? Is it entertaining, unique or useful? The general rule of thumb is to post 80% engaging posts and 20% about your business.

Another way that you can turn off a follower is to post too much. If you can provide quality content every day, that is great, but most organizations do not have the means or the ability to provide new engaging content every day. In the battle between quality and quantity, quantity wins every time. Your quality content is going to get more likes and interaction every time. If you can provide your followers quality content 2-3 times a week it is better than mediocre content every day.

Quality content also gives you more engagement with posts (likes, shares, and comments). Posting content that drives engagement helps build an active Facebook audience. The larger your audience, the better when you later post a piece of content related to your services. Also, when you have engagement with your posts on social media the algorithms think that your post is interesting and will show it to more people. If you have less engagement, the algorithms will think you are irrelevant and uninteresting therefore making your posts seen by less people. (Algorithms are what determines people’s news feeds. For more information there is a great article about algorithms on Buffer.

In addition to quality content that you create yourself, you can turn to curated content. Curated content is content that you do not create yourself. This content includes links, articles, infographics, post shares and more. Posting curated content is a way to build authority, gain influence, spread goodwill and keep your audience engaged. You can find great curated content in newsletters, news websites, people you follow, podcasts, or basically anywhere you find great content online.

Be cautious about what type of curated content you share, as it will directly reflect on your organization. The content needs to be relevant to your organization and to your customers. For example if you are a church, you probably do not want to be posting car videos. Another thing to watch out for is fake news or misleading headlines, make sure you check the sources on everything that you share or repost. Also be cautious about posts regarding politics as political posts have become one of the leading reasons people are unfollowing. If it relates directly to your organization, you may want to post it, but depending on the tone and voice of the article, it can turn people off.  

Creating the right content helps keep your audience engaged and active. Hopefully this gets you started thinking on what content you want to post. You can read more about creating good content in Part 2 which includes more tips on posting.