If you’re a social media manager or content creator, or even if you’re just an avid social media user, you’re probably very familiar with the most popular social platforms.
Social media is dominating in 2021. The world’s largest social network by all age groups is currently Facebook – boasting a staggering 2.4 billion users! About one-in-three people on the planet are using at least one social media network every single day. This all means one thing: a social media content creator is more important than ever.
Do you want to be a social media content creator?
Social media presents a huge marketing opportunity for businesses of any size. No matter what industry or niche you or your business is a part of, there’s bound to be an ideal platform to help you target the right audience. Instagram or Pinterest, for example, is the best social platform for brands that rely heavily on imagery.
What exactly is a social media content creator?
A social media content creator is a position title for the person who is responsible for managing a brand’s social presence, on any number of social media networks including but not limited to: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more.
A social media content creator may be the one to create original content and posts, or they may outsource the actual content but maintain a responsibility to manage the process from start to finish.
The goal of a social media content creator is to generate social media engagement while also keeping the brand voice and strategy on both a macro and micro level.
Social Media Content Creator Platforms:
With all of this in mind, it is key to understand that not every social network is ideal for your brand. Read on to learn more about the top 5 social media platforms for 2021, and discover the best ways to leverage them as a social media content creator.
As you already know, Instagram is a popular social platform for sharing images, quick videos, and 24-hour stories with your followers. But for brands and content creators alike, Instagram can be an extremely powerful way to reach a massive audience. In fact, according to Hashoff, roughly 91.9% of influencers choose Instagram as the ideal platform for their marketing efforts. And with roughly 800 million active users, it’s easy to imagine why.
A notable Instagram feature includes IGTV, which can be used to create and promote longer-form videos, podcasts, and live streams.
Quality Hashtags
Instagram is also known for hashtags – which are a great way to reach new audiences on the platform. Check out our guide for more in-depth strategizing: 7 Quick Tips to Build an Instagram Hashtag Strategy.
Both of these features can be used to help reach a much wider audience than just your followers.
Instagram Content Creator Pro Tip: Brand Storytelling
Yes, Instagram is a great place to post stunning photos, but if you don’t tell a story, you can’t expect to engage your audience.
Framing a narrative around the images that you post is what is going to cause your followers to develop an emotional connection with you. Telling a story in the comment section is also a great way to turn an unexceptional photo into one that tugs at the heartstrings or brings out an otherwise emotional response in the reader.
Our Favorite Instagram Example for Social Media Content Creators to Learn From:
The Humans of New York Instagram account, with approximately 10.7 million followers, is the perfect example of a story narrative turning unexceptional images into emotional journeys for every social media content creator to learn from.
Each post is simply the image of a person and their story. The images posted rarely show anything other than the person with a passport-photo emotionless stare.
However, the story in the comments section, on the other hand, shares the person’s most intimate stories of struggle.
With nearly 2.4 billion users, almost one-third of the entire global population can be found on Facebook every single day. Because of this potential exposure to such a huge audience – it’s easy to see why Facebook marketing for content creators is such a big opportunity for brands.
On top of being wildly popular, Facebook is also famous for providing some of the best targeting and retargeting capabilities when it comes to running PPC advertisements. This is because Facebook pulls a ton of information from its users, including all sorts of things they like and follow. Instead of being restricted to targeting your ads based on age groups, locations, or genders, you can hyper-focus them to a narrower target audience, who exhibit very specific interests or behaviors.
Facebook is a Great Place
On the other hand, although Facebook is a great place to generate organic buzz about your brand, you’re going to have to pay up if you want to see growth. In fact, in recent years, Facebook has become a platform where businesses pretty much need to pay for ads if they want any chance of standing out from their competition.
Facebook Content Creator Pro Tip: Create Dialogue
Social media content creation is all about engagement, and even your long-form written content needs people commenting, sharing, and liking for it to perform well.
Creating a dialogue on your Facebook posts will go a long way to bringing in new potential followers and ensuring you are showing up in the timelines of some of your less engaged supporters.
The more engagement your posts receive, the more Facebook’s algorithm is going to push you to the top of people’s timelines.
More engagement
Unfortunately, we’re learning a lot about what drives people to interact with posts these days and not everything we learn is positive. Controversial posts that divide people into topics which they are emotionally connected with often see higher levels of engagement. However, posting about such topics isn’t always going to fit with your brand.
Avoiding politics and controversial subjects is likely the route you want to go if you don’t want your post littered with angry comments.
The more you encourage your followers to engage with a post, the more that post is going to be seen by others. In turn, this can help increase your reach and expand your fanbase.
Our Favorite Facebook Content Creators Example:
With over 68 million followers, Netflix has one of the largest and most engaged Facebook pages online.
Seemingly, all they have to do to create engagement amongst their followers is to post news about upcoming movies, TV shows, and more. But even Netflix goes one step further to engage its audience by asking questions to create dialogue.
Posts with titles such as “The Umbrella Academy stars Tom Hopper and Justin Min decide once and for all: Who’s Hotter?” appear regularly on Netflix’s Facebook page.
The enthusiastic dialogue in the comments section then helps ensure that even more Netflix subscribers are aware that The Umbrella Academy is currently streaming on the service.
YouTube
YouTube isn’t used by businesses quite as often as Instagram and Facebook are. However, it is another extremely popular platform, with the potential to help your videos reach millions of people around the world.
It’s estimated that there are more than 5 billion videos viewed on YouTube every day. This makes it the world’s 2nd largest search engine, and the 3rd most used website, only preceded by Google and Facebook.
About YouTube
One of the best parts about YouTube is that brands can share videos on the platform for free. Like with other social platforms, only advertisers need to pay to promote their content. With that in mind, marketing on YouTube is great for small businesses or startups that just don’t have a lot of capital to invest in their online marketing efforts. Boosted is a great tool for creating YouTube videos. Boosted is a video maker app that enables you to create professionally-designed videos, in minutes.
You can use your footage or select stock footage, and then add text and other elements to customize. It’s free to download and use (you can upgrade to access all video templates), which is always a plus for any small business looking to expand its reach. Here’s an example of the type of YouTube content you can create with VideoBoost:
Another great thing about using YouTube is that you can easily share your videos to other social networks, like Facebook or Twitter. And once your account is verified, there’s also no limit on the length of video you can post. So you’ll be free to post anything from short introductory videos to hour-long classes, seminars, or speeches. However, studies have shown that videos between 2 to 3 minutes are ideal for keeping your viewers entertained, without losing their attention.
Powerful YouTube Feature
Another powerful YouTube feature is that you can start your channel and subscribe to other people’s channels as well. By doing this, other channels will be notified that you’re now following them. And in return, hopefully, they’ll return the favor and follow you back.
But the truth is that using YouTube isn’t all roses. It comes with a few downsides as well. The truth is that videos – especially videos that people are going to enjoy watching and want to share, take a lot of time and commitment, which is something you might not have as a small business. Another downside to using YouTube is that there is no guarantee people are going to see your videos. Even if you spend thousands of dollars creating a highly-targeted HD video, you might only get a few people who end up watching it.
At the end of the day, if you’re a content creator, you already understand the work involved in creating world-class content. Once you’ve mastered that, using YouTube to promote your brand should come to you naturally.
If you are looking to create videos on other platforms, we have you covered. Boosted is an ideal video maker for every social platform: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, & YouTube.
YouTube Content Creator Pro Tip: Keep it Short
Even the top YouTubers today need to play into YouTube’s algorithms, or else their videos won’t perform as well as they want them to. So to expand your reach and get as many views as possible, you need to play into YouTube’s algorithms by keeping your videos short and to the point.
Anything approaching the 20-minute mark tends to be risky and anything over 25 is simply not advised, especially for less established brands, which are advised to keep their videos around 5 to 15 minutes maximum.
Viewers not watching your videos hurt your standing in YouTube’s ever-evolving algorithm, and results in your video appearing in the feeds of fewer people.
If you are confident your 20-minute video is engaging enough to keep people watching all the way through, then go for it. But in general, it’s probably best to keep your videos shorter though.
A quick 5-minute video, that is both engaging and entertaining, is a great way to introduce new viewers to your channel.
Probably the Most Famous YouTube Content Creator:
Even world-renowned YouTuber PewDiePie keeps his videos short when posting to his 106 million subscribers.
Most of the videos on his channel fall under the 20-minute mark. Gamers and channels dedicated to video games often have longer posts as fans watch a YouTuber play a video game.
However, for longer types of video content like this, it’s usually best to aim for doing a “live stream” rather than uploading your pre-recorded content.
People often feel that Twitter is limiting, simply because you can’t tweet anything longer than 280 characters. But when you consider the fact that Twitter has more than 330 million monthly users, it’s easy to see why it can be extremely effective for a small business marketing strategy.
On top of providing you with the potential to reach millions of other users, there are also a few other platform-specific perks that it offers. For example, Twitter is an excellent resource for keeping you or your team up to date on the latest trends in your industry. By following the right accounts and keeping an eye on your feed, you’ll see what other people in your field are talking about. This can go a long way in helping guide your future marketing efforts and content creation decisions.
Communication Hub
Plus, by stripping away any unnecessary communication (due to the 280-character limit), your responses will be more focused and direct. In turn, customers will get a better idea of what your brand is like to deal with.
At the same time though, it’s estimated that about 500 million tweets are made on the platform every single day. It’s hard to guarantee that any of your tweets will get noticed amongst the millions of others being tweeted at the same time.
However, news stories or news-related tweets tend to get the best reception on Twitter. So if you’re in an industry that has a lot of ongoing developments or is constantly changing, Twitter might just be one of the best platforms for your business. Social Media Content Creator Guide: Twitter
Twitter Content Creator Pro Tip: Consistency
Most social media platforms value consistent posting and push the most active accounts to the top of people’s timelines. And this is perhaps most applicable to Twitter, however, and you’ll need to be mindful of this if you want to succeed on the platform.
Twitter is filled with people publishing multiple posts a day and the amount of new content posted to the Twitter sphere every second is mind-boggling.
So to get noticed within this cluttered world, you need to be posting engaging content with regularity. Even the best and most expertly-crafted posts won’t do well if they are published by an account that is typically inactive.
Unfortunately, for many content creators on Twitter, this can be a challenge.
This is where scheduling your Tweets can be an easy way for your account to remain active, consistently posting content, even while you’re unplugged, and off somewhere, relaxing and reading a book.
Twitter Content Creation is Still a Thing
Comedian Sarah Silverman shared an interesting story about how ensuring her Twitter feed was consistently posting content came back to bite her in 2017 while on the Jimmy Fallon show.
Silverman noted that she will craft Tweets and schedule to have them sent out to her 12 million followers at a later time so that the content she posts is spread out.
Although Silverman is already a famous comedian and actress, having her account active, and posting content regularly throughout the day, week, and month, she guarantees that she’ll remain at the top of the list when her followers open up to the app to check their feeds. And of course, as one of Twitter’s more prolific celebrity content creators, she keeps a steady dose of comedy and sarcasm for her fans.
Pinterest allows you to easily share “Pins” and create “Boards” containing all sorts of visual media. But beyond being a photo-sharing platform, Pinterest is one of the most powerful social platforms for driving traffic to websites and gives a ton of opportunity for any content creator in 2021.
In fact, according to Hootsuite, Pinterest is capable of driving 3x times more traffic than other platforms, saving advertisers about 80% less on marketing. Pinterest outranks both Twitter and YouTube when it comes to providing websites with referral traffic.
If you’re looking for one of the best ways to generate traffic and grow your online presence, Pinterest is the way to go. Another neat fact about Pinterest, according to SocialMarketingWriting, is that the lifetime of a pin is roughly 1,680x longer than a Facebook post. This means that instead of only being active for a few days, your Pins will be shown to other Pinterest users for weeks, possibly even months, after being published. For somewhat of a snowball effect, you can even repin your old pins now and again to ensure that you continue to generate traffic for months on end.
Built SEO
On top of this, Pinterest also comes with in-built SEO, since the platform creates a stored link each time a user pins an image to a Pinterest board. These “stored links” function just like inbound links and will help boost your profile and your Pins in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Just like Instagram, Pinterest is another highly visual social network, making it ideal for sharing images, short videos, or infographics. Video Pins are a big trend at the moment – check out our guild all-about them here. If you’re already using a lot of visual content in your marketing, using Pinterest should be an easy addition to your strategy.
Finally, it’s estimated that about 85% of all Pinterest-driven traffic is by women. So if you’re targeting a female demographic, being on Pinterest is a must!
On the downside, there’s been quite a bit of controversy surrounding copyright issues on Pinterest. As with most social media platforms, this is mostly due to users sharing other people’s content without permission. Of course, if you’re sharing your content, you won’t have to worry about this – but if you’re sharing other people’s content, know that you could get yourself into trouble if you’re not careful.
Finally, marketers can also choose to advertise on Pinterest, which if done properly, can be extremely effective at generating traffic and helping you grow your brand.
Pinterest Creator Pro Tip: Rich Pins
Pinterest has become almost like its own search engine, which means that today, rich pins are an easy and effective way to add more context to your posts.
Many brands and companies have begun using Rich Pins on Pinterest, which is something that requires a process to set up. For starters, you’ll need to have a website for the pin to pull its data from, and you’ll also need to apply for permission to use them on your account.
Rich Pins work by using metadata from your website. Once you’ve been granted access to use Rich Pins, any posts on your site that contain metadata will automatically be turned into a Rich Pin on Pinterest after a user saves it.
Essentially, this is an easy way to automate for any Pinterest creator to move content between their website and Pinterest.
Example Of Rich Pins In Action
Whole Foods uses Rich Pins to inform its potential customers, and some 492,000 followers about both its products, as well as recipes.
Conclusion
In other words, her content is real and feels human. And this helps it connect to the average, everyday type of people, which is probably why she currently boasts a following of about 850,000 on Instagram alone, and her net worth is estimated at well over $3 million.
While other platforms, like YouTube, are ideal if you will mainly be creating video content. Take the time to focus on your brand’s marketing priorities and then decide which social media platform best suits your needs, to help you become the ultimate content creator in 2021.
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