In a small village in Karnataka, Ritesh’s mom is smart with her cooking, planning a few meals which would help her feed the whole family for an entire week. Today we shall take the lessons from Ritesh’s mom’s kitchen and get ideas on how to improve the content engagement on social media.
So, here are 4 home-made recipes that would help you build content engagement for different channels on social media. This will help you produce amazing content and attract more viewers and customers to your business.
You cannot make 10 different meals at a time
Ritesh likes to have Bisibele bath, Mysore Pak, appam, bhajji, bonda, parotta, kanji, sambar, uttapam, vada and pesarattu. His siblings prefer different menu altogether and his dad too. His mom cannot make for everyone in the family a different meal for breakfast, lunch and dinner because that would multiply the cost of the meal as well as require more time and effort. Just as Ritesh’s mom focused on meals that would work for all the mouths she needs to feed, one should do the same with their content.
You’ve got almost 4-7 ‘mouths’ to feed with content:
- Blogs
- YouTube
- Snapchat
- Company’s own website
- Apps, if any
How can one feed all these different platforms?
Like Ritesh’s mom, we should repurpose (adapt for use in a different purpose) everything.The path that one needs to follow is to create campaign content that could be distributed across all the channels they are active in. You can’t write separate content for Facebook then seperate for Blogs; you can’t tweet about new topics all the time; you can’t create different stories for Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat all at once. It is always a smart idea to take your campaign content idea and repurpose it for all your channels. This brings us to probably the most important point:
The point of confusion in Repurposing
If you promote your blog post on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, you’re not repurposing it, you’re promoting it. It’s not about promoting, it’s about engaging!
The Engagement Litmus Test:
- Is your post on Facebook, Instagram or tweets on twitter likely to be shared by your customers?
- Does the post or tweet offer any value to your viewers?
When Ritesh’s mom makes a dosa – she makes sure that the batter is without any lumps and is mixed properly so that every bit tastes good. Whether it’s a blog post, a tweet, an image post, a live story – each bite should have a little bit of coconut chutney and a little sambar – with the coconut chutney being the creative style and sambar being the valuable information. This way every bite of dosa offers great taste on its own.
The ability to slice up and repurpose your content starts way back when you first plan the meal like Ritesh’s mom does. When you have a lot of mouths to feed – pick an easy dish! When you make your list of points or outline when creating a blog post or an image post, plan for each main point to be repurposed – this way you can know from the start that you’ll get full exposure and full reward for creating the content.
Never waste the leftovers
When Ritesh’s mom makes a dosa – she knew that the coconut chutney and sambar would be gone in an instant. So, she did what every smart cook does – she made a little extra. You can also make a little extra content filled with creativity and information which would multiply the meals. Like the chutney and sambar can be used for having it with idly in the next meal.
- Live Events: It’s always easy to make several meals out of them.
- Record the event and also make it live on Facebook or Instagram and later on can be posted on YouTube or on Facebook wall.
- Tweet the stats, the juicy points and compelling quotes or creative illustrations.
- Add the videos or images in the blogs that are relevant.
- Snapchats can be put in use for Facebook stories and Instagram stories.
- Each question in the comment section could be made into a YouTube Q&A
Add Fresh Toppings
Ritesh’s mom wouldn’t just put leftover dal on your plate, she’d refresh it with some fresh tadka made from curry leaves, cumin and her special masalas to entice you to eat it with freshly made steamed white rice, fresh curd and a little payasam as dessert.
- When you spice up your content and share it – include an engaging photo
- When you repurpose a key question, or point to YouTube video – keep it fun and shoot with a nice backdrop. Nobody wants to see a shaky video with a bad backdrop.
- If you tweet a quote – include anything which gives credit to the author.
- Take a moment and research to include keywords and hashtags in you post
- Work on adding a good and sensible description if you’re posting an image on Facebook or Instagram which would complement the image.
- Each bite of repurposed content should either link to another spoon or link to the whole bowl of payasam.
Let your customers choose their flavour
Dosa is versatile, just like your content. It doesn’t take a lot of work to split it into several very different dishes. It can be made in different flavours; add butter to make butter dosa, add masala to make it butter masala dosa, make the dosa a bit thinner to make it paper masala dosa, add onion to make it onion dosa, add cheese and chilly to make it cheese chilly dosa, and this can go on and on. That’s what Ritesh’s mom does and lets her family members choose what they like. It’s not a lot of work and it triples the likelihood that her dish will be enjoyed.
Similarly, some customers like to read and skim, other likes to listen, and others are visual in their thought and mind process, which attracts them to see the content that you put forth.
- For visual learners: Take your key points, charts and turn them into an infographic. Take recent topics and make it into illustrations. Use filters for Instagram, snapchat and Facebook stories.
- For audio fans and Youtube’aholics: Talk through your blog posts, turn them into a video. Find interesting content and convert it into video. If you are in a food service company show your menu in the form of videos. Shoot small video clips of your customers enjoying your food.
- Of course, for readers – create multiple blog posts on different blogging sites so that you reach on every platform you can.
Why should you offer your content in multiple flavours?
- Instagram is the fastest growing social network – home of wonderful image posts
- YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world – are you active there?
- There are nearly 2.2 billion plus monthly users on Facebook are you catering them with freshly prepared content?
To assume your audience only likes to read is like thinking there’s only sambar and no dosa.And this is our home cooking guide to improve content engagement on social media. It’s just like howRitesh’s mom used to make it.
More recipes coming soon. Stay tuned.
