Simplifying Your Social Media Content Helps Amplify Your Results

The pace of social media content consumption is accelerating — can your brand publishing strategy keep up? Social mediausage has evolved considerably over the past 10 to 15 years, but we’ve seen some of the biggest changes occur in just the last few. While these new developments have been wide-ranging, there are two in particular that have had a significant impact on brand publishing best practices:

People are increasingly relying on social as their primary pathway to information discovery — e.g., trends, news, products, events, and more

The amount of digital consumption happening entirely within social platforms themselves has increased substantially, mainly due to social algorithms’ growing preference for “native content”

Regarding the former, social media’s relatively newfound role as an information hub isn’t exactly breaking news (I vaguely recall something about Facebook and the 2016 presidential election…). However, it does present an exciting — and largely untapped — opportunity for B2B and B2C marketers alike to reach new audiences.As for the latter, the continual evolution of social algorithms and user behavior represents the hurdle that must be cleared in order to reach and create connections with these new audiences.Moving forward, your ability to succeed on social will ultimately come down to how well you can optimize content in accordance with the major networks’ shifting algorithmic preferences – without lessening the impact of your message. Here are a few ways to do just that.

KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid)

One of the primary goals of all social media platforms is to make the content discovery process as seamless (i.e., fast) as possible for users. Of course, as the pace of social media browsing accelerated, users’ attention spans became even shorter, making it more and more difficult for brands to connect with prospective new customers.In the past, the goal was usually to grab someone’s attention and quickly convince them to click through to a webpage or longer-form piece of content. In the age of native content, however, you not only need to grab their attention — you also have to get your entire message across, right then and there.As you can probably imagine, the name of the game here is simplicity. While crafting a short social post might sound a whole lot easier than, say, writing a 1,000-word article, it’s actually incredibly difficult to convey complex ideas quickly — and on social, the window of opportunity is often only a few seconds long.

Embrace New Tools and Tactics

The most effective way to communicate more efficiently is to fuse your messaging with high-quality graphic design. Visual content, such as graphs, diagrams, photos, illustrations, and quote graphics, not only helps your audience receive your message instantly — it also sticks with them for longer.Video is another great way to keep audiences engaged while telling complex or nuanced stories. They also typically outperform static content — across all social platforms, video content generates approximately 1200% more sharesthan text and images combined.Related: 3 Ways to Jumpstart Your Executive BrandThere are a whole slew of platforms out there that make it relatively easy to create and upload beautiful, social-optimized video content, and I recommend investigating your options sooner rather than later.As the level of competition for social media users’ attention continues to increase, you can rest assured that those who fail to keep pace with evolving brand publishing best practices will get lost in the shuffle.