Create consistently good web and social media content, part 7
Contents (tl;dr)
Give people a reason to care < you are here
7. Give people a reason to care
You can follow all the advice I’ve given in parts 1-6 of this series and still not have a successful post if you audience doesn’t care about what you’re saying to them.
Don’t post content that isn’t cool, interesting, or useful to your audience
Your audience won’t engage with your content if they can’t tell what’s in it for them.
Good content is at least one of these things: cool, interesting, or useful.
Importantly, this isn’t what you find cool, interesting, or useful, it’s what you audience finds cool, interesting, or useful.
Here are few ways in which you can achieve this.
Use a better photo
We wanted to publish a post about a bunch of engineering students who visited one of our tunnels during a routine maintenance closure.
Civil #Engineering students from @UQ_EAIT get a behind-the-scenes tour during a tunnel closure on Legacy Way in Brisbane. #maintenance #UQ #partnership @UQ_News
We were sent several photos to choose from. This one didn’t match the story we were trying to tell:
Photo of four people wearing orange high visibility vests and white hard hats. They are standing in an interior space with white panels on the wall in the background. Three of the people are facing a fourth, who is talking to them.
While this one did:
Photo of five people wearing orange high visibility vests and white hard hats. They are standing inside a long underground road tunnel that continues around a curve. They are all looking up, above the white wall panels that run the length of the tunnel.
The second photo works better because it’s a wide shot. And, as we learned in part 3 of this series (‘use photos and videos’), you should use wide shots when you’re trying to show context or the space that the subjects of your photo are in. Showing the tunnel is important to the story we’re trying to tell here, so the wide shot is the one to go with. Basically, that second photo is both cool (people walking in a tunnel almost no one gets to walk through) and interesting (engineering students get an idea of what they’ll experience).
Show stuff people don’t normally see
People don’t normally get to see things from the point of view of a ground handler at an airport. So, when they do, it’s cool.
Last night flight NZ288 arrived safely in New Zealand, carrying critical medical supplies. Thank you to our cargo teams and partners for keeping our country safe and stocked up during this challenging time
Photo of two airport ground handlers offloading cargo from an Air New Zealand aircraft at night. The cargo is a big pile of white, wrapped boxes that is being held together by a net.
People also rarely get to see what happens behind the scenes at major infrastructure projects. So, for those who are into engineering, this photo is both interesting and potentially cool.
Five of the new 630kW ventilation fans which will keep the air moving through the #NorthConnex tunnels when they open in 2020. #BigFans
Photo of two people wearing orange high visibility vests and white hard hats. They are standing in a huge underground space with five massive silver coloured fans along one side. Each fan is about the height of three adult humans.
Give people a reason to care
Sometimes the best way to tell a bigger story is by focusing on something small.
Here is the first of two posts published by Boral during National Road Safety Week a couple of years ago.
As part of our #RoadSafetyWeek activities, Boral drivers and representatives from the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator attended a breakfast at our Logistics Depot in Wacol, Queensland to discuss the importance of road safety, safe on road practises and the responsibility we share as road users.
Photo of three dozen people wearing yellow or orange high visibility vests. They are standing in three long lines inside a massive warehouse facility. Behind them are two large yellow trucks, one a cement truck and one a liquified gas transport truck. The name ‘Boral’ is written in large, green, all-capital letters around the barrel of the cement truck. The people are all looking up towards the photographer, who is standing on a railing high above the warehouse floor.
The post has a decent photo: a wide shot that shows the scale of their equipment and the warehouse they’re standing in. But do you care about what they’ve written in the text? It’s nice that they had that breakfast in which they talked about road safety, of course, but that’s not particularly cool, interesting, or useful to me.
Compare that to this second post.
“Safety is paramount in this job, not only for me but for everyone on the road. I have a young family so I want to ensure that I am safe on the road so that I can go home to them. The training that we receive at Boral creates safe driving habits, which I am grateful for.” Peter, Boral Driver
Photo of a man, evidently a truck driver, wearing blue pants with a reflective strip and an orange-and-blue long sleeved shirt. He has one hand on his hip and has placed his other hand possessively on the large yellow truck next to him. The truck is pulling two large containers. The containers are painted yellow and green, and they have the company name ‘Boral’ written on them in large, all-capital letters. The man is smiling at the photographer.
That post also has a good photo, and this time they manage to show the scale of their equipment with a narrow shot. But, because they’ve made it personal, this post works better than the first one. If you’re a driver who shares the road with truckers, they you would appreciate that they get training on safe driving habits. Because this post makes road safety personal, it’s much more interesting than the first one.
Tell people something useful, but do it quickly
In part 2 of this series (‘keep it short’) I talked about how three of the videos we posted easily outperformed the others. Those three videos not only conveyed useful information, they did so in a very short amount of time. In fact, the longest was just sixteen seconds.
Also, we showed the audience a striking, dramatic, or unusual scene within the first three seconds of each video (as shown in the screenshots below). This caught our audience’s eye and got them to watch the videos most of the way through.
Three square-cropped screenshots of videos. The first screenshot, captioned ‘Tunnel safety’, shows an SUV driving through a tunnel with bright sparks flying out from one of its rear tyres. The second screenshot, captioned ‘Incident response’, shows the point-of-view of a motorcycle rider speeding along a congested road. There is a ‘fast forward’ icon above the video, suggesting it has been spend-up. The third screenshot, captioned ‘Road safety’, shows the close-circuit camera view of an eight-lane highway (four lanes each way, with a cement divider between them). There are cars and trucks driving up and down this highway.
So, don’t just try to be useful, try to be quick about it too.
Show stuff that’s just cool
Sometimes you don’t need to have a particularly interesting or useful message to share. Sometimes all you need is a cool photo.
Hope you’re not scared of heights! Grate photo from one of our engineers from inside the Burnley Tunnel’s air supply shaft. #50mUnderground #RegularInspection #LongWayDown #WorkingFromHeights
Photo of a tall, vertical maintenance shaft below someone’s feet, as seen through a large industrial grate. All you can see of the photographer are the cuffs of their blue work pants and their brown, steel-toed work boots. Running vertically down the length of the shaft (below the photographers feet) are several pipes and cables.
Though, if you can add a message to your photo, it’ll make your post even cooler. (And like I said in part 2 of this series, before-and-after photos tend to perform better than average.)
Around 900,000m3 and counting – NorthConnex is closing in on its goal to put 1 million m3 of spoil into Hornsby Quarry
Collage of two photos, both showing a large mining quarry with trees and brush growing along its sides. The photo on the left is labelled ‘February 2017’ and shows a pool of water at the bottom of the deeply-mined quarry. The photo on the right is labelled ‘August 2018’ and shows the quarry almost completely filled with soil that is lighter coloured than its surroundings.
Give people a reason to care: recap
Let’s recap how you can give people a reason to care about what you’re saying:
Only post content your audience will care about: don’t post content that isn’t cool, interesting, or useful to your audience
If you have a choice of which photo to use, pick the one that tells the best story
As someone who works for a business you probably have access to things other people might not even know exists, so make the most of it: show stuff people don’t normally see
To tell a big story sometimes you need to focus on something specific and small: by making things personal you give people a reason to care
Share content that makes your audience want to keep coming back for more: tell people something useful (but do it quickly)
You don’t have to have a strong message in all your posts: sometimes you can just show stuff that’s cool
To sum it all up
Use these seven principles like a checklist:
Keep it easy
Keep it short
Use photos and videos
Use numbers
Share emotion
Post quickly
Give people a reason to care
And if your post isn’t at least:
cool,
interesting, or
useful
then I don’t think you should post it at all.
Don’t post bad content
The final bit of guidance I have for you is this: bad content is worse than no content.
If your content isn’t cool, interesting, or useful to your audience then it is bad and you should not share it.
If you post too much bad content:
your audience will stop following you and
the social networks you’re posting this on will stop showing your content to your followers.
But if your content is worth your audience’s time and attention, they’ll keep coming back for more.
Close the loop with analytics
Once you’ve posted your content, you need to see if it’s resonating with your audience. Use digital and social media analytics to see how it’s performing. Then give your audience more of what they like and less of what they don’t like.
Don’t just stop posting stuff that doesn’t resonate widely with your audience, though. There are likely things you need to say that, while not the most engaging, are still important to have said. And sometimes what you say only needs to resonate with a narrow segment of your audience for it to be considered successful.
Go forth and post great content
That all the guidance I have for now.
Let me know if you have any questions. Get in touch:
in the comments section below,
via this website’s ‘Contact’ page,
Also, let me know if you found this guidance useful and if it helped you improve the reach and engagement on your content.
In the meantime, happy posting!