How To Create On-Brand Content That Gets Engagement (Kick Social Media's Ass)

As creatives, we want to share our work with the world, so without necessarily intending to, we become content creators. Whether showing your process, helping others get started, or sharing the experiences, knowledge, and stories you have about your craft, you’re likely creating social media content about your passion.

Unfortunately, sometimes getting your work and content out there can feel like an impossible task full of algorithms, audiences, and ads. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be that way though. Creating engaging content and growing your Instagram following can actually be full of celebration, community, and creativity!

In this article, we’re going to dive into how you can create on-brand content that gets engagement, aka how to kick social media’s ass and have fun doing it!‍

The Seven Ps of Powerful Content

Personality

Putting your personality into your content that you’re creating is key number one for engaging your audience. Yes, they want to see your amazing work, but they’re also here for you. People connect with people and your people followed you for a reason. They want to connect with you, get to know your personality, and understand the person behind the passion.

So ask yourself these questions and try infusing the answers into your content:

• Who am I?
• What’s my message?
• What’s my personality?
• What’s my voice?
• What’s my story?
• What are my values?
• Why do I do what I do?
• What excites me about creating?
• What are the fun parts of creating?
• What are the hard parts?

People

As well as knowing who you are, it’s important to know who your audience is. Understanding who they are, what they’re following you for, and the content they love to see is super helpful in creating content that they’re going to engage with!

This doesn’t mean you should be creating content just for the sake of your audience if you’re not enjoying creating that content, but it’s about understanding who you’re talking to so you can have a two-way conversation instead of feeling like you’re talking to a brick wall!

You can think about:

• Who are my audience?
• What do they value?
• Why are they following me?
• What emotions do they want to feel seeing my content?
• What types of content do they enjoy?
  

Answering these questions will help you think of content that your clients and customers are going to love chatting with you about!

Passion

The last thing I’d want you to do is create content because you feel like you have to, because you’re only making what other people want to see, or because you feel pressured or forced to. Instead, I want you to make content that you’re passionate about making!

The more you enjoy the content you’re making, the more your audience will enjoy it too when they see how much fun you’re having and are attracted to your energy. They’ll see you on stories, making reels, or Tweeting, talking about the stuff you love and you’re having a fun time doing. The more passion you van put into the content that you’re making the more engaging it’s going to be.

Pillars

When you know who you are, who your audience is, and what you’re passionate about, you can start to put your content pillars together. Content pillars are essentially the core topics that you cover with your social media and communicate with your audience what your brand is all about. This helps you share your message clearly and have a clear plan for the types of content you want to create! Instead of worrying about what to talk about each week, you can brainstorm ideas under each pillar and cover each pillar once a week, for example.

My pillars are:

• Brand Strategy
• Brand Design
• Creative Business
  

With these pillars I can make sure I regularly and consistently cover these topics so that you, my audience, know what I’m about and can come back again and again for education, inspiration, and entertainment on these topics!

Platforms

It’s important to know that you don’t need to be everywhere all at once. Thats a) exhausting, and b) can spread you too thin. Instead, focus on providing high-quality content and cultivating an engaged community on one–two key platforms.

I recommend focusing on one short-form platform, and one long-form platform where you can create both kinds of content. For example, this could look like:

• Instagram and a blog
• Twitter and a podcast
• Facebook and an email list
• TikTok and a YouTube channel
  

As I mentioned when we talked about passion, make sure to choose a platform that will be fun for you to use and allow you to create the content you love.

Play

There are so many different social media platforms with so many different features that you can experiment with, so don’t be afraid to play and have fun with your content. You can try different formats like boomerangs, time-lapses, polls, question boxes, or reels, and just have fun. Trying new things keeps you and your audience engaged with exciting, different types of content that prevent you both from losing interest.

You can also play around with what’s going to work best. You might be creating feed posts and find that those don't really work but create stories and your people love them. Or maybe you make threads on Twitter and they go crazy viral. Play around with the different types of content and find out which will be the most engaging.

Pals

Lastly, social media is all about community, and cultivating a group of pals who support your work and are engaged in your content.

To start building those two-way dialogues, you can ask them questions, get them to help you make decisions, or get them to give you feedback on the content you've created. Creating these sort of two-way dialogues and then actually talking back is so powerful in getting engagement because if you are just starting to try and get people to engage in your content really, it's going to take a minute for your audience to like get used to that. You might put a poll up on your stories and at first nobody votes on things, but the more that you do it the more they're going to get used to it. And the more they're going to be like, “oh cool, this person actually wants to talk to me, they’re interested in what I have to say and I’m enjoying being part of the creative process.” It takes a while to grow that natural engagement.

And part of that is making sure that you are rewarding or responding to the people who do engage. If somebody is replying to your poll, commenting on your Instagram posts, or sending you a DM, try and reply to them. Make sure that you're continuing that conversation because otherwise it’s not really a conversation, It's just somebody trying to engage with you and getting nothing back.

Now it’s your turn! Are you ready to choose a P to focus on and start upping that engagement? If you start implementing all of these seven Ps of powerful content, I am sure that you will create incredible, amazing, engaging content that is like going to kick ass. So which will you start with?