It’s a beautiful thing, the First Amendment, and in today’s age of social media communication, the freedom of speech has spilled out onto the online platform in waves, offering everyone the chance to share what they’ve got by the bucketful. As internet users spend more time on social media than on any other internet site – including email – the amount of content and ideas that are being shared socially is borderline infinite. So how do you stand out in the social media crowd when trying to market your company online? Here are a few suggestions.
Impact with Images
Millions of pages of social media content are scrolled through every day, swipe after swipe of robotic fingers, and scroll after scroll of desktop mice. Stop social media skimmers in their tracks using impactful images. Many marketers of small businesses, and even top name brands, make the mistake of choosing photos just to fill the void in a blog post or a social media message, for example, but choosing photos that are emotionally engaging will grab the attention of social media users and even encourage them to share your content.
Photos are the most engaging type of content on Facebook (the Internet’s largest social media platform by far), with a whopping 87% interaction rate, according to a study by emarketer.com. To put this into perspective, no other post type received even more than a 4% interaction rate.
You’re not going to find an emotionally engaging photo in your company’s stock photo pile, however. What you will find there are cheesy, unappealing photos that will immediately turn off viewers, leaving them with a subpar first impression of your company. To entice viewers and encourage them to share your content in social media, consider using these types of emotionally engaging photos: 
- Vibrant Images: social media goers want to share what their own followers are going to like, so post your content with attractive, enticing photos that people will want to share with their own circles.
- Customer-submitted photos: by letting customers “define” your brand, your targeted audience will more than likely identify with your company easier. Encourage your fans to share stories about your products or service to present a real-person feel to your social media followers.
- High-Quality Stock Images: using relevant, high-quality stock photos to boost engagement of your social media posts doesn’t have to cost you. Check out these free stock images to use to help establish your brand with style in social media.
- Infographics: the brain processes images significantly faster than it does text, so when trying to portray certain information to your social media followers, visually appealing infographics are the way to go!
Be an Exception to the Rule
…the 1% rule, that is. In internet culture, the 1% rule refers to the sociological participation of internet users, where 1% of users are actually the ones creating original content and 90% are just regurgitating, repurposing, and simply spreading others’ content as fast as they can read the headlines. While sharing content relevant to your industry from trusted sources is most definitely beneficial to your content strategy as an online marketer, to stand out among the droves of distributors you have to start making authentic contributions to the circulation of ideas.
Don’t have any ideas you think are worth sharing? Well, no pain no gain. Begin by studying the blogs of respected leaders in your industry to get your creative juices flowing and remember, in this case, it is all about quality over quantity, so spending more time generating an original piece of content will benefit you more in the long run than pumping out 5 sharable links to others’ ideas. Establish yourself or your company before your social media followers as a knowledgeable source in your industry by sharing innovative ideas through blog posts, infographics, videos, and eBooks. Be sure to share them on all of your social media outlets, too, so the 90% can start spreading YOUR brilliant ideas.
In order to stand out in a crowded social media market, employ a couple of these strategies while posting to market your company or brand. For more information, tips and ideas, visit Paveya’s Inbound Marketing blog!
