Creating Engaging Content
"Content is king, but context is god," says Gary Vaynerchuk in Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. Throughout his chapter on creating great content with compelling stories, he argues that the most crucial part of making effective content is designing content to fit each marketing platform's context.
Creating valuable content centers around understanding your audience's context. Viewers won't linger on posts you made six minutes before your quota deadline. Understand them: who they are and what they like. Gear your content to provide consumers with the best experience on their platform. How often are we interrupted on Facebook by a dull brand post created by someone who needed to fill their quota before lunch? Did you open social media to yawn?
Viewers are on social media for value and connection, so marketers must maintain a presence unified with the context. Social media sites trigger dopamine pathways in our brains, and effective content will, but only if you create the content to fit contextually into its target platform's landscape. It has to look and sound like other posts on someone's media feed to offer value.
With that in mind, remember platforms offer different environments. I don't have a Twitter account because scrolling through wordy tweets bores me, so why would I want to open Facebook to find dense paragraphs of status updates? Make content that conforms to each platform's style to keep your audience by your side.
Subtlety is like camouflage for the digital world. Respect the context to socialize with your audience. Emotion is priceless, and forming a bond with your consumers is beneficial long-term. When you create something that sparks an emotional reaction, you're encouraging someone to share this feeling with someone else. Yet, this still relies on your ability to calculate the context of your target audience. If you pay for an advertisement on a backroad, nobody will pay attention to it. No matter how good your content is, it won't be effective if it isn't in the right place at the right time.
Vaynerchuk, G. (2013). Round 2: The Characteristics of Great Content and Compelling Stories. In Jab, jab, jab, right hook: how to tell your story in a noisy social world (pp. 15–28). essay, HarperBusiness.
Vaynerchuk, G. (2016, March 1). Content is King, But Context is God. GaryVaynerchuk.com. https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/content-is-king-but-context-is-god/.
Zinsser, W. K. (2008). 5: Audience. In On writing well: the classic guide to writing nonfiction (pp. 24–31). essay, HarperCollins.
Zinsser, W. K. (2008). 8: Unity. In On writing well: the classic guide to writing nonfiction (pp. 49–53). essay, HarperCollins.