Now you can often hear that people don’t read enough and they are more interested in the information presented in the form of photos and videos. Undoubtedly, visual content is very descriptive and popular among users. However, almost all visual information is accompanied by captions, hashtags and descriptions – that is, texts in different formats. This allows us to conclude that text content remains the most convenient and understandable for both readers and search algorithms.

Social media gives businesses a great opportunity to communicate directly with their target audience. Thanks to the POSTOPLAN automated marketing platform, you can create and post texts on the most popular social platforms.

What types of information need to be included in a content plan to not only engage users, but also maintain their interest, inspire trust, and turn potential customers into real ones? In our article, we will talk about the types of text content.

Informational Content: Brings Benefits and Builds Trust

Interesting, useful and unique posts on social networks serve to promote the company’s products and services no worse, and sometimes even better, than direct advertising. An important condition is their regular posting so that readers get used to seeing them in their news feed and recognizing them among the texts of competing companies.

Informational content does not sell directly, but it serves to attract and “warm up” the target audience: it creates an idea about the company and its services, demonstrates new or complex products, explains the expediency of their purchase, and keeps followers up on the company news.

Based on these goals, informational content is divided into the following types:

• News content: These are company or industry general news, press releases, new product presentations, ratings, strategic vision, coming events, vacancies, etc.
• Professional content: It includes interviews with professionals, opinions of market leaders and experts, analytical materials, successful cases, posts explaining difficult terms in a language that is understandable for the buyers.
• Image content: This category includes information about the company: history of origin, mission and goals, staff qualification, successes and achievements in its field of activity, and showing diplomas, certificates and awards. It also includes posts with responses to objections and negative feedback, as well as interesting cases from practice.
• Useful content: It includes product and service reviews, lists of top products, a summary of product characteristics, thematic collections, checklists, Q&A posts, and useful tips.
• Educational content: It includes step-by-step instructions, master classes, secrets and tips and tricks on how to use products and services.

Professional posting on social media inevitably leads to increased brand awareness. The regular company’s informational posting builds consumer confidence, stimulates their interest in the promoted products and turns potential buyers into real ones in the future. You can save time and effort on posting using POSTOPLAN, since with it you can post the same content to all your social accounts at once.

Selling Content: Makes Readers Want to Place an Order

Selling posts identify the tasks or issues of the target audience and offer solutions with the help of certain products and services. The goal of selling content is to encourage users to take conversion actions after reading it.

To achieve targeted actions, the selling post authors use special techniques. For example, one of the classic formulas for writing selling texts is AIDA. It works great both in the B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) segment.

AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. That is, when writing a text according to this formula, the author first attracts the users’ attention, then arouses their interest, after which the readers should have a desire to get a product or service, and to do this, their perform an action: purchasing or placing an order.

In addition to AIDA, copywriters have a lot of other formulas based on the components such as trust, motivation, deadline, description of the client’s issues and ways of solving them.

Selling content is not limited to texts with specific product offers. This category also includes:

• posts showing the most popular products or seasonal highlights;
• information about promotions, discounts and other offers limited in time;
• reviews of real customers, who satisfied with the quality of the products and services, as well as other social confirmation of the popularity and relevance of your products.

No matter how the selling posts are written, they should always end with a call to action. It is important for the reader to clearly understand what they should do after reading the text.

The ultimate goal of a selling post or chain of selling posts is to impel the user to buy your product or order your service. But conversion actions can also be subscribing to a newsletter, joining a group, ordering a call back, moving an audience to a product catalog, or performing another action.

Entertainment Content: Engages and Brings Positive Emotions

Most of the users join social platforms mainly for recreation. They want to read something positive and fun, which can cheer them up and make them want to share the post with their friends. This is what you need to keep in mind when creating entertainment posts.

This type of content is not used to sell directly, it works in a different way. Really interesting posts become “viral”, that is, they quickly spread through reposts and popularize your groups on social networks. Entertainment content may include “ambient” posts, interesting facts, “bad” advice, memes, funny captions and comments to images and videos related to your products and services.

Another important function of entertainment content is audience engagement. To do this, various contests, giveaways, polls, tests, marathons, or flash mobs are used. Participation in such events stimulates subscribers. They repost, like and actively comment your posts, thereby raising the reach.

Gradually, a community, a group of people with similar interests, can be created around the company. Often, members of such communities act as brand advocates by giving positive feedback and disseminating information about the company and its offers to their acquaintances.

Thus, posting entertainment content increases brand loyalty, makes it recognizable and increases the number of potential customers.

Social Media Content Ratio

The experience of many SMM professionals shows that the optimal social media content ratio is as follows:

• informational content – 50%;
• selling content – 30%;
• entertainment content – 20%.

Sometimes the division of content into different types is rather conventional. For example, some informational posts can lead the reader to purchase, just as selling texts can be informative, and entertainment content can contain data useful to the audience. However, it is still necessary to distinguish these types of content, since they are used to solve different issues and are required to encourage users to perform certain actions.

Plan your posts so that they meet your goals, and use services such as POSTOPLAN to easily spread your company’s content among all popular social platforms and messengers.

A version of this article was first published on the DAN