• High quality content is what drives traffic, engagement, and results in sales. And there is no better place for quality content than social media.
• Content on social media has the potential to organically bring you more traffic and more clients without spending a fortune on running paid ads.
• But what type of content should you share on your social media platforms to achieve great results organically? We'll tell you.

There are many people saying that organic reach is dead on Facebook and that you have to focus only on paid content. It just isn’t true. For those of us working in the trenches every day, across hundreds of Facebook pages, it is true that the results are varied, but many are still getting excellent organic reach. In fact, better than the last 18 months. I bet you want some of that, right?

There is one thing in common on all these successful pages: good quality content that connects people, creates community AND generates conversation.

So let’s look at the 5 top performing content types on social media and how to create them.

1. Brand Building Content

The best brand building content is that which tells the story of your business.

• Who are you?
• Why do you do what you do?
• How do you do what you do?
• Who else helps you?
• Where do you do it?
• What does your average day look like?
• What kind of events do you attend?

People are on social media to connect with people, not with your brand. The more human you can be, the better your content will resonate. You will bring your brand to life.

Sally, a florist, does a Facebook Live every week from the flower markets where she talks about what flowers are in season and how she goes about choosing the perfect flowers for her customers. Because she knows some of her customers and what they like, she will say things like ‘Michael, I know your wife will love these irises. They are tightly closed buds at the moment, which means they will last for weeks. I’ll be sure to put a bunch aside for you.’

2. Community Building Content

The number one thing you need to focus on with your social media profiles is community building. This means connecting people not just to you (the business), but also to each other. People are seeking conversation, connection and community on social media.

Community building content is particularly useful for small businesses that are looking to introduce, connect and gain attention from people within their area or industry. This type of content includes questions that start conversations, posts encouraging feedback or content that celebrates milestones within a community.

Lauren, who has a tree services business, recently created a post when her page reached 300 likes on Facebook. To celebrate the milestone, she created a little video thanking her community of customers. She did a cardboard cutout of a Facebook thumbs up. It was personable and a little quirky and her audience loved it! The post was shared by her customers into 17 local Facebook groups and the video received over 3000 views. Not huge numbers, but organic reach in her local community, that generated 5 new enquiries.

Lauren can also now run an ad campaign to the 3000 people who viewed the video, now that they are familiar with who she is!

One of our restaurant clients posts their monthly specials on Twitter and asks ‘If we would deliver one of these to your desk at lunch today, which would you choose?’ They get about 100 responses, and every now and then, when they recognise a customer and know where they work, they actually go and deliver that meal as a surprise.

And what do you think that person does? They take a photo and share their surprise and delight all over social media!

3. Inspiring Content

Inspiring content is any content that evokes an emotive response from your audience. This is generally in the form of quotes, good news stories, funny comics and exercises, challenges or activities.

Whether they feel happy, sad, angry, inspired or motivated, the best performing content on social media is that which makes people FEEL something. The truth is, if your content doesn’t appeal to people’s emotions, then there is nothing to encourage them to engage. If no one is engaging with your content, then no one is seeing it. If no one is seeing it, then why bother?

Amanda’s business involves supporting, educating and training teachers that have special needs students in their classrooms. Whilst it is a very niche audience, Amanda knows her audience so well (being an ex-teacher herself) that she knows what resonates. She knows their pain points and frustrations, she knows what keeps them up at night. She has also worked out exactly what times to share content, based on what her audience are doing during the day.

Amanda recently created a quote post that said ‘My life is a constant battle between wanting to correct grammar and wanting to have friends.’ It was a tongue in cheek post, but one that many can relate to! Her post on Facebook was shared over 5,000 times and reached over 1.5 million people. All without an ad budget.

4. Educational Content

The fastest way to grow your social media communities organically is to truly understand your customers' pain points. What are the biggest challenges they have, that your product or services solve? Create content for them that adds value and reminds them of how useful and helpful you are to them. They might not be ready to buy from you now, but they will remember you when they are ready to buy!

A good way to create this content is to take all the frequently asked questions in your business and turn it into content. You can also just ask people.

For example, when people join our Facebook group, sign up for a course, fill out our contact us page or come into contact with our business in any way, we ask: ‘When it comes to implementing social media in your business, what is the single biggest challenge you have right now?’ This information gives us an enormous amount of inspiration for content. We know exactly what to create to make a difference to our customers and potential customers.

5. User Generated Content

User generated content is content created by your customers or those who follow your social media profiles. People love being asked for their opinion or experiences, and if you have built rapport with your social media followers, they are generally happy to contribute when asked. People love sharing about themselves on social media!

For example, Mark, who is a vet, posted on World Pet Day, asking his fans and followers to post a picture of their favourite pet/s. He had 65 people post a photo. Mark then created a video slide show featuring the pets and posted it a couple of days later. His community loved it! They all shared his business page post with their friends so they could show off their pet in the movie.

My 5 Favourite Content Creation Tools

These are my 5 must have content tools that every business needs in their social media tool kit. They are all free or low cost.

1. Trello

Although Trello isn’t necessarily a content creating tool, it’s an amazing tool to plan and organise all your content. We use it to plan our monthly conversation/content calendar and to collaborate on content creation.

Trello is available on desktop and in the app store for mobile use. It’s a great place to dump all your ideas as you have them and then to be able to move them around into a proper content calendar.

Tip: enable the Calendar Powerup!

2. Pexels

It’s very costly (especially for a small business) to have a photographer available at all times to capture unique and high-quality images. This is where free stock libraries come in. Do not just take images from Google as you probably don’t have the right to use them.

Pexels is one of the best free stock libraries currently available. It offers over 40,000 free stock images, with at least 3,000 new images being added every month. All the images found on Pexels are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license, making them free to use for personal and commercial use. Make sure you read the license agreement so that you know exactly what that means!

3. Canva

Canva is a free, cloud based graphic design tool. It uses a drag and drop format and provides users with access to over a million photographs, graphics and fonts, it also offers hundreds of templates for those of us that aren’t very savvy at graphic design.

This tool is available on desktop (app is still a bit clunky) and is a must have tool if you want to create visual content for your business easily, efficiently, and for free!

4. Crello

Crello is similar to Canva, but it’s best feature is the animations. You can make personalised animations for your business that are saved as video files. These are great for social media and particularly good for attraction attention and engagement. Two critical elements for organic reach!

5. Lumen5 

This is a great free (and paid) video creation tool. Video receives much higher engagement and reach, so you need to master the art of video creation in your business. This handy tool with templates is very easy to use. It also has an awesome feature of turning your blogs on your website into videos automatically!

Regardless of which content types you choose to use or which tools you use to create them, the keys to successful content are story telling, being human. and delivering value. Keep the marketing messages that you want to broadcast for your paid ads and keep all of your organic content focused on connecting with people and building community.