In modern social media, content plays a fundamental role in attracting and retaining the attention of the audience. However, creating effective content is a complex process that requires understanding the needs and interests of the target audience.
Content moderation has become an integral part of the social media business, but its mechanisms remain not fully understood. Today, there are new approaches to automated moderation adopted by platforms. Some are moving away from a semantic approach and moving towards regulating the surrounding element that determines the overall character and impact of the content. This shift to the surrounding element represents a more proactive approach to moderation, aiming to create a useful information environment for users. This contrasts with reactive, individualistic modes of moderation based on the principle of information neutrality [1].
Research argues that mobile devices have changed the way people consume content and that media strategists need to adapt to this new context by creating a media product that is flexible, adaptable and accessible across devices and platforms [2]. Evaluating current content is an important step in creating an effective content marketing strategy. It allows you to understand what software is working and what isn’t and identify areas for improvement. And it also helps you determine which types of content are most effective for your audience and which distribution channels are most impactful.
1) In order to properly evaluate your current material, you need to take a few sequential steps:
Gather performance data such as views, clicks, conversions and the like.
The key to successful content marketing is to create high-quality, relevant and valuable content that resonates with your target audience, and to consistently measure and optimise its performance. In other words, you must understand your audience by creating a media product that meets their needs and continuously improve your content strategy based on data and feedback [3].
2) Survey your audience to understand what they find most useful and interesting.
By focusing on creating ‘epic’ content that tells a different story, you can break through the clutter. The goal of content marketing is not to create more content, but to create content that is truly valuable and relevant to your target audience. Epic content is about telling a different story that resonates, not just promoting your products or services. By focusing on quality over quantity, you can gain customer trust and loyalty and ultimately increase revenue [4].
3) Analyse your competitors to understand what types of content they use and how they distribute it.
This way you can discover options that are: relevant to your target audience, valuable and informative, consistent and regularly published, authentic and transparent, optimised for different formats and channels.
4) Finally, to assess the quality of the content in terms of relevance, accuracy and usefulness to your audience.
Then, to create content that resonates with audiences, drives engagement and leads to business growth, you need to apply any of the strategies below:
- Relevance: resonates with the target audience
- Urgency: creates a sense of urgency
- Scarcity: creating a sense of scarcity
- Authority: establishing credibility and trustworthiness
- Social proof: using social proof to establish credibility and authority
- Reciprocity: creating a sense of reciprocity with the audience
Knowledge of psychology and how to influence will also benefit in this area. It’s worth noting, for example, the results of a meta-analysis study of emotional valence on visual word recognition. It turns out that our emotions influence the way we process a word. Specifically, it’s about how positive or negative emotions affect how quickly we can recognise and understand words.
That is, when words have positive emotional colouring, it helps us to recognise them more quickly. This is called the ‘facilitating effect’. However, when words have negative emotional colouring, it has no effect on how quickly we recognise them. But there is a caveat: negative words can have an effect in certain situations, such as when they evoke strong emotions. In addition, the manner of publication can influence the results, and content that shows predominantly positive emotional colouring is more likely to be published [5].
We live in the age of artificial intelligence, so many people are enlisting its help, including for creating social media content. It has been proven that readers’ perception of computer-generated news content differs from traditional news factors. Factors such as Engagement, Alienation, and Trust play an important role in readers’ perceptions of news content created by modern technology. That is, readers may rely on emotion rather than logic when reading publications created by artificial intelligence. Factors such as Effort, Content, and Clarity may be important to readers’ perceptions of news. Individual differences such as preferences, education level and personal interests play a crucial role in shaping readers’ perceptions of news [6].
But can humans compete with artificial intelligence in content creation? After all, it can create media products faster and cheaper than humans. However, artificially generated information only improves when humans create more of it. Humans, on the other hand, can create content that remains valuable for a long time. But this necessarily requires a strategy. In time-sensitive content areas (like news or pop music), there is no algorithm that can find the best strategy for humans. There is, however, an algorithm that can help people maximise their utility by switching between short and long timelines.
In time-independent domains (e.g., historical facts), there is an algorithm that can help people maximise their utility in the long run [7].
After evaluating your current content fill, when all the important factors are taken into account, you can start improving it. Here are some effective ways to do so:
- Update old information to make it more relevant and useful to your audience.
- Create content that meets the needs and interests of your audience.
- Use a variety of formats such as videos, infographics, blogs, and more.
- Optimise your media product for search engines to improve its visibility and accessibility.
Thus, evaluating and improving your current content is an important step in creating an effective content marketing strategy. By following the steps outlined in this article, you will be able to set the media mechanism in motion to attract attention and achieve all your marketing goals.
List of references :
- Li L., Zhou K. When content moderation is not about content: How Chinese social media platforms moderate content and why it matters. – New Media & Society. – 2024.
- McGrane K. Content Strategy for Mobile. – New York: A Book Apart, 2012. – 160 p.
- Crestodina A. Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing. – Orbit Media Studios, 2014.
- Pulizzi J. Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less. – New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013. – 272 p.
- Ferre P., Sanchez-Carmona A. J., Haro J., Calvillo-Torres R. How does emotional content influence visual word recognition? A meta-analysis of valence effects. – Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. – 2024.
- Wasdahl A. Machine Credibility: How News Readers Evaluate Ai-generated Content. – InterActions UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 19(1). – 2024.
- Esmaeili S. A., Bhawalkar K., Feng Z., Wang D. How to Strategize Human Content Creation in the Era of GenAI? DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2406.05187. – 2024.
