In light with the recent global events, we have seen a behavioural change with the huge shift of people spending even more time online now than before. People are consuming content daily on multi-platforms and brands are pushing out even more content online. We keep multiple tabs open on our browser because we get so distracted easily. We have normalised chatting back and forth throughout the day, so we won’t get bored. We crave attention and yet cannot give attention.
In this world of social media and the rise of Instagram Reels, TikTok, it has now been extremely challenging to stay focused.
As marketers of creative content - how do we then cut through the clutter? Is our content thumb-stopping worthy?

Attention dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just 8 seconds in 2018 – beating out the ever-distracted goldfish, which clocks in at 9 seconds.

These are numbers generated every minute of the day:

3 strategies how you can engage with your online audience

Social listening

With an abundant of social media listening tools out there in the market, you can create compelling and relevant content for your audience at the right place, right time. Audience insight is important, but it is also vital to know what your audience have been searching for, what topics have they been discussing about lately.
Besides being able to manage crises and tracking your competitors, social listening gives you the opportunity to engage with your audience/customers.

If you are not social listening, you could be missing out on a great chunk of valuable insight!

Know your formats

Studies have shown that the brain perceives visually explained concepts better. That is why including an image or a video in any social media post will automatically increase your engagement and audience retention.

Besides posting an image and a copy to go along with it, you can further engage your audience with the different types of content formats that the major social media platforms offer such as Carousels, Interactive Polls, Slideshows and many more. This is the perfect opportunity to be creative with your messaging and try to explore which format works best for your audience. There is no strict rule to what would work best and in this digital day and age, there are plenty of ways to do A/B testing to make sure you get the most of your media spend.

Content, content, content

Every marketer would probably have heard this a million times. Content is king and indeed it is. All of social media is basically content. Without content, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tiktok and many others would simply not work. Content educates your audience and it plays a major part in your SEO strategy. With adequate amount of insight and audience research, you will then be able to understand what your audience is really looking for. This should be the first line of action before you create any content for your brand/organisation.

And when you create content, know that you’re also competing with culture and what’s out there in the world today that your audience are focused on. This is where our point of social listening comes into place.

In conclusion, gone are the days where you can just post something online and hope that this piece of content will engage with your audience and drive high click-through rates. Without a proper digital and content strategy in place and audience research, chances are your content will unfortunately be scrolled through.

This article probably took you 4 minutes to read, so I hope I didn’t lose you.