All the marketing gurus tell you you have to “add value” in your content before you promote your products, and to give value in the things you do for your team…but they never tell you how you actually add value or what value actually means.

Gurus tell you to add value to your audience but they never tell you how to do it or what value really is

Adding value is mainly giving people what they want. But what is it they want? Below you will find different types of content that offer value to different audiences.

Shareable content: if the content is interesting enough to share it, how would it make them feel when they send it to people they know? Will it make them feel fun, witty, intelligent, trendy, inspiring… etc. If you want your audience to share your content, try to spark one of these emotions above (or more!). Try to imagine how sharing your content should make them look like to their audience.

Comment instigator content: or you can also refer to it as polarizing content, depending on how extreme you want to go. This content promotes that your audience identify themselves with a group or they will want to inevitably share their opinion or their views on a articular subject. In the end, you are sharing content in which you are taking a highly indistinctive side on a specific topic. In this case, you are looking to cause in your audience the feeling that they can’t help but participate in the discussion. This can be very engaging but like mentioned above, it can polarize your followers, so use this only if you can handle the pressure or some people opposing your views. You will however find your deepest fans.

Content that your audience will like: This reaction reflects that your audience is really just being above neutral to your content. Liking is better than no reaction, of course, but is less committed than a comment, a share or a save for example. Realize that even bots can automatically like posts… 🙂

Memorable content or those pieces that people would want to come back to at a later time (or even repeatedly). This is usually information that can be used later such as recipes, or lists of items or just reminders that could be useful. Ideally, this should be content that is not so easy to search on Google, otherwise Google is your competition and you don’t want that to happen, because, guess who’ll lose?

Curiosity content: to encourage profile visits. This content could either be a hook for people to continue reading through a link that you offer in your bio (an offer, a story) or content that because of its nature it doesn’t make sense or it doesn’t fit into the platform content restrictions. For example a video tutorial teaser could be your post, but you offer access to the full version through your link in your profile. The content that encourages profile visits is usually used because you want your audience to take a further action (clicking on your link, or calling your business or checking you out in a map).

In general, please be aware that all social platforms want people to stay the longest there, therefore the most valuable content for the platform is the one that keeps people engaged there and doesn’t send them anywhere else.

Engage your audience inside one platform before you drive them off to your website

One suggestion that I offer is to try to first focus on using valuable content to create as much engagement as you can engagement inside the platform before you drive people off to your website or anywhere else.

So now that you understand what value could mean to your audience, to the platform and ultimately to you, ask yourself these questions: what does value mean for my audience? How can I deliver that?