Being an influencer is all about giving what your audience desires. Different audiences crave different types of content based upon the niche. There are times when influencers run out of ideas. As a content creator or influencer, your ultimate priority should be the audience and their engagement with your content.
Before starting to follow an influencer or celebrity on their social media accounts, every person asks themselves why they should follow this influencer. What do I get from this social figure? Does the influencer fulfil my cravings for digital entertainment? Does the content provide any new information? Or is the content relatable? These are the main questions every person asks themselves before clicking on the follow or subscribe button.
A major social media trend resembles relatability as its key facet. Social media content with relatable themes had prevailed prior to the outbreak. Influencers who have stepped away from product-focused content to more natural and relatable content have found a prolific digital presence. A major percentage of GenZ are more inclined to organic format content with topic ideas related to inspiration, self-expression, humor, escapism, self-help, and connection.
What Your Audience Likes?
Discovering content that your audience craves is quite difficult, and the process of creating such content is even more challenging. An influencer with a passion and dedication towards their profession may feel the need to create content that their audience desires.
Ask the Audience
If you create content for social media, then that’s the best place for content suggestions. Nobody can tell you what content suits your audience better than the audience themselves. If you have an established audience, then asking them what they want is the best way to get relatable content suggestions. Validate content ideas by analysing the target audience’s responses. You may simply ask a question or poll to see the audience’s responses. Also feel free to read the comment session and personal messages for audience responses. On the other hand, also remember that sometimes you are responsible for pushing the audience further. There is just a thin line between what they want and what they deserve.
Stalk People and Surf Q&A Websites
Stalking is not as cringy as it used to be. Here, stalking simply means going through the competitors’ profiles and common sessions, just to understand the audience’s behaviour on trendy topics. As an influencer, you must maintain social media decorum and ensure that nothing offensive (except offensive jokes and dank memes) is posted on your profile. Also, Q&A forums like Quora and Reddit are great platforms to practise target audience analysis. Similarly, you may also surf through vlogs, blogs, and YouTube video comment sessions. It is essential for a media enthusiast to stay current with media trends.
Make Use of Your Analytics
Use your analytics to find out what your audience already likes about your content. On Instagram, you can use the analytics icon to sort out your posts by reach, engagement, and many more. On Facebook, you may use the page insights option to find the same thing. Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn all have similar native analytics options which would provide you with more insights about what the audience wants from you.
Utilize Research Tools
There are tools that would help you to trace the most viewed content. Content research tools like Buzzsumo provide a vast number of popular topics. All you have to do is to type a keyword, let’s say ‘content marketing’. The browser will come up with all the popular and most viewed content related to the keyword. A simple method of typing a keyword on Google is also an effective way to identify popular topics. Google suggestions are best when you look for popular keywords and ideas.
Experiment
Social media trends keep on changing with respect to the algorithms. Let’s not worry about the algorithms and statistics. All you should know is that the internet is a people’s place. All numbers and algorithms are made based on what people like. Think as an audience and feel free to experiment with fresh ideas. You may never know what struck them the most.
We often come up with high quality content and see it fail. On the other hand, we also witness some random videos (not necessarily well-researched or high quality) getting the most views and likes. Great content happens when we understand the similarities between what people like the most and what they deserve.