How to Create Eye-Catching, Scroll-Stopping Content

Fyre Festival was, quite possibly, the biggest flop of the 2010s. Through oversights in planning and outright criminal negligence, the festival’s founders created an ill-conceived and dangerous disappointment for all attendees.

So why discuss Fyre Festival when talking about eye-catching content?

If the Fyre Festival founders did anything right, it was hiring an amazing content creation team. So much of the disaster came from the fact that a carefully curated social media blitz had shot expectations sky high. Months before the actual Fyre Festival began, Jerry Media coordinated a social media takeover wherein 400 influencers posted a simple, burnt orange square with the hashtag #FyreFestival. This strategy stopped scrollers dead in their tracks and was able to drum up an air of mystery and exclusivity.

Anyone who has social media has come to expect certain things from their Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter feeds. Pouting influencers hocking hair and skin vitamins. Manicured toes sticking out of the sand at a beach. A cup of coffee being held by a tanned hand with an inspiring caption. We expect certain types of content from certain types of feeds. So the question remains: how do we stop someone who scrolls at a mile a minute?

If you’ve been following our series on content creation, you’ve learned how to create your content pillars and how to create a content calendar. Now that you’ve got those two down, it’s time to learn how to create the actual content! But not just any content: eye-catching, scroll-stopping, go-back-to-the-post-and-like-and-follow-them content! We’ve broken it down to a few simple rules to follow.

Know your audience: Follow popular social media accounts of leaders in your industry. This will give you a better idea of what your target audience wants to see. Take note of what content pillars, fonts, colors and tone these popular posts use. Your target audience is following them for a reason!

Be bold: As we mentioned before, social media followers tend to expect the same old content from their feeds. While you should maintain a general color and font scheme, try to switch it up! You never want your feed to seem like the same kinds of pictures over and over again.

Customize content for different platforms: Instagram, Facebook and Twitter each have different image size requirements and algorithms that dictate what type of content will perform best on each platform. That means you need to be strategic with what kinds of content you are populating onto each respective platform.

For example, engagement driven posts do well extremely well on Facebook. For engagement driven posts, you should focus on content that makes people want to comment and share.

Time-relevant content does well on Instagram, thanks to hashtags surrounding that time period. For example, posting a #NewYearsEve picture on New Year's Eve will boost your content.

Twitter is great for quick, conversational content where you can engage directly with your audience. Each social media platform has their own pros and cons.

Take the time to pick what social media platforms you want to focus on and do your research as to what works well for that site. The more research you do, the brighter your content will shine and the better chance you’ll have of reaching your audience!

Keep up with analytics: Keep a weekly log of what posts get more engagement and/or reach. Having a written log of what content pillars do better will help you when it comes to creating a new month of content. Make sure to take note of things like engagement, reach, click-through rates and impressions.

Oftentimes, people like to joke about good social media, saying “the social media intern must have had fun making this one!”. As someone who creates social media content, I have to admit-it is fun! However, it’s not as simple as hiring a college kid to simply post a picture on the company Instagram every couple of days.

Social media strategy requires creativity AND analysis, innovation AND discipline, ingenuity AND introspection. Putting real effort and examination into your social media presence is guaranteed to convert followers into leads and leads into clients. Your followers are future customers waiting there for you, so get going!