3 Types of social media posts that grow your audience - And how to write them with ease

Social media posts can attract leads straight into your inbox. See how you can leverage your platforms for lead generation.

Growing your audience means that you can interact with and market to an audience that is genuinely interested in what you have to say and offer.

Growing your audience with people who are genuinely interested also means that your audience is more enthusiastic about engaging with your content and more open to moving through their customer’s journey with you and converting to customers.

Now, consistently writing posts that support these outcomes can be a bit of a struggle. In this post, I am going to share a few details about three of my favourite types of posts and how to write them with more ease.

#1 - The Educational Post

You follow people on social media because they share information that matters to you. Quite often this is information that teaches you something or provides you with useful insights.

This could either be…

To create a mind shift
To inspire you
To share tips and tools

The purpose of an educational post is to share knowledge and insights with you that have an impact on your personal development or your skills and capabilities.

Educational posts make your life better, easier, more effective, or more enjoyable…

You can do this through:

Posts that create a mind shift…

Replace an old belief with a new belief
Bust a commonly believed myth
Talk about a new way of doing something
Rant or examine a common issue

One way of writing a mind shift post is to look at common experiences, beliefs, processes or moments that your audience is familiar with and might come across regularly.

In your post, you lead with this thought or moment and describe it in some detail. You explain why this is happening or why people think a certain way. You dive really deep into the topic and share your personal insights and beliefs (which you can also back up by research and data).

And then you share what people should do or think instead and describe why they should change their point of view or how they can change the situation they are struggling with.

At this point, you may also talk about a solution that you are offering to solve this issue or create this mind shift.

Wrap this up with a short summary and a call to action or a challenge that your reader carries forward in their minds after they finished reading.

This kind of post is important because it helps you to guide your reader toward what they need to believe in order to work with you.

Mind shift posts align your reader with your beliefs.

Another educational post is:

The inspirational post

This is a post that inspires your audience to develop a thought or idea further. Often that is a thought that supports their personal development, creating a new habit, or a new framework they could try out in their business etc.

Inspirational posts are based on new (and original) thoughts that pop up in your mind, concepts that you have worked out, and connections that you have made…

These posts are meant to inspire people to do something new or different. To look at something from a different perspective and act upon it.

They are an expression of your creativity and thought leadership.

They are upbeat and positive, showing people ways of transformation – of changing something in their lives.

And they do overlap with story posts because they are often based on a “before” and “after” story in which someone shares a personal story of overcoming the odds.

Finally, the most common educational post is:

The “How-to” post

In a how-to post, you share tips and tools, frameworks and processes that help your audience to upskill or solve a problem.

How-to posts are a structured description of how to learn something new or do something different or better in order to grow and progress.

They usually have a headline that contains the long-tail keywords for the particular skill or process that is going to be shared.

The headlines (and the body of the text) are keyword loaded so that you can find them easily on search engines like Google, YouTube or Pinterest.

How-to posts are a good way of sharing knowledge with the intention of building trust and enticing your reader to consume more of your content or to learn more about a particular offer that is related to the information that you have shared.

It is a good practice to share enough knowledge to give your reader a small win so that they follow your content, save your posts for reference, subscribe to your email list, or even take you up on an offer.

I mentioned story posts earlier. Let’s look into them next!

#2 – Story Posts

Definitely, one of my favourites because with stories you can tap into one of the most effective marketing tools ever!

I’m saying that because storytelling is timeless. It is no fad but a pattern that has been programmed into human minds for tens of thousands of years. Everyone craves stories and stories are everywhere.

Even if you think that you don’t have any interesting stories to tell. Believe me – you do! It’s a matter of building awareness around stories and gaining some storytelling knowledge that will lead you directly to a better understanding of finding stories that matter to your audience and how to tell your stories in a way that hooks your audience.

(I do have a business storytelling course that you can take a closer look at: https://www.theworddistiller.com/courses/business-story-t-selling)

To give you a taste of the types of storytelling posts you could write, you could write…

Customer stories
Stories about the business
Your stories

Any of those help you to connect and build credibility. Stories engage emotions and have the power to influence because people “get into” a story and emerge changed. Stories have the power to release neurochemicals like dopamine or oxytocin in your brain and with them the emotions that you want your audience to feel.

The best type of story to build credibility is:

The Customer Story

This could either be a testimonial (check out my freebie on how you can get your clients to write compelling story-based testimonials for you: https://www.theworddistiller.com/f/story-based-testimonial) or a story about something that happened to your clients because of working with you.

For example, sharing one of their success stories resulting from your coaching.

Or you could write about some insights that you and your clients had while working together.

The main thing is that customer stories are focused on your customers and are amazing for building credibility because they demonstrate the transformational results that you helped them achieve.

Stories About Your Business & Your Personal & Brand Stories…

Are stories that are focused on you and your business.

Your origin story is about how you became the coach, consultant or service provider that you are today and how your experience, knowledge, personality, and expertise make you the perfect fit to help your clients achieve the results they are looking for.

But when you write your origin story, take care to write about details that make you an expert in the service you are offering today – rather than telling your whole life’s story.

Origin stories are about qualifying you as an expert! That could be through overcoming an obstacle or through your qualification through your knowledge and experience. (More about that here: https://www.theworddistiller.com/blog/finding-your-origin-story)

Or you can take a look at one of my blog posts if you fear that you don’t have an “overcoming the odds story” that can qualify you as an expert: https://www.theworddistiller.com/blog/telling-your-story-when-you-are-not-your-clients-hero

And then there are stories about your business. These are closely related to your brand and who you are as a brand. These stories connect and “prequalify” your audience because they tell your reader what you believe in and stand for. They resonate with like-minded people.

These are the stories where you can share your values and talk about why they matter to you, you can talk about your purpose, how you do things in your business…

That brings me to the last type of post:

#3 – Sales Posts

These days, people don’t want pushy sales. However, you need to let people know that you do have an offer. (Here’s one of the posts I have written about offers containing a number of links to other offer-related posts: https://www.theworddistiller.com/blog/lost-for-words-when-talking-about-your-offer-how-to-create-your-own-messaging-system)

There are a number of copywriting formulas that you can use for sales posts and sales copy. I have a detailed post about the PASO formula that you can check out here: https://www.theworddistiller.com/blog/writing-posts-that-convert

But when you write sales posts, it is important that you with your client’s point A (where they are now), describing it in some detail so that they can identify with it.

Next, you show them a picture of what point B (their destination or dream scenario) could look like.

By doing that, you open a gap between their current reality and their aspirational reality that you can close by sharing your offer with them.

Make sure to be specific when you are sharing your offer and lead with benefits and outcomes rather than features.

Your audience wants to know what you are doing and how exactly you are doing it. They need to be able to picture their own transformation.

And last but not least – never forget a call to action – in any of your posts!

Saying that, I encourage you to send me a message if you need support or have questions about writing your posts. In particular, about writing posts that your audience cares about.

Well-written posts can generate leads – and you won't want to miss out on that, right?

Categories: Content Creation, Content Creation tips, Copywriting, Copywriting tips, Copywritingskills, Lead Generation