4 Ways to Create Engaging Content Users Care About

With so much information readily available competing for readers’ attention, it’s important to create engaging content that benefits the end user. This will develop a loyal reader base, and in turn will gain more exposure once picked up by influencers within your industry.

In this post we explore 4 ways to create engaging content that users care about.

1.  Do your research
It may seem obvious, but asking your audience what they want to read about is the best way to create content that will peak their interests. This can be done easily by asking questions via Social Media or by creating short surveys and emailing them to users. Tools such as our Wufoo form, or Survey Monkey make creating an emailable survey easy.

If you are just starting out (or even if you’re not), it’s worth looking at what actions your competitors are taking, analyzing which content is well received. Look at the number of comments and social shared a post draws as a measurement of how engaged users are with their content.

2. Plan and be consistent
If you are thinking about developing content on a regular basis, it is important to plan effectively. Think about when you plan to post, and how frequently (such as every day, week or month). Once you have a plan, be conscious to stick to it. Gaps in content posting may cause readers to lose interest and decrease content engagement rates. Set realistic expectations of yourself, if you believe posting daily will be difficult, plan to post weekly instead. Consistency is key to successful content production.

3. Mix-up content forms
Creating content in the form of written blog posts and articles is great for SEO, however other content forms should not be overlooked, often having greater engagement rates than traditional posts. To give an example, video is shared 12 x more than links and text posts combined on Facebook. Visual content such as infographics are another great form of content that readers actively share. In fact, businesses who market with infographics grow in traffic an average of 12% more than those who don’t. Try out different forms of content on your audience to see what forms readers engage with and share the most.

4. Make content easy to engage with
Creating content is good, but making it easy to engage with posts is key to measuring how successful your efforts really are. Adding a functionality for commenting to your blog will allow readers to start active discussions around the piece. Social share buttons on posts will also make it easier for readers to share the content they find interesting. Including calls-to-action in posts is another good way of measuring engagement. Try adding links to other posts, allowing you to measure click-throughs and user engagement with your blog as a whole.

There are many ways to measure how successful your blog content is and how engaged your users are – we will be exploring some of the various success metrics in next week’s post. Stay tuned to find out more.