Yogyakarta, April 16th, 2020—Center for Digital Society Faculty of Social and Political Sciences UGM (CfDS Fisipol UGM) was back online conducting the 14th edition of Digital Discussion series titled “Tips on Writing Content on Social Media” last Thursday. This discussion was discussed in the WhatsApp Group platform with 111 participants, coming from various majors. Digital Discussion by CfDS invited the speaker Wardahtuljannah as CfDS Social Media Associate, @missfioree who was then called Mbak Wardah and moderated by Aldo Rafi Presnauli Siregar as the CfDS Partnership Assistant who guided the discussion.
The Digital Discussion #17 event started at 19.00 WIB as the moderator conveyed the group rules and introduced the speaker. To slightly enliven the atmosphere in the WhatsApp Group room, the interaction began with the moderator conducting a simple question and answer session on the topic to the audience after having invited the speaker to introduce herself. “Beforehand, according to Smart People, how important was it to make good and qualified content on social media?” asked Mas Aldo. Of the participants responded, almost the entire people answer the question with their opinion that making good content on social media is very important.
“… the existence of content is very important. It is good for institutional, organizational, brand, or personal social media accounts. Without content, our social media might never be glimpsed. So, we have to present the content, thus the other users don’t want to stop seeing our account,” as Wardah agreed on the participants’ answers. After that, Wardah explained the material by first giving tips for planning and creating good content on social media. “The key to good content is well-planned content,” she said. Wardah mentioned three things we must pay attention to make a plan. These include determining the subject of social media, the purpose of social media and recognizing the social media we use. Every social media has different characteristics. Content distributed on Instagram, may not sell on Twitter, and vice versa. So, we need to study the social media that we use and optimize its function. By recognizing the social media that we want to use, we will be able to optimize the algorithm,” said Wardah.
Subsequently, the speaker explained some reasons people like the content. According to her, content that has high engagement is relatable. They like it because it is relatable. Social media users tend to look for content that suits themselves as a form of approval, users who are craving for entertainment also tend to like entertaining content. Also, social media users usually use social media to communicate so that they often like slick content. The term relatable means that not everyone like the same content. In a sense, there is content that we consider important, but apparently has low engagement and vice versa.
After knowing why someone likes the content, Wardah explained how to find inspiration and interesting titles in creating content. That there are two types of content we can create, which are evergreen content, the timeless one which can be read at any time, and the second one is the trending one. “The tricky thing is actually trending content because the trend in social media is constantly changing. If we can find a discussion room that fits out account, our content can be a trend,” she said. Based on her explanation, the idea of content is everywhere, we just have to process it. Then, the title also has an important role in matters of content. The title can make our evergreen content read by many people. “One of the things we can do is create a clickbait title. Use titles that make people who read it curious, confused, or upset. You can also use the question as a title,” Wardah said as the tips to get a lot of attention.
Then, content that is engaging according to the speaker is the consistent content. Here added some tips by the speaker that can be applied when creating content. These tips are to complete the post with visuals, provide practical content that does not only contain information to be applied by readers, and create content that triggers emotional reactions to put it in demand. Next, to increase social media engagement, we must interact frequently so that our accounts are not covered by other accounts. “Befriend other people, interact with them, answer comments, ask questions, do everything you need to do to network. By becoming an active account, then our account has a good engagement,” she said.
After the discussion felt to be enough, the moderator opened two question and answer sessions. Both sessions were filled with quality questions from the audience, Wardah answered all questions in a coherent and clear explanation. The speaker also gave some examples of Instagram accounts with good quality. The event closed at approximately 21.00 WIB and the moderator invited participants to provide feedback about the event at the given link.