If your goal is to connect with your audience, to build brand loyalty, and to position yourself as an authority in your industry—all excellent uses of social media—your first step is to get people’s attention. So how do you ensure that your content stands out among the crowd?

The fastest way to lose an audience’s attention is to talk only about yourself—a social media account that posts only promos isn’t offering your followers any value. Sharing a combination of interesting industry-related news and projects, user-generated content, RTs and other follower interactions, and long-form content (like this blog post!) along with your promos will entice your audience to stick around long enough for you to market to them.

Some social media experts say the perfect radio is 80% non-promotional content to 20% promotional, some say 1 in 4 Tweets or Facebook posts is your promotional limit—but these are just guidelines. The best way to determine the perfect “formula” for your industry and audience is for you or your social media company to experiment and analyze your results, adjusting as necessary.

In order to share industry-related content that your audience will care about, you need to keep up with that industry’s news. There are a few easy ways to do this. Google Alerts offers a quick and simple way to set up a notification system for a particular search term; every time a new result for that search term is added to the Google database, the system will shoot you an e-mail. This is great for specific, niche topics (and for keeping up with the coverage of your own company or product), but it won’t work for something broader, like design or technology.

The best way get the top news from those broader fields is actually to use the tools provided by social media. Follow accounts that share the content that interests your audience, keep Twitter lists for specific industries to make browsing easier, and sign up for daily, weekly, or monthly e-newsletters from the best sources. This ensures that you’ll have no trouble finding out what’s going on in your industry on any given day.

One of the most common, yet most easily fixable, mistakes on social media is sharing a piece of external content without including any information about why you decided to post it. Your followers probably won’t share without visiting it first, and with so many posts scrolling past users’ eyes every hour, you need to give them a quick but enticing reason to click your link—and an article title alone won’t do.

Here are a few ways to make your links more interesting:

1. Share a particularly snappy or bold quote from the article before the link
2. Describe how the article or content affected you (i.e., “this video completely changed the way I think about web design”)
3. If it’s a controversial topic, state your stance and invite followers to explain theirs (“Not sure if we agree with this philosophy on photography—but we’d love to hear what you think”)
4. Include an image—not only will an image help the piece stand out on the users’ social media feeds, but it can help provide a bit of context for the information presented in the article and make the content more shareable

Paperkite’s designer created this graphic pull quote to share one of our previous blog postson social media.

This is where outsourcing your social media becomes really helpful—professional designers can create polished, brand-appropriate charts, images, and pull quotes that are perfect for social media sharing.

This seems like a no-brainer, but actually, studies show that a pretty hefty percentage of social media users Tweet or post content without actually reading it. Reading—or in the case of a video, watching—a piece of content, from beginning to end, is the only way to know if that content is accurate, well-written and professional, relevant to your audience, and if you agree or disagree (and without that knowledge, you can’t possibly share the content in an intriguing way, as above).

Realistically, the best way to keep your feed compelling is to share only the content that was truly interesting to you. Did the article, blog post, or video impart new information? Was the information written or presented in a new or particularly interesting way? Did it change the way you think about something? Were you truly drawn in by the content, and did you read all the way to the end?

Yes, this is time consuming—which is why so many decide to outsource their social media management. But without this crucial step, you’ll just be adding to the chatter.

Are you looking to outsource your social media? We’d love to help. Contact Paperkite today.

But experts advise that it’s not whether advertisers should use print or digital, it’s how much they should use each channel. The shift shouldn’t be absolute—and the right balance between print and digital depends completely on your audience. There’s a perfect balance of print and digital advertising for each industry and company, and each medium has something they can offer.

There are clear advantages to digital. It’s less expensive, sophisticated behavioral targeting methods mean you can zero in yon your ideal customer, and analytics give advertisers the opportunity to test how their ad is performing—with print, the advertiser can only hypothesize. But research demonstrates that the key is to understand your audience; specific audience demographics are much more important than overall trends. Is your audience over 65? Are they primarily non-technical consumers? Or are they young techies whose first instinct is to “Google it”? All of these factors will affect your ideal advertising strategy.

Digital gets high points simply for frequency of use. An informal survey of daily train commuters conducted in 2013 revealed that for every one commuter reading a print newspaper or magazine, eight were engrossed in a laptop, smartphone, or tablet. The numbers are clear—Americans spend much more time engaging with digital media than they do with print media, and while print media may be confined to “leisure time,” digital media is encountered throughout work, school, and leisure time.

That last point, though, is important to think about. Digital media, and therefore, digital advertising, is more likely to be consumed while a user is distracted or multitasking, like at work or school. When consumers read print media, they are often much more engaged. Studies show that people often skim websites in under 15 seconds, long enough to get an “impression” of your ad (in the technical sense), but not long enough to absorb the information—and that website may be just one of many browser tabs open on their desktop. While consuming print, users are much more likely to be giving it their undivided attention.

Plus, digital advertising is so common now that our brains have all but tuned it out. Print advertising, on the other hand, stands out—a full-page magazine ad or a physical mailer is encountered rarely when compared with the hundreds of banner ads we consume daily. We must also remember that while digital advertising is fleeting, consumed for no more than the seconds or minutes a user spends on a website or mobile app, print has staying power. The same magazine could be saved in a home for months or passed along to other consumers, increasing the advertiser’s return on investment.

Here’s a handy guide:

The bottom line? No one formula fits all companies. Research is key, along with flexibility, monitoring, and a little creative thinking.

Forbes

American Express Small Business

RealMatch.com

USA Today

Association Media & Publishing

Netsertive.com