What makes content good?

It’s a great question. Elegant and simple, and often overlooked by marketers who go into painful nuance detailing aspect ratios, calls-to-action, thumbnails, hashtags and algorithms. But what is good content, actually?

This inquiry came up recently during a Bolster marketing workshop I was running for AIR’s Women In Music program, by an artist after hearing me talk about content incessantly for over an hour.

I think the answer is seemingly simple but also complicated and ever changing. Good content is content that makes you go and stay on a platform. It’s what makes you want to be on the platform. It’s vastly different across each ecosystem, and more than one thing can be considered great content simultaneously.

People go to TikTok for entertainment and trends to feel like they’re party of an internet community, but also love to go down weird niches and learn things (MS Excel TikTok, anyone?). Twitter is for news and updates at a break neck speed, and sardonicism rules the roost. Also people like to be smart on Twitter and feel validated. Pinterest is the opposite of Twitter; all inspirational and aspirational content designed to be relatively ever green. It’s the modern day scrap book, and mostly for curating beautiful things you want to refer back to. Instagram is a weird one, and starting to feel a bit like the 9Gag of social platforms, where top content from other channels gets regurgitated, but when Insta is at its best it’s all about social change and making the word a better place, one infographic carousel at a time. Facebook - who knows. Feels like more and more just a holding place or a business card at this stage, more about reserving your name/handle to stop imposters than for genuine outreach. Facebook events and groups still have a time and a place, but no one really uses Facebook to communicate directly anymore. LinkedIn is for humble brags, inspirational (humble brag) stories and boasting about your job/trying to find a new job in equal measure.

So there it is. There is no formula for engaging content. The best-in-class content out there just feels native on its platform. It could be one of many things, and what’s works this month will likely change next month and next year.

P.S. Please FFS stop uploading your TVCs to TikTok and hoping it’ll go viral.