I remember when posting three tweets per day for your company or personal account was considered aggressive.

Oh, how things have changed.

Now, some social media gurus, like Guy Kawasaki (The Art of Social Media) will say you need 8-12 unique tweets per day if you’re a casual user and as many as 25 if you’re hardcore (pg 54 of the book linked above). And he’s not wrong.

Add to that all the questions you have to ask when creating just one of those posts: Is my audience likely to engage at the post time? How many times have I already posted this? Is my image optimized? Have I checked my engagement analytics for how this kind of post performs? Organic or pay-per-click for this one? Am I using the best hashtags for my topic? And on and on and on …

Make no mistake, these are important questions, but all of them are secondary to this:

“Could This Post be More Interesting?”

Imagine what would happen if all of us social media managers took the time to ask that simple question before hitting send on our  posts.

Right now, you should put it on a Post-It note and stick it somewhere you look often.

Related: Four Ways to Write More Engaging Social Media Posts

The social game is a nonstop, relentless pursuit of molding the perfect content to encourage those clicks, follows, and solid-gold shares/retweets. But you have to find time to ask that question before you hit send or schedule. Here’s why:

If Your Answer is Yes, Your Audiences’ Answer Will Be Yes, Too

I’ll be the first to admit how many times I’ve been tempted to say this is good enough after getting all the mechanics right in my post (length, photo, hashtags, timing, etc). I’ve even made sure to start with “5 ways…”, “How you can…”, “The ultimate guide …” and all those other surefire (read hit and miss) ways to enhance social media engagement.

But if I haven’t asked, “could this be a more interesting social media post (to my audience)?” then while my post is optimized for general audiences, it’s not optimized for my audience. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

From an “OK” to an Interesting Social Media Post

I recently helped film several case studies for a client. One of the videos was about how they helped an organization set up an entire IT services sector in an underdeveloped region. While this isn’t the stuff of pop culture and viral topics, it has an audience. And I want to reach them.

When it was time to promote the video, I wanted to get across the scope of the feat (which was actually pretty impressive), but I neglected to look back to my go-to question of “can I make this post more interesting?” Thus …

My first post: [How we helped a major donor organization build a thriving #IT sector in an underdeveloped region (with surprising results)]

Not a terrible post by any means in my opinion, and it didn’t do too bad on the engagement side either. But could it be more interesting? Definitely. So I tweaked it a bit and took a slightly different approach to build more intrigue.

Second post: [How do you build a thriving #IT sector in an underdeveloped region? Like this]

More interesting? Check. More views? Check. Worthwhile for you to take a shot at this in your social channel(s)? Check.

Try it for a week and see how asking the simple question “could this be more interesting?” changes how you post and how your audience reacts.

I’ll think you will be surprised.

I’ve recently blogged about four ways to write more engaging social media posts to bring this concept to life in your strategy. Be sure to check it out.

Have a technique or a question you ask that help you tailor you posts to your audience? Share it in the comments.