Snackable content is the current wunderkind of content marketing. Mobile-friendly and quick to create, snackable content is perfectly suited to the scroll-happy digital audience of today.
From animated gifs to memorable memes, short videos to infographics, snackable content is rapidly becoming a must-have as part of your broader content and social media strategy.
However, snackable content is more than just low-hanging fruit – it has a job to do for your brand, be it enhancing your voice or adding value to your audience.
We’ve pulled together this intro to snackable content, including what it is, what it does, and how to start creating it.
What Is Snackable Content?
As the name suggests, snackable content relates to bite-sized pieces of digital content that are easily consumed and shared. Being highly visual, snackable content is extremely effective at capturing people’s attention as they scroll through online channels on a mobile device.
When executed correctly, a snackable content strategy can improve your brand’s social capital through shareability. Being a faster transaction than longer-form content, snackable content is more likely to be shared in a condensed moment of impact.
As snackable content is typically easier to prepare and publish, it is a handy way to keep your followers’ social media appetite satiated. However, it does come with its own unique challenges. Maintaining relevance to your brand and its values is the golden rule.
What does this mean in practice? It might be tempting to share the latest trending meme, but if it’s not on brand, save it for your personal accounts.
Is Long Form Content Dead?
No, and nor will it be anytime soon. Long-form plays a completely different role at the opposite end of the buyer’s journey. It is still necessary for many reasons. In addition to performing better in search engines, longer-form content is important for establishing brand authority and helps convert people at the pointy end of the sales funnel.
Snackable and long-form content can be used as a one-two punch, however, if your snackable content is used as bait to hook traffic for longer pieces. (In this scenario, use snackable content principles and apply them to the layout of your long-form item. Breaking longer pieces into chunks, with lots of visuals, pull quotes and links makes them infinitely more consumable).
How Can Snackable Content Be Used & Created?
Snackable content is versatile and has many online applications, from websites to social media. It can easily be created, with a stack of free and paid tools including Canva, Adobe Spark, and Pablo by Buffer available.
Effective snackable content strikes a balance between compelling visuals or graphical elements and smart word choice. When it comes to the latter, keep it catchy but not sensationalist, as readers today are wizened to click-baity headlines. You should also try to ensure that your snackable content retains a subtle form of branding whenever possible, even if it’s just a hashtag.
Popular types of snackable content include:
1. Quotes
Quotes from influential people or excerpts from interviews and articles are one of the most straightforward types of snackable content. When posting quotes, it’s a good idea to tag the person being quoted (if they are on the social media platform you are posting to). You never know your luck – you might even earn a repost.
2. Gifs
Animated gifs have become part of our online vernacular. Gifs are a simple and effective way to capture people’s attention with movement and work particularly well for product or event teasers. But when it comes to utilising gifs as a brand, try to keep the dancing animals to a minimum – unless they directly relate to your core business.
3. Memes
It is the era of the meme and thank goodness. Memes have helped us laugh our way through many events in recent times and used correctly, can have a place in your snackable content strategy. As always, keep it relevant, keep it clean and make sure you know what you’re doing. (There is a growing body count of brands who have failed spectacularly at memes – best not to join them).
4. Infographics
Infographics can add a bit more meat to your content snack and don’t necessarily need to be boring facts or figures. What they should do, however, is teach people something quickly. Simple ‘how to’ or ‘did you know?’ answers can be remarkably effective.
5. Short-Form Videos
From Instagram stories and reels to TikTok and Facebook Live, short-form videos are a powerful form of social currency. Keep them under 15 seconds for maximum cut-through.
6. Quizzes, Polls, Q&As
Running a short quiz or poll is a fantastic way to boost engagement, while platforms like Instagram have made it possible for brands and influencers to have two-way conversations with followers through Q&As.
Why Re-Purposing Content Feeds Your Snackable Content’s Calendar
One of the easiest ways to get started is to go through your past content across different channels and see what performed well. Larger items can be chopped up into bite-sized pieces, for example, carve up a ‘top tips’ blog into individual posts or a case study video into key snippets.
To Wrap Up
The most important thing to remember is to keep it short, scannable, and shareable. Make it easy for people to understand and ensure all snackable content is supporting an overarching content and social media strategy.