Posting original articles or sharing relevant content with your clients and prospects shows that you care about educating them about important financial matters, says Shannon Sloan, director of new business development with Rich Media in Toronto. Clients will appreciate the level of transparency, Sloan adds, and they’ll feel more informed about making decisions.

To that end, you should produce content that’s considered social media-friendly — meaning it’s engaging and sharable, and will find the right audience. It’s also important to avoid directly promoting a product or service. Instead, share information that will be relevant and helpful to your audience.

Here are five tips for creating content that is social media-friendly:

1. Break it down into points
Consumers are attracted to magazine-style “top ten” lists or stories that are broken into bullet points (like this one), Sloan says. They’re looking for high-level or general points first, and if they’re interested, they’ll read further.

Your headline should reflect what’s to follow, Sloan says. For example, if you’re writing five tips for retirement planning, include that information in your heading. Bite-sized information is easier to digest and will more likely catch your reader’s eye.

2. Include an interactive component
Allow readers to participate in some way. “Engagement increases when people actually get to do something while reading an article,” Sloan says. You might include a poll asking your readers to express an opinion, or a mini-quiz asking readers to recap what they just read.

Widgets allow you to provide real-time results of polls or quizzes, so your audience can see how others are answering. While agencies such as Rich Media can provide custom widgets, you can create your own on web platforms such as WordPress.

3. Add original visual content
When creating online content, always try to find a photo or other image that will reflect that content at a glance, Sloan says. When Sloan works with larger organizations, she always recommends using a unique graphic rather than a stock photo to grab the reader’s attention.

4. Use video
Give your readers a reason to share your content with their contacts.

“The number of Twitter retweets goes up significantly with visuals,” Sloan says. “And video is certainly a big part of that.”

If your audience is too pressed for time to read an article that would require five or 10 minutes, a two-minute video or animation might attract their interest.

Video is particularly helpful in explaining complicated concepts. For instance, if you want to educate your clients on dollar cost averaging, an animated, infographic-style video can deepen their understanding of that concept. And the reusability is high, Sloan adds.

5. Increase your SEO
Search-engine optimization (SEO) means making sure your content appears as high as possible on search results on Google and other search engines. Sloan recommends listing several keywords with each article you post.

Cross-linking is also very helpful for SEO, which means linking your articles to other relevant articles.

This is the first part in a two-part series on creating social media-friendly content. Next: Tips for sharing content on social media.