If you want to have social media reach the most people yet have the content interpreted within the bounds you had in mind, there you certain things you should do.
The first thing to know is that many social media users are savvy and they can smell low effort or purposeful product pushing. The first major consideration is to have or gain authenticity. If you truly want to create good content (let's say you just like having funny content) then is it pretty easy to have authenticity. If you are a company, then direct references to products either need ot be packeaged with other rhetoric that appeals to emotion (comedy, serious content etc.). The product is not attractive and can make people tune out.
The second major thing is to have content that is unique, in enough quantity, and does not inundate the followers. Flooding feeds make people get annoyed because you are one of many things they are paying attention to. By interrupting the natural flow of feeds with attention starved content you make, things get annoying pretty quick because people find it simply annoying.
So so far, the two major lessons are 1) being authentic and 2) balancing quality and quantity.
Now, these factors drive the social media train, but if you want compelling social media content, it has to fit the context of the chosen medium. Instagram is photo-based, so an applicable picture/video with a small caption with some hash-tags (to reach people outside your fanbase/stay trendy) is preferable (the picture has to be the most important part and mostly explanatory. Whereas on Twitter, bursts of rhetoric or just plain entertainment is useful, with some links or picture sometimes. As you can see, different mediums capture different focuses that users perform. Amid fitting the mediums are the demographics of the medium. Twitter has a mixed userbase that trends to some adults and some teenagers, Instagram towards teens and young adults, and Pintrest is female of all ages.
Using the brand you establish is important as well. Sam Adams, a beer company, made a funny spoof of themselves advertising "HeliYUM beer" and altering voices in post-production to make most video participants sound funny. Accurate or not, having a sense of humor and not pushing an actual product does wonders for authenticity. Using the brand can also be used for contests, like Mashable's Easter egg hunt or Marc Jacobs model auditions via sent Instagram photos. See, those types of social media content or ideas rely on a two way interaction, or at least appear to care how the user fits into what your content means. If you're a car company, you can post action shots and add some details on what it was like to drive the car, making reader invested in what happened. They can figure out the product themselves.
In that sense, one of the most important lessons is that the consumer is more savvy than traditional content providers and advertisers used to think. If you lack in quality (let's say your twitter jokes aren't that funny), your followers will speak up or leave. If your product pushing gets too direct or starts to lose its authenticity or social cache, engagement will drop and sometimes people speak up.
As you can see, the followers engage with you, sending messages to you. Like aforementioned, two -way communication is key, and going from acknowledging trends (using hash-tags or memes) to responding to individual fans visibly to the world can further move your content and account from a separate and maybe not fully individual content provider (unlike other social media users, who are individuals) to being human. Humans respond, and if McDonald's twitter account tweets back at followers, now McDonalds, who is a non-person entity, acts like a person.
There are a lot of things that people say to do for social media usage, especially when trying to make compelling content. But these are the most important factors. Sometimes, it's all you need.
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