Social media can be a great way to reach and interact with potential customers and current customers. But, it’s competitive. Not only can it be difficult to stand out, but you also have to post regularly to keep your feeds active. It can be hard to plan out the posts you need while also testing new post types to see what resonates most with your audience. Here are a few types of content to post on social media to help inspire you if you’re stuck:
1. Blog Posts
Not only are blog posts a great way to drive traffic to your website, build thought leadership, help your customers, and more, but they are also one of the most common types of content to post on social media.
Social media can be a useful channel to promote new blog posts when they are published, re-promote old posts that are still relevant, and reach new customers. Valuable blog posts are informative, useful, interesting, etc. Sharing these on social media helps your potential customers and can help grow your business too.
2. Resources From Your Website
In addition to blog content, you can also share resources and lead magnets from your website on social media to get more eyes on them, increase traffic, and also increase leads for your business. White papers, eBooks, case studies, downloadable assets, podcasts, slide decks, and more can all provide value to your potential customers. You can use social media to promote whatever resources you have that would be useful to your target audience.
3. Testimonials
Testimonials are a type of social proof to use on your website and are another one of the types of content to post on social media. They do tend to fall more on the promotional side instead of the informational side, but they are still valuable and interesting for your target audience.
You can share testimonials, reviews, and general positive feedback from current customers on social media. Not only are these trust signals your website should have, but sharing them on social media provides opportunities to shout out and highlight current customers while reaching potential customers as well.
4. Curated Content
Social media is about communication and building communities. You can’t just promote yourself all the time – you also have to contribute to the community. Promoting too much and not focusing enough on providing value and listening and communicating is one of the biggest social media marketing mistakes businesses make.
Instead of promoting all of the time, take a more balanced approach that’s right for your brand, your target audience, and how they use social media. Include other types of content that are useful, funny, interesting, uplifting, etc. that your audience will enjoy for a more balanced and community-focused feed.
This can include sharing, or curating, great content from others. You can re-share articles from thought leaders in your industry, posts from other sources doing interesting things, content from partnerships your business has cultivated, funny memes, and more. Whatever content you’re curating and re-sharing, just make sure you clearly credit the original source.
5. Statistics and Facts
Statistics and facts are valuable resources for your business when it comes to creating content to share on social media. An interesting statistic or fact can easily become a simple, attractive graphic for social media.
Plus, there is a wide variety of information to choose from. You can stick to facts and stats directly related to your industry. Other options include expanding to a related industry or just sharing something interesting about the world, animals, etc.
As long as it aligns with your target audience’s interests and your brand, it has potential. Because education and awareness are so essential to nonprofit missions, sharing stats and facts is one of the great social media ideas for nonprofits.
6. Tips
Tips are another great content type to test out in your social media marketing. Not only can a tip make an interesting graphic for social media, but it’s also useful to your target audience. Because of this, good tips can generate a lot of engagement on your page and can help you reach new people through re-shares of the post.
Also, by defining your target audience on social media, you can learn more about how they use social media and what they find most valuable. This allows you to speak to what they find most important and share tips that they are more likely to find useful and valuable.
7. Quotes
Quotes are another category that can easily become graphics, which makes them one of the types of content to post on social media. Depending on your target audience, the types of quotes they respond best to may vary. Whether your audience prefers inspiring, motivational, funny, etc. quotes, a graphic featuring a quote can be a nice way to add a visual and some variety to your social media feeds.
8. Videos
Videos tend to be a highly engaging type of content, especially for social media. Plus, it’s a flexible and versatile content type. Short clips, longer videos, tutorials, walkthroughs, etc. are all options for video on social media. If it works for your brand and you can pull it off, live video is also an option.
Instagram offers Reels and Stories. The Reels feature allows users to scroll videos only and works well for short videos that you want to stay available on your feed unlike Stories, which disappear after 24 hours.
Explainer videos or tutorials are useful for your audience, which can make them a good option for sharing on social media. Product tutorials are one of the social media marketing ideas for ecommerce, but can also be a good fit for service-based businesses as well.
Plus, once you’ve put the effort into creating a video, you can also use it in a variety of ways to support other marketing efforts outside of social media. There are plenty of ways to repurpose video content to help create more content or support other types of content on your website as well as across social media.
9. Infographics
Infographics are a highly visual content type that can also perform well on social media. As long as they are well-designed and interesting to your target audience, an infographic can help break up post types and increase engagement.
10. Company Announcements
Social media can be a great channel for sharing announcements about your company. Again, you don’t want your feed to be full of only company announcements. But, if something cool happened, you hit a milestone, you posted a new job, etc., it’s worth sharing a post about it on social media and celebrating with your loyal customers.
11. Product Highlights
If you run a retail business or ecommerce website, product highlights are definitely one of the types of content to post on social media. You can announce new products, share products that are newly on sale or on clearance, introduce product bundles, share products that are limited edition, selling out fast, etc., and more.
In addition to announcing or sharing products, you can also highlight features of specific products. Product tutorials are a good option for using video, but you can also provide supplemental guides or instruction in other formats. You can also highlight tips or innovative or helpful ways of using the product.
12. Events
If your company is hosting an event, sponsoring one, or attending one, you can use social media to announce it and to invite your target audience to attend. You can also use your social media platforms to help promote local events if you’re a local business. You can even promote events that your partners or customers are hosting, sponsoring, or attending as well to help increase interest in them.
13. Behind-the-Scenes Sneak Peeks
Another one of the types of content to post on social media is a sneak peek into what goes on behind the scenes of your business. This could include office sneak peeks that highlight your company culture, a look into a part of a manufacturing process, how a product gets packaged, and more.
What constitutes “behind the scenes” for your company depends on your industry and your business. Giving people a look behind the scenes can be useful for a variety of social media platforms. In fact, it’s one of the clever ways businesses can use Instagram Stories.
14. Press Coverage
If your company received notable press coverage, it’s worth sharing that on social media. Although it’s technically promotional, it’s also curated content and earned media. Plus, it can help build thought leadership and brand awareness while contributing to building authority in your industry and increasing trust with potential customers.
15. User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is not content from your company and is instead created by customers and fans of your business. User-generated content could be reviews, feedback, photos, videos, and more.
Often, UGC is collected through contest participation, participation in special hashtags, etc. Usually, a UGC campaign or ask is done on social media. But, if you’re running it through your website and have permission, you can cross-post user-generated content on social media.
16. Holiday Themes
Holiday content is popular on social media. If there are big holidays you know your target audience enjoys celebrating and actively participates in, it may make sense for your brand to create festive holiday content around them.
Holiday-themed social media content is often fun and festive. In addition to that, you can also think about any specific challenges or obstacles your target audience may face around certain holidays or times of the year. Then, you can also create holiday content that is more business-focused to help solve those problems or ease those challenges.
17. Questions
Questions tend to get engagement on social media and can be a great way to interact with your audience while also getting some feedback from them. Asking questions to start conversations is one of the tips for improving social media engagement.
Whether it’s more serious on the business side or just for fun, you can ask a question to your audience on social media to get feedback. You can even run a poll and share the results! You can also answer audience questions on social media.
FAQs are a great resource to have on your website for common questions you get from potential and existing customers. Sharing answers to those on social media is a way to reach and help customers who also have that question. At the same time, you can get feedback from those conversations that may help you improve your answers to those questions.
These are just a few types of content to post on social media to help inspire you as you plan out your content calendar. Some social media content is meant to draw engagement on the platform while other types are meant to drive traffic to your website.
If your website is outdated, underperforming, or just doesn’t offer a great experience, that traffic won’t do much for your business. Contact us for a meeting of the MINDs. We can talk about your business goals and how we can help get your website back on track and performing for your business!