Long gone is the time when social media for businesses was optional!
Day by day, businesses are entering the world of social media and reaping its benefits. First of all, to enter this province, let’s accept that followers are hungry for fresh content!
To stay ahead of the curve, you will have to move past the monotonous and repetitive content. Initially, it will work out well, and you will have a lot to post and talk about, but there might come a time that you will go through a creative block.
If you are in such a place right now or have started to handle a business’s social media, here is a list of ideas that will help you never feel a content rut again. Let’s get started!
#1. Host A Series
#2. Follow Trends
#3. Let Someone Take Over
#4. Challenge Your Audience
#5. Pin, Share, Retweet, & Regram
#6. Revamp
#7. Celebrate Holidays!
#8. Take A Shot At Memes
#9. Feature Your Customers
#10. Go BTS!
#11. Educate
#12. Do A Q&A Session
#13. Give Your Business A Face
You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.
#1. Host A Series
Want your followers to come back to your social media channels every once in a while?
Here is how you can make that happen!
Give them a reason to land back on your social media profile by starting a weekly series. You can keep your audience motivated with a ‘Motivational Monday’ or cherish them with a ‘Fun Fact Friday.’
When you plan to start a series, make sure it’s a two-way road and allows users to act on it. Ask users to share an image/video as a part of the series by using the same hashtag. Like this, you will witness a smooth rise in your social media engagement. If your followers find the content relevant, they will keep looking forward to seeing more content from you.
Here is how Chewy started with #TreatMeTuesday on their social channel to get users to share photos of their pet eating snacks. The idea that makes them stand out is how they integrated their weekly series into user-generated content.
Image Source: Chewy Twitter
#2. Follow Trends
We all know how social media channels are full of ever-changing trends, and keeping up with them can help you reach more users quickly. Staying up-to-date with this ever-changing landscape requires continuous learning, development, and adaptation skills!
To follow trends, you must plan your social media calendar by considering that the plan will change once approached. You can start by spending a certain amount of time on social media every day to see what people are talking about and what changes are happening. When you do that, keep a sharp eye out for what your competitors are doing.
Dive deeper by getting the right social media tools to see what customers are searching, and analyze their behavior at each step of the funnel. By doing so, you can utilize social media analytics to grow your business even outside of social media. Additionally, you can join relevant LinkedIn groups and follow trending Twitter hashtags.
Look how @indicooks stayed updated to the trend while the series Money Heist was trending and succeeded at driving it towards their brand.
Image Source: indicooks Instagram
Know more about Top 5 Instagram Marketing Trends For 2021!
Bonus: Statusbrew not just helps you to organize your social media calendar and schedule content well in advance, it also provides 180+ industry-rich metrics to delve deeper into the nitty-gritty of your content performance on social.
#3. Let Someone Take Over
Bringing a new face to your business on social media channels can act as a user magnet if done right.
Usually, businesses hand over their social media channels to a celebrity/influencer with a massive fanbase. Doing so brings their audience to your business, but the trick here is to get someone whose fanbase is relevant to your target audience. A beauty blogger won’t do any good by taking over an IT company’s social profile.
Choosing the right person to take over your social media can help you increase brand awareness, open up to new audiences, and entertain your current followers. To find the right influencer, begin with following hashtags and searching specifically on Google. Add ‘site: Instagram.com,’ ‘blogger,’ or a location before your keywords to narrow down your keywords while searching.
Know more about Instagram Influencer Marketing: All You Need To Know
Additionally, start following brands and bloggers and keep a habit of scanning through your competitor’s mentions and tags. Here is a fine example of an American actress taking over the social media profile of an American watch company Movado.
Image Source: Alexandra Daddario Instagram
Also, feel free to promote your social media takeover on all your social media channels. If the takeover is happening on Instagram, use any social media channel with a relevant audience to promote it.
Make the most of social media tools that can help you analyze, your content performance to know how the promotions worked out for you.
#4. Challenge Your Audience
Whether it’s an ice bucket challenge or a weight-loss challenge, there is a strong drive when many people do it together!
A similar concept lies behind this social media idea of challenging the audience- getting people to drive quick results. But before jumping right into designing challenges, it’s necessary to ask yourself these questions:
- What is this challenge providing to the audience?
- What is the aim of this challenge?
- Why should a user take this challenge?
- How can you make the challenge more interactive?
- What more results can you gain from this challenge?
Come up with a period when your challenge will run, i.e., 5-8 days, partner up with influencers, and create a unique hashtag for your challenge. Make sure that your challenge is not ‘win or lose’ but instead, win every day. Such an effort will serve a bigger purpose of keeping all the participants feeling rewarded.
Last but not least, talk about this challenge, promote it on any channel with a relevant audience, and aim for more extensive results than just getting the audience to take up the challenge. Let's look at how to do this with the help of an example.
Have a look at this simple social media challenge by Ruggable, where they challenged the audience to ‘make a mess’ on their rugs and upload photos/videos. This campaign was further used as social proof to embrace the product’s washability.
Image Source: Ruggable Facebook
Recently, social media challenges have been trending on Instagram Reels. If your business is already publishing content on Instagram, take a shot at posting a challenge through Reels, getting Instagram stars to do it, and then observe the outcome.
#5. Pin, Share, Retweet, & Regram
When you are on social media, you are part of a space shared by others. Rather than only posting new content, you can also try to embrace this shared space by sharing the content of other businesses or people.
Pin, Share, Retweet, Regram, do it all!
Not all the content on your social media channel has to be yours. When you dive into sharing someone else’s content, it reflects how you are also a part of industry conversation and not just someone tooting your own horn.
Make use of a unified dashboard such as Statusbrew that collects all your conversations from several profiles into a single place. Using such a dashboard ensures that you don’t miss out on any conversation, reply to them as quickly as possible, & also figure out the non-mentioned conversation using the social listening feature.
To find the right content to repost, scroll through Twitter Search, Facebook Fanpages, Pinterest Search, Instagram Hashtags, etc. The added advantage is that your audience will experience a variety of content journeys through your social media posts and might come back to you later as well.
Image Source: SueBZimmerman Twitter
#6. Revamp
Before you start looking out for new and fresh content, take a deep dive into what you already have and look for content that has worked well for you in the past. You can simply adapt that content into different formats and save the effort of working on something new each time.
Well, this doesn’t mean you should just copy-paste!
Do it wisely, with the right content marketing strategy. If you have a blog that has worked well, take excerpts from that blog and post quotes, statistics, or important messages. This will also help you gain more traction on your blog and give you effortless social media content.
Because when the audience has engaged with your content in one place, there are high chances that your audience on different platforms will engage with it too. Here are some ideas for you to begin with:
- Pick meaningful quotes from blog posts
- Talk about your blogs in your Youtube videos
- Incorporate statistics as Twitter posts
- Embrace the testimonials on LinkedIn & Instagram
#7. Celebrate Holidays!
We all know that holidays are emotional!
Hence, holiday posts can also carry a certain amount of emotional appeal for your audience. It’s not just about Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s but also about National Science Day, National Donut Day, National Kids Day, etc.
Holiday posts can give your audience a particular insight and also foster a sense of community. Keep in mind that the holidays you share should be relevant to your industry and that this will help the audience know what to expect from your social channels. When approaching this, don’t forget to learn from previous holiday data.
Do you want to know the best part?
Holiday posts are more shareable as people end up tagging their friends on Best Friend’s Day and their teachers on Teacher's Day. Moreover, you can provide special holiday offers, organize themed getaways, host a live holiday stream, etc., with your holiday posts.
Know more about 2021 Social Media Holiday Calendar
Have a look at how @GoodFoodsCoop shared an innovative post on National Friendship Day.
Image Source: Good Foods Twitter
#8. Take A Shot At Memes
After all the strategic ideas, let me take you through a fun way to engage people on social media channels. Users on social media are overwhelmed with advertisements and are used to scrolling past them.
At such times, memes can do their job just right!
The key to catching the attention of these hard-to-reach users is to give them something other than just machine-advertising the product. Memes are inexpensive content to post and are more shareable than any other content type. The only thing to keep in mind is that the tonality of the meme should match your brand voice. The meme, even while being funny, should reflect on your brand personality.
To create such memes, find the right tool such as Photoshop or start with meme generator sites. Keep it short and simple and find the correct expression. To understand this better, look at this meme by @jimmyjohns, a sandwich joint that successfully engaged many of its followers.
Image Source: Jimmy John Instagram
You can also incorporate famous movies and dialogues in static or GIF formats to make it more interesting. So, keep an eye out on what goes around the internet and meme your way through it.
#9. Feature Your Customers
While you are making all that effort to increase engagement on your social media channels, it’s time to give your customers the spotlight!
Because, what’s a better way to appreciate them than featuring them!
Do it regularly and make your customers feel proud and special. Doing this will lead to them building an emotional connection with the brand. You can start with telling a customer’s story or promoting customers on your Facebook cover regularly.
Don’t forget to add a face to your customer feature, as users will relate more to a story/feature with a face. Here are a few ways to feature your customers.
- By sharing case studies
- By sharing their guest blogs
- Posting testimonial videos
- Featuring social media contest winners
- Re-posting user-generated content
Have a look at how @thefeatheredfarmhouse, a decor boutique, started with a ‘What’d you do with it? Wednesdays!’ series where they started featuring their customer’s homes every week.
Image Source: The Feathered Farmhouse Instagram
In the end, featuring customers will effectively create some buzz around your brand and increase your revenue moving further.
#10. Go BTS!
Going behind the scene on social channels can contribute majorly to attracting users to your profile. The inside look of your brand will help them build trust and like you even more.
If you aren’t doing it already, it’s time to get started!
Because the more trust users build on you, the more trust they will build on the products/services you sell which will efficiently fulfill your business goal. So, if you are looking to develop a deeper connection with your followers, you can start by showcasing your personality on social channels in these ways:
- Let people know about your day-to-day life
- Update your users with your work
- Start talking about your ups and downs
- Talk about your interests and hobbies
- Introduce your team
If this is overwhelming for you, simply start with giving a tour of your house or office. Look at how @warbyparker approached behind the scenes by documenting their employees’ stories.
Image Source: Warby Parker Instagram
#11. Educate
Educating your followers can take you a level up on social media. There are hundreds of ways in which you can educate your followers.
No, not just with blogs!
Blogs are an excellent medium to educate readers in detail, but social media is no less. Think of how-to videos, tutorials, step-by-step DIY guides, etc. The educational content on social media is short, to the point, takes less time to absorb while remaining comprehensive. With such content, users can easily consume information and share it with their connections too.
Depending on what your social media profile is about, you can start thinking about what content you can provide and when. If you run a fashion magazine, you can share a summer reading list, a music playlist, or a weekly movie suggestion for your users. Provide something that the users can make good use of, just as @girlsnightinclub did.
Image Source: Girls’ Night In Instagram
#12. Do A Q&A Session
A Q&A session on social media can get you some real-time engagement!
Not just that, it can also project you as an industry expert on social media. You need to develop ideas around the services you provide and your work journey. The next step will be choosing if you want to be the speaker or want someone else to be the face of the session.
Align your timings with high audience activity and decide how to take the questions- live or ahead of time. You can look for the best time to post on Instagram, take questions beforehand through Instagram stories, and conduct these sessions via Instagram Live.
Before your planned date, start promoting your Q&A session on relevant social media channels and create a massive buzz around it. Moreover, while conducting the session, if you observe and analyze the user’s questions, you can develop better content for them in the future.
#13. Give Your Business A Face
Start posting about your workplace, your regular life, employee stories, family stories, and a lot more than can simply bring a face to your social channels. If you want to understand the difference between a business with a face and without one, check out these two social media profiles on Instagram.
(i) Social media profile without a face
Image Source: Mintex Technologies Instagram
(ii) Social media profile with a face
Image Source: Warby Parker Instagram
Wrap up
If you have reached here, you are undoubtedly tired of the content you are already posting. There might be social media ideas here that you have already tried. If so, give a shot to the other content types and look at how it works for you, as these 13 content ideas should keep you busy for at least a month.
In the end, don’t forget that social media is supposed to be an interactive space where you connect with people and build a community. Start with ideas that pop up in your head while reading this and go one by one.
To know what the audience responds to, analyze your performance with a social media engagement tool such as Statusbrew. With several ready-to-use reporting templates and total flexibility to customize these reports, Statusbrew will help you determine whether your social initiatives have led to positive results and where adjustments are needed to strengthen your marketing campaigns.
Statusbrew is an all-in-one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and even Google My Business.
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