Are you stumped when it comes to coming up with ideas for social media posts?
Don’t worry; you’re not alone.
Even if you have a social media strategy in place, constantly coming up with fresh and engaging content can be challenging, but luckily there are a few methods you can use to get the creative juices flowing and many tools to help you come up with ideas for social media posts.
In this article, we’ll share tips to help you develop ideas for social media posts that will engage your audience and help you grow your brand.
Social Media Basics
What is social media?
Social media is a platform where people can interact with each other online. Interaction can involve sharing content, comments, and likes. Common social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter.
What are the benefits of social media?
There are many benefits to using social media, including:
- staying connected with friends and family
- sharing news and important information
- networking with other professionals
- promoting your brand
- marketing your business or product
Generating Ideas for Social Media Posts
If you’re stuck on what to post on social media, you can do a few things to generate ideas. First, look at your products or services and brainstorm interesting ways to discuss them. You can also focus on your customers and share stories about them. You can also look at what’s happening in the news and share your thoughts. Whatever you do, make sure you’re providing value to your followers.
Identify your audience
If you’re not sure who you’re talking to, it can be difficult to determine what sorts of things to post on social media. Take some time to consider who your target audience is. Make a list of their demographics, including age, location, gender, job title, and interests. Once you understand who you’re trying to reach, you can begin thinking about the types of content that will appeal to them.
There are a few ways to come up with ideas for social media posts:
- consider what sort of content would be helpful or interesting to your target audience
- look at other businesses in your industry and see what sorts of things they post about
- use social media listening tools to see what topics are being talked about related to your business
Identify your goals
Before you can start generating ideas for social media posts, you need to know what your goals are. What do you want to achieve with your social media posts? Do you want to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or generate leads? Once you know your goals, you can start brainstorming ideas to help you achieve them.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Share interesting industry news
- Share a customer success story
- Promote a new product or service
- Run a contest or giveaway
- Live stream an event
- Share helpful tips or advice
- Feature an employee of the month
- Highlight a charity or cause you support
- Share motivational quotes (click here for 10 free ones!)
Use a content calendar
A content calendar is a planning tool that helps you organize and track your content. You can use it to plan and ensure you’re always creating new and fresh content. To create a content calendar, start by brainstorming a list of topics you want to write about. Then, choose a posting schedule that works for you. For example, you may want to post once a week or daily. Once you have your topics and schedule figured out, start filling your calendar with specific posts. Include the date, time, and platform for each post. Finally, don’t forget to add other important details, such as links or images.
SoVisual’s Social Media Content Calendar
If you are unsure what to post on social media this month, check out SoVisual’s Social Media Content Calendar. Use their text prompts to create something unique, and then click on the image to customize it using their free image generator.
Use social media listening.
To create content relevant to your audience, you need to understand what topics they are interested in and what type of content they engage with. One of the best ways to do this is through social media listening.
Social media listening is monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, product, or industry. This can be done manually, but many tools can also help you automate the process.
Once you have a good understanding of the topics your audience is interested in, you can start generating ideas for social media posts that will be relevant and engaging.
Creating Engaging Social Media Content
Use lots of images and videos
People are visual. We process images 60,000 times faster than we process words. For this reason, using images and videos in your social media content is so important.
Including images and videos in your social media content will make it more engaging and visually appealing, which will help to stop people scrolling past your posts.
According to Hubspot, tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images, and Facebook posts with images get 2.3x more engagement than those without images.
So, if you want people to engage with your social media content, start by using lots of images and videos!
Use calls to action
Make sure your social media posts have a call to action. This could be as simple as asking your followers to share your content, or something more specific, like asking them to click on a link. Either way, a call to action will help to increase engagement and make sure that your followers are doing something with your content rather than just scrolling past it.
Use hashtags
Hashtags are a great way to help your content get found by people searching for topics relevant to your business. When you use hashtags, use ones specific to your industry or niche and popular among your target audience. You can also use hashtags to track your content’s performance and see what topics resonate most with your followers.
Measuring Your Success
If you want to be able to measure your success on social media, one of the best ways to do it is to set up Google Analytics. This will allow you to track how much traffic your website gets from social media, what kind of engagement you’re getting, and more.
Most social media platforms have some sort of built-in analytics that you can use to see how your posts are performing. For example, Facebook Insights lets you see how many people have seen your post, how many people have engaged with it, and what their demographics are. Twitter has a similar tool called Twitter Analytics.
Another way to measure your success is to ask your audience directly. This can be done through surveys or polls. You can also ask people to leave comments or feedback on your posts. This can be a good way to get ideas for future content and get a sense of what people like and don’t like about your current content.
Finally, you can also look at indirect measures of success, such as overall website traffic or sales figures. If you see an increase in these after you post something on social media, your social media activity is likely at least partially responsible for that increase.
