Regardless of the industry or niche you’re in, having a social media strategy and posting regularly across a variety of social platforms is essential for long-term success and growth. Not only do you need to post quality content of your own, but you also need to leverage user-generated content and a myriad of complementary tools to help you build a devoted following.
Posting regularly and frequently will allow you to build brand awareness, generate qualified leads, and nurture them to become your paying customers. In the long run, being consistent on social media will allow you to create lifelong brand advocates. That said, posting on social media every day can be exhausting, and pretty soon you may run out of fresh content ideas.
Let’s fix this problem right now and take a look at some of the best social media content ideas and how you can keep coming up with fresh ones throughout 2024.
Follow and analyze the trends
One of the first and most obvious ways to keep your social media content calendar fresh is to stay on top of the trends in your industry. This doesn’t just mean following what’s hot in your field, it also means monitoring your competition and what works for them, and actively monitoring your social media audience.
You can keep coming up with fresh content ideas through social listening and by using a content idea generator to get optimized and data-driven content suggestions. This will reveal the type of content your audience enjoys the most, among many other things. And then there are the expert insights and statistics.
It’s important to monitor the usage statistics and growth rates of all your social media platforms, but also the preferred content formats. You will then find out which platforms prefer which types of content, and how to best promote your products, events, and brand.
The audiences on every platform have different preferences, so if you are looking to build hype for a successful webinar for example, you need to know how to best promote it using videos, shout-outs, engaging content, and links to landing pages on your site.
Make sure to use social listening to your advantage and always stay on top of the latest trends to get new content inspiration for your social media accounts.
Organize live events and webinars
One of the often overlooked social media content ideas, one that does require a lot of planning and organization, is a live event. Also known as virtual events or live streams on social media, live events are a great way to fill up your content calendar on many different platforms. Once you start organizing them, the ideas for the live event itself will start popping up on their own.
Regardless of the industry you’re in, there is always something to talk about, and remember that Q&As and AMAs are a big part of the whole experience. You can also switch things up from time to time and organize webinars instead, once you have built up enough engagement through regular live events.
A great way to fill up your posting schedule and improve sales enablement through community content on social media is to actively engage your audience in webinars, live events, and encourage user-generated videos, feedback, and more. For example, using the right webinar platform, you can lead your social media audience to sign up and join your webinar on your website.
Whether you are organizing webinars or live events, though, keep in mind that these events are a treasure trove or promotional ideas:
- You can post engaging copy about the event with links
- You can give sneak-peeks from industry experts
- You can tag keynote speakers in your posts
- You can spark up a conversation around your event
- You can create dedicated videos, images, and infographics
Turn FAQs into social media content
Another treasure trove of inspirational social media content is the FAQ section on your website. It’s also probably one of those social media content ideas you’ve been ignoring or perhaps even unaware of, which could fuel your social media calendar for months.
For one, you can use the FAQs to start up a series of long-form articles on your websites, to which you can link back from your social media pages, your emails, and other communication channels you have with your audience. But that’s just the beginning.
You can then take snippets out of those articles and post them as standalone content on your social accounts, sparking conversation with your audience. Or you can use a short quote and a CTA to link to the full article on your site.
That said, written content is just one content type you can derive from your FAQs. You can turn these questions and answers into short explainer videos, and complement them with some nice editing and background music to create some TikTok or Insta-worthy content.
That said, you can also turn FAQs into captivating and colorful infographics – the possibilities for content diversification are endless.
Repurpose video content for different platforms
Video should be an integral part of your overarching content strategy. Whether it’s for social media or your website, for your press kits or your webinars and other events, video content can help you disseminate your brand and make your marketing more efficient and effective. The best part, however, is that you don’t need to keep pumping out new videos to keep your content calendar fresh.
While you should be creating new video content regularly, you can definitely fill in the gaps by repurposing video content that you already have and creating different styles and formats for different social platforms. With a bit of clever editing, you can shorten long-form content into bite-size, reel-friendly videos to keep your reels page fresh and relevant on instagram.
The same goes for other platforms as well, as you can easily repurpose old videos for TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter. If you have some explainer videos or webinar recordings, for example, that can be a real gold mine of short-form video content ideas for the next few months.
Engage with notable influencers
Influencer marketing has always been a powerful way for brands to expand their reach, gain new followers on social media, and generate qualified leads through their trusted influencers. What you might not have considered before, is that your influencer collaborations can serve as content inspiration for your own social media feeds.
One of the best ways to build social media influence is to get shout-outs from your influencers and sponsor their posts, but you can also feature them on your social profiles and include them in a myriad of different content types across the board. You can feature your influencers on original imagery, in your videos and live events, you can quote them in your blog posts, and you can tag them in your social posts to start a conversation.
The possibilities here are numerous, so don’t just think of influencers as people who can promote you on their accounts – think of ways you can use them in your own posting schedule.
Leverage affiliate marketing on social
Affiliate marketing is a great way to promote brands if you’re an affiliate, or to generate more conversions if you are a business owner. The great thing about affiliate marketing is that you can promote brands and their products across a variety of olne channels, including social media.
Just like you would build an affiliate marketing email template or a template for your affiliate marketing on your site, you need to create templates for your social accounts and use affiliate marketing as a source of inspiration for your posts. If you’re someone who’s an affiliate for a number of brands and you’re regularly sharing affiliate links, then you should have no problem mixing up your posts and scheduling different affiliate posts throughout the month.
Run engaging social media ads
You might not consider paid advertising to be a part of your posting strategy, but it’s important to remember that ads are also posts in a sense that they promote your brand across the social media realm. Ads are highly-targeted and excellent at disseminating your brand and generating leads, and you can use them to get any message across.
This is a powerful tool that you don’t only have to use to guide people to your sales-oriented pages. If you use paid social advertising wisely, you can leverage ads to target followers at every stage of the sales funnel, and at every stage of their journey.
Your ads can also inspire people to get in touch and talk to one of your representatives, or they can lead to landing pages that are tailor-made for a specific type of audience. Mixing ads that are optimized for different user intent and have different micro-goals can be a great way to freshen up your advertising strategy on social media.
Talk about the perks of shopping with your brand
While everyone else is boasting about the quality of their products, you want to focus on your brand as a whole. Talking about how easy it is to shop at your online store or get in touch with you is a great way to mix up your posting strategy and incentivize your followers to make a purchase by getting in touch in the DMs or heading over to your website.
Emphasize the effort you put into data security, for example, or talk about how you have a secure ecommerce payment gateway that makes shopping safe and easy, and then talk about some of the best-selling products to seal the deal. A good approach would be to pick one of the value propositions such as security or how easy it is to shop with you to differentiate your posting from that of your competitors.
Showcase and promote your products creatively
Speaking of promoting your brand, products, and values, it’s important to make your product promotions on social media more creative and engaging. There are many ways you can talk about your products without sounding overly promotional, and a variety of content types you can use to make your posts more interesting to your followers on different social channels.
Using this approach is a great way to assure your business against the competition on social media, so make sure to:
- Use creative images and original photography
- A variety of video types and not just product reels
- Infographics about your products
- Quizzes and polls
- Talk about your products in your live events
Use professional photography
It’s easy to say that you need engaging imagery and original photography to create engaging social media posts, but what do those mean? Original imagery is anything you create in-house that’s not stock photography, and by investing in original images you can enrich your posting strategy.
For example, by using a headshot photographer to take photos of your staff, you can launch a series of posts in which you can complement the headshots with quotes from your employees. On the other hand, using engaging imagery can mean sprucing up images of your products in popular photoshop tools to better highlight their features, add a splash of color, and maybe some compelling copy.
Get inspiration from your email campaigns
When in doubt, try to draw inspiration from your email campaigns, newsletter, and correspondences. If you have taken the time to personalize emails for all your customer groups and have been communicating with your audience via email so fome time now, then you can go back to those correspondences for some much needed inspiration.
Take a look at some of the conversations you had with customers from different stages of the sales funnel, or use revamp and repurpose your old newsletter content for your social media calendar. Use these to create a series of posts and things you can talk about on your social channels.
Over to you
Posting on all your social media accounts frequently and regularly is the way to grow your profiles consistently and build your brand in the social media realm. But it can be very challenging to keep your profiles looking fresh after a few months of posting.
You can ensure your brand stays relevant on social media by using these tips and applying the best practices we talked about today. Be sure to give these social media ideas a try and continue to grow your online audience in 2024 and beyond.