To develop a successful social media strategy, you must create content strategy with ideas that will stick with your audience. From simple product promos to in-depth blog posts, the content varies in length and its presentation. Thus it is essential to cover all your bases and get content ideas from a variety of sources. To help out with your social media planner, we have come up with some brilliant ways to generate content ideas for all of your platforms.
Utilise customer reviews
This method may seem questionable, but positive reviews of your service or product can be used as social proof on your social media accounts. It is also possible to utilise negative reviews. For example, let’s say you sell a photography app which lets people apply filters to their photos. However, you get a negative review because your app’s free service doesn’t include a black and white filter. It is possible to hijack the review by giving away a free black and white filter and mentioning it in your response via social media. This type of response shows you care about your customers and are always looking for solutions to their problems. You can also employ humour with negative reviews and use them as promotional content to display your company’s wit and care.
Moreover, if you sell a product, you can send it to related influencers and blogs for an honest review. This system can help expand the reach of your audience and will also give you more content to repurpose for your channels through snippets and story mentions.
Take from your competitors
While we don’t think copying always works, taking an idea and growing it can boost your social media channels massively. It’s worth looking at your competitors to see the type of content they post. We believe in originality, so it’s worth noting that you should use your company’s design guidelines and only take small snippets from your competitors.
A great way to understand your competitor is by creating a mockup schedule guide and working backwards to find what they are targeting to sell or raise awareness. This strategy can help you find your path and help you understand their way of thinking and progression when it comes to social media content.
Utilise recent events
Using recent events can be another great way to produce content ideas. For instance, if a big sporting event occurs, allow your business to align with a sports team or player. This type of strategy will give you relevance in the sporting event’s spotlight. Look at the example below, how IKEA, a Swedish company, used Sweden’s loss to England in the 2018 World Cup to promote their hat and coat stand.
For companies with riskier strategies, political events can also be used to their advantage. This strategy tends to work with humour-related content such as memes or parody videos. It’s essential to be light-hearted with these topics or use them in a way that can support a more comprehensive campaign, such as a critical cause. However, if you are looking to steer this way, you must understand the risk of isolating potential or current customers.
Celebrations and Festivities
Using festivities like Christmas to help develop new ideas for your social media content is a superb way of expanding to your audience beyond straightforward product promotion. There are many celebrations throughout each year meaning you’ll have a lot to choose from and you’ll never run out of potential content when the new year rolls around.
Companies such as John Lewis are known for their TV adverts around Christmas. But TV isn’t the only medium they showcase their advert; they also use this opportunity to promote via their social media channels. The majority of their hype for the advert comes from social media as platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn have the power of trends. Hence, social media can be an excellent platform for festive content.
Analytics
Using the analytics from your website or campaigns can be a great way of knowing what content your audience enjoys. For example, suppose you run six different social media channels and continuously update all of them. However, you realise from the view and engagement that one single channel is receiving more attention. In that case, you could make a potential shift to focus more of your time on that channel and develop content that is vastly more successful.
You can also analyse the content that isn’t working and understand how you can make it work. From changing the text to improving the critical message, there are many reasons why certain content fails to do well for businesses on social media. Without a comprehensive analysis of your content, you might be missing out on sales and potential leads that could take your company to the next level.
Recycle your old content
Adding to the point above, if you’ve been creating content for a while, it’s always worth looking back. Maybe do an updated version of your video, or even better you can generate an updated version of a blog post. Recycling and updating old content is a fantastic way to re-engage with your audience.
Social media is mysterious. Social media managers are always in panic regarding scheduling, but no one knows when the best time to post it during the day — if we did, we’d all be succesful. It can change daily, depending on the type of content you’ve posted and the current events happening in the world. A Tuesday on social media on a hot summer’s day is vastly different to that on a Christmas week.
Look at other sectors and industries
If your company is known for being in a “boring” industry, we recommend looking at different sectors for content ideas. Marketing everyday products can be tedious, but there will always be an angle you can approach to maximise your content quality. It is worth exploring YouTube to see if any popular content on its platform could work for your company. We’d also look at companies that keep appearing in the news. These have a specific mission that drives brand awareness through controversial on-the-line content and can be advantageous for special offers your company is running.
