So I hear you’ve committed to a presence on social media for your company? Good for you! Social media greatly increases your company’s reach and allows your prospects and customers to consume and share relevant content about your brand.
What’s that you say? You committed to posting daily and now you are struggling to find topics to post that frequently? Never fear. Social media content is hiding all over the place.
1. Promotions, specials: Share your special deals, discounts, sales and coupons.
2. Events: Promote ahead of time in a series of differently worded posts that appeal to different subsets of your audience. Take photos during the event, at your booth, live tweet happenings, do a live video on your Facebook or Instagram story–anything that shows your enthusiasm for the event/your community/the cause, and encourages your audience to attend and participate. Post after the event as well. Events provide multiple opportunities for social posts.
3. Happy customers: Take a photo of your customer holding your merchandise with a big smile on their face. Take a short video of your customer talking about how your product or service impacts their life and why they like it. If you don’t have direct access to your customers like that, establish a hashtag around your brand, get your fans using it, then search for posts with your hashtag and share them to your channels.
4. Blog posts: Blog posts are a no-brainer to post on social. Use a catchy, teaser title, a great photo or graphic, and watch the traffic to your site increase.
5. News releases: If you send official news releases to local or national media, share the link to the release on social too.
6. Sharing of your customer’s content: Follow your customers on social media. Make it a point to go check out their channels weekly and share something from them. It shows you support them, haven’t forgotten about them, and boosts engagement.
7. Sharing of industry articles: Your social media posts should not be all about you. Establish the right mix for your business and share relevant content from other sources often.
8. Corporate provided content (if applicable): If your business is part of a franchise or large corporation, they probably have a solid marketing department that is continually creating content that supports the messaging and is within the brand standards. Again, only sprinkle this type of content into the mix; too much and your feed starts to look too ‘corporate’ and loses the local feel your fans know and love.
9. Memes, funny trends/quotes/jokes: Show your sense of humor! Piggyback on silly trends! Memes and quotes are more sharable than KitKat bars.
10. Product photos: When you have a new product, new packaging, upgrade or change in ingredients, etc, share this with your audience.
11. Demos, or short video how-to’s: Record video of your product in action and have someone from the company explain how it works or how it’s made. Or have your employees share a tip about how to best use the product.
12. Infographics: Even short and simple infographics beg to be shared. If you can find a way to say it graphically these days–all the better!
13. Employee spotlight: Show the people behind your brand. Highlight someone on your staff with a photo and facts about them, or a short video.
14. Member/customer spotlight: If your business is based on memberships, highlight a member of the month. Or highlight a customer and how they use your product or service.
15. Case study/customer success story: Maybe one of your customers had a big issue or problem in their business and implementing your solution was a game changer for them. Develop a case study about it. Interview them. It’s great to have testimonials like this for your business.
16. Contests, polls, games, caption contests: This is another category that is mostly just for fun and to engage your audience. But the possibilities are endless!
17. Tips and tricks from your experts: If you sell something like software, tips and tricks from your software developers can be invaluable for the users. This could be in the form of a blog post, a video, or a short tooltip on Twitter.
18. Holidays, National Days of: Did you know there’s a National Crouton Day (May 13) and National Ballpoint Pen Day (June 10)? National Days are a thing and people love to celebrate them, or at least just joke about them. Look at the calendar for the year and see which National Days would make for fun and relevant posts for your brand. If you are a restaurant that focuses on salads then National Crouton Day is all you.
19. Live tweeting from industry event/conference: If you attend a conference or industry event share what you are learning there–in real time. Take photos of information shared, shoot video, tweet snippets of new and interesting information. It shows you are on top of the trends in your industry and again, good for that engagement on your feed.
20. Testimonials: Ask your customers for testimonials and put their quotes on social media.
21. New releases of your product: This is a no-brainer of course, but think about new and different ways to announce a new version of your product. Host an event, run a contest, be mysterious and build that excitement with intriguing teaser posts.
22. #TBT: Throwback Thursday posts are still alive and well because who doesn’t enjoy seeing old and historic photos? It can be of your brick and mortar store back in the day, an old version of a product of yours, the original logo for the company, or even something in the city in which you operate. Bonus points for black and white photos! Be sure to always give photo credit and have permission to use the photo.
23. Plug a partner: If you have partner companies you work with, cross promote each other and give each other props.
24. Inspirational quotes: Go easy on these, you don’t want to take a turn to Cheeseville. Perhaps just a few a year, depending on your company culture, product and industry. But the right quote used in the right way can be impactful.
25. When in doubt, post a photo of an employee’s dog. Seriously. People love dogs. And they love dogs in the workplace. Sleeping under a desk. Wearing the company logo on a bandana. Sitting at a chair in a conference room during a meeting. Trust me. Social media gold.
