Social media content creation tips
Content is at the core of any social media. With no social media content creation strategy, there is nothing to promote or share on social media nor products or services to talk about. Brands from every industry and size have met this 21st-century marketing demand by building a content creation team or outsourcing their content creation needs to an experienced agency.
Social media content creation is an essential sales tool and a cost-effective marketing strategy. Learn how to level up your social media strategy by developing a strong social media content creation plan that will enable your organization to attract new customers, secure returning customers, and increase revenue for your business.
Whether you’re just starting out or looking to improve your current efforts, implementing these strategies today can help you reach your social media presence growth goals. Follow our 12-step guide to get you started!
1) Set goals
Your goals for your social media content outline the key metrics or results you want to achieve as a brand on social media. Goals range from increasing brand awareness, driving more website traffic, increasing sales and lead generation, to driving more engagement. Your goals will help define your content plan of action. Your marketing team should take the time to think in detail about what you want to achieve in your social media content strategy to make sure your brand can drive the results you are looking for.
2) Identify your target audience
Identify your audience in order to more purposefully tailor your content to meet their interests and desires. Take a look at your social media metrics and demographics to develop your buyer personas, such as age, gender, education, income, interest, and geographic location. Most apps provide audience data, but third-party tools such as social listening will help as well.
3) Definine your brand personality
Your brand’s personality is shaped by how people perceive your social media interactions and online presence. Your brand persona can help you present your brand in the way that best fits your goals and needs, from a more friendly and entertaining approach to a professional knowledgeable resource in your industry.
4) Types of content to share
To establish a thriving digital presence, a strategic approach to content creation is imperative. Diversifying the types of content you share can captivate your audience and differentiate your brand from your competitors. There are four different types of content that can help you increase your online presence: visual content, informative content, engaging content, and user-generated content. By understanding each type and how to use them effectively, you’ll be able to develop a well-rounded content strategy that resonates with your audience.
Visual content
Visuals increase engagement, as they attract customers’ eyes to your specific piece of content. This type of content is a great way to offer products with colorful images or videos that are easily digested by customers to drive traffic to your website. Visual content works on most platforms, but visually centered channels like Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook cater to users who drive engagement through visually stimulating content.
Informative content
Informative content can help your organization demonstrate its knowledge and expertise. As with other types of content, informative content is highly competitive. Your content creation team will need creativity to share compelling content and news topics to stand out.
Informative content can range from social media copy, written posts, infographics, blogs, articles, and guides of different lengths. Due to its form, this type of content is best suited for LinkedIn and Facebook, especially longer-form content. Twitter can also work well, but with limited characters, a shorter version must be created.
Engaging content
Polls, quizzes, and contests create a fun and entertaining environment for your social media community. Contests and giveaways are engaging, as users usually enjoy the opportunity to win giveaways from their favorite brand or get the chance to try something new. This type of content helps you connect with your customers, but it also provides valuable insights about their interests and needs, as well as seeking new content ideas from your audience for future campaigns.
For example, a fashion brand can post pictures of their latest collection and ask their followers which outfit is their favorite. This not only encourages engagement but also provides valuable feedback for the brand to improve its future collection. Content that resonates with your audience is a win-win situation for both the brand and its customers.
User-generated content
User-generated content such as testimonials and reviews can be used as content pieces to shine a light on customer satisfaction with your brand products or services. Users trust other users’ opinions and experiences more than anything your business can say, as research shows that 91% of people ages 18 to 34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family. Testimonials and reviews create more engagement and show you have your customers’ interests at heart.
5) Choose a content creation tool
Social media creation tools can help your brand improve the quality of your content while meeting your team’s production limitations. These tools can help your brand build infographics, animations, videos, graphics, and other visuals for social media, as well as help with the quality of your copy.
Some content creation tools even include artificial intelligence to save your team hours of work and will even identify your highest-performing posts. AI in social media can generate content ideas based on topics or keywords in your industry and help streamline the content creation process.
6) Monitor social media trends
Social media listening tools can help you find out about top social media trends and hashtags. Trends create hype around your brand’s social media platforms while helping you build up your social media calendar with events and topics that your audience is invested and engaged in.
7) Have a brainstorm
Carving out time to brainstorm ideas is an important part of content creation to build high-quality social media content that will differentiate your brand from your competitors. Your team members and customers may have interesting new ideas and suggestions to help you build your content calendar. Take the time to listen, gather ideas, and see what could fit best with your brand and audience needs.
8) Choose social media platforms
Each social media network has its own unique audience and features, so it’s worth doing some research before committing to a particular one. Some factors to consider might include your target demographic, the type of content you plan to share, and your overall marketing goals. The right social media platforms for your business will help optimize content for each social media channel, as some types of content might work better on certain channels. Ultimately, the goal should be to choose the channels that will allow you to reach and engage with your audience the most effectively to ensure your brand can grow and engage with your audience in different ways and through different channels, as trends and needs evolve over time.
For example, a fashion brand targeting young women would benefit from choosing Instagram and TikTok to reach their audience. Instagram is a great visual platform to showcase their clothing with photos and videos. On the other hand, TikTok is a fast-growing platform with a younger user base for short-form video content. These two channels would fit the brand’s preferred format and style and would help reach its targeted demographic.
9) Create a content calendar
A content calendar allows you to plan future content and ensure your content is spread evenly across all social media platforms. Content schedules also help maintain momentum and retain an engaged audience. Your posting schedule should follow your brand resources and goals. In general, we recommend committing to posting 1-2 times per week at minimum when beginning on a new platform. As bandwidth or demand increases, increase it, then test further. It is better to start small and add more content as you go than rush everything.
10) Engage with your audience
Social media content creation can drive many brand outcomes. Engagement should be a key priority for your brand. Your social media monitoring team should carve out time to respond to comments and be prepared to handle customer support. Social media is usually the easiest and most accessible platform for your customers to reach out and connect with your business, and the more efficient and fast your responses, the more satisfied your customers.
11) Measure social media content success
To measure your goals, you can prepare a social media report by gathering metrics and data that highlight your marketing objectives. Metrics and data to measure performance can include the number of likes, shares, tweets, comments, new followers, conversions, website traffic, impressions, and audience growth rate, just to name a few.
12) Analyze results
Once you have measured performance, your brand must take the time to analyze the results to see what worked and what didn’t. You can use analytics tools directly on social media platforms or third-party tools to analyze your content creation performance. This information will help your content team take action on upcoming content to implement your findings and improve future content.
Social Media Content Creation And Management Tools
Management tools are there to help you on your content creation journey. The following types of tools can help you put your ideas into form.
Graphic design tools
Graphic design tools can help you take your graphic design, infographics, and animations to another level with high-quality design. These tools can help you personalize your graphic content with custom fonts and colors that fit your brand identity to build a cohesive brand image and brand style on social media. Some of the best tools to create graphics quickly and easily include Canva, Make a Meme, and TailWind.
Video editing tools
Tools for video content work well for podcast, audio, and video-focused brand content on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Video editing tools help you stand out from other brands with high-quality images and sound for your audience to enjoy. Most tools help brands simplify their editing needs with user-friendly applications that can speed up the editing process with, for example, in-tool royalty-free music and adding automatic captions, when needed. Descript, InShot, and Adobe Premiere Rush are some of the best video tools to save you time and allow you to create better-quality content.
Content management and planning tools
Planning tools allow social media managers to create, organize, plan, and manage their social media content efficiently. These tools can help create your content calendar, seat reminders, and notifications, and streamline collaboration with other members of the team. Content management is a great tool to post and schedule content in advance for different platforms at the same time, while helping with customizing content for each platform.
Manage your Content Creation With ICUC
With over a decade of experience in building social content plans, ICUC is the right strategic marketing partner to create, manage, and promote your content online. We offer social media content creation services that include in-feed response templates, long-form collateral social posts, infographics, video and photo assets, social media content management, and more. Every asset created by our team for your company will speak directly to your core customer and align with your brand message.
What is social media content creation?
We’re going to sound like a broken record, but social media content creation is the act of producing information and visuals to be distributed across different social media platforms.
Each social media site has its own rules about the best types of content to share, how long captions can be, how to use hashtags, and what size image or video to create. So social media content creation is an art in its own right.
Social media content creators must be well-versed in the criteria laid out by each social media platform, as well as the types of content that perform best in order to succeed.
7 types of content for social media
So without further ado, let’s get into the different types of social media content your brand might want to create. There are seven main categories, though you also can get creative with your content ideas and come up with something outside the box.
1. Text posts
First, we have our basic text posts. This involves nothing but a typed out caption or text status (probably with a few emojis thrown in as well).
Here’s a great example of this from Grammarly:
The proofreading software brand created a simple text post (with emojis, of course) to help its target audience communicate better at work by offering improved wording options.
X (formerly known as Twitter) and LinkedIn are the two best platforms for text-only posts. LinkedIn is great for starting discourse on certain professional topics and X has a reputation for being a short-form content hub (though premium users are now able to create longer posts).
Creating social media feeds that include a variety of content helps your strategy feel fresh, so consider incorporating text posts into your X and LinkedIn content strategies.
2. Images and graphics
Images and graphics are another popular type of post. While you might have your social media team work with others to create these types of assets, basic photography and graphic design skills are also great for social media managers to have.
Here’s an example of an image shared on the Costa Farms Instagram page:
The plant nursery took a photo, beautifully split it up into three square photos, and shared it as an image carousel.
Here’s another Instagram image carousel from form and survey software Typeform, but this time with graphics rather than photos:
Image carousels are a great way to share more than one image at a time on social media. They’re swipeable—and on Instagram, they flow together seamlessly, making it easy to connect one image to the next.
However, you can also share single images on social media, like we see here in this Facebook post from software company Zoho:
Pretty much every social media platform supports and encourages the sharing of photos. It’s a great way to add visuals to your text posts. And like we mentioned, you can create a mix of both photography and graphics and a mix of both image carousels and single images to help balance out your strategy.
3. Videos
Videos are a wildly popular type of social media content right now, and social media platform algorithms love them. This means video is another type of content you should be creating for pretty much every social media platform your brand has a presence on.
Here’s an example of a short-form TikTok video from social media marketing tool Hootsuite:
Short-form videos are perfect for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. Long-form video content works well on your YouTube channel, as well as sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.
4. User-generated content (UGC)
User-generated content (UGC) is content that brands repurpose from influencers and actual customers. This type of content is a form of social proof, a concept centered on the idea that people often follow in others’ footsteps. So if potential customers see your product used in action by existing customers, they’re much more likely to buy.
Here’s a great example of UGC from label maker brand NIIMBOT:
A small business recorded a video of themselves using the label maker to create labels for shipping products, and NIIMBOT smartly repurposed it onto the brand’s own Instagram to showcase how its product is being used.
Quality UGC can be difficult to collect, though. Make sure you’ve created a branded hashtag that you list in your social media bios that lets customers know how they can tag your brand in order to be featured on your social media.
UGC is perfect for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
5. Interactive content
Interactive content is content that your audience can engage with—but through more than just likes and comments. While many types of interactive content have to be hosted on a website or other non-social platform, social media platforms are also making this type of content easy to create natively.
Take a look at this LinkedIn post from graphic design software Canva as an example. Social media sites like LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook make it possible to create polls right inside of a social media post.
6. Stories
Social media stories are temporary photos and videos that appear on your profile. They’re used on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. These stories last for just 24 hours—though Instagram allows users to add select Stories to Highlights that live on their profiles.
This type of content is the best place for behind-the-scenes footage, company updates, UGC, and interactive content. Instagram stories offer a number of stickers you can add to your visuals in order to create polls or quizzes, add music, and tag locations.
7. Links
Finally, sometimes you just need to share a link back to your website. There are a couple different ways to do this to ensure your content is still visually appealing, eye-catching, and engaging for your audience.
Here’s an example from SEO software company Semrush:
Its team shared a link to a blog post, but also made sure the caption included a bit of information about what readers will learn, along with an eye-catching photo.
You can also choose to just paste a link in the caption and use a photo as the main visual, rather than creating a clickable post. Test out both options to see what works better for your brand.
Links can be shared on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn.
How to create content for social media in 7 steps
We’ve covered the seven main types of social media content, but how do you go about creating them? First, you need to make a plan. Your team needs to come up with a social media content strategy and content creation process that helps you generate quality content every time.
1. Define your goals and audience
What do you want to get out of your social media content? Do you want to engage and entertain your audience? Provide a resource of helpful information? Generate more sales? You can do all of that and more with the right content formats.
You also need to figure out who your target audience is and what types of content they want to see from brands like yours. Gen Z enjoys different types of content than Gen X and baby boomers do, so pinpointing exactly who you need to create content for is key.
2. Choose the right platforms
Another part of finding your audience is knowing which platforms they prefer to use. For example, you might not have the best experience creating content for TikTok if you’re targeting a much older demographic. At the same time, you won’t want to spend much time on LinkedIn if you’re trying to reach a younger, hipper, less professional audience.
Choose the right platforms for your product and your target customer to make sure you create a successful digital marketing strategy.
3. Create a content strategy plan
An overarching strategy or plan can help make sure you create the best content for your brand. Once you’ve figured out your platforms, it’s time to outline a few other things, such as:
Once you have that figured out, you can move onto the next step and start building your content calendar.
4. Do content research and brainstorming
At this point, you should have a vague idea of what you’ll be creating and where. Now it’s time to do some research to figure out your specific content ideas.
Start by taking a look at what your competitors are doing. While you never want to copy their strategies exactly, it can be a great starting point for gathering basic ideas.
Sit together with your team to start brainstorming different ideas based on the seven types of content we mentioned in the last section. Keep your content calendar varied with multiple types of content to ensure your feed stays fresh and doesn’t seem repetitive.
5. Optimize for each platform
Even if you plan to create similar content for your Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok pages, each platform has different rules for optimization. The way you write your caption, edit your post, or incorporate hashtags will be different for each platform.
You should never create the same social media content and post it the exact same way to every platform across the board. Instead, pay attention to what works on different platforms and optimize your posts so they cater to those rules.
6. Engage with your audience
Once you’ve started sharing content to social media, you need to make sure there’s an audience there to receive it. Engage with users that fit your target demographic so they’re aware that your brand is on social media.
Start by liking and commenting on posts made by experts and influencers in your industry. Find their followers who fit your target demographic and engage with them as well. As you grow your own audience, make sure you’re commenting on and responding to all messages you receive.
The more you engage with your audience, the more likely they are to return the favor. Plus, it can help build brand awareness if other users see your brand name in the comments and click over to your profile.
7. Analyze and adjust
Lastly, keep an eye on your social media analytics. Each platform comes with its own built-in form of analytics and insights, but you also can rely on a third-party tool to keep everything in a concise little dashboard for you.
Pay attention to the posts that perform well and the posts that don’t. Keep creating content similar to the posts your audience likes. And if certain types of content just don’t get a lot of buzz, nix it out of your strategy.
Being adaptable is key in social media. There are always new trends happening and there are always ideas that might not work. You just need to look at your analytics to see what does work and do more of it.
BY ANISH KHAN
