25 Social Media Content Ideas To Increase Engagement

Are you struggling with finding new ideas for social media content that improves your engagement rates? Explore our tips on how to work with trends, be visual, use collaboration, share your content, and show your personality to find the techniques that fit with your business.

Social media is an easy and cost-effective way to reach your audience. It’s free to register and post and you can get a high level of exposure to existing and potential customers instantly. In addition to that, you gain invaluable insights into who your target audience is through the in-built analytics that provides demographic data as well as reach and engagement rates.

Have a clear social media strategy of what we have to do, what we have already did, etc... That's really important if you want to understand how to grow audience through social media. 

Be a content creator is not an easy task, if you want to become ones, you will have to take it very seriously and be original and create unique posts!

As with every other form of marketing, for your social media content strategy to work, it’s important to have a plan first. To get you started, have a brainstorming session to get some ideas for creative campaigns that will engage your audience. Use your ideas to create your strategy and fill the slots on your social media calendar with the content you’ve gathered.

Find out when the best times to post for your target audience are and get a social media management tool to bring some automation into the process. Social media management software is handy for pre-scheduling posts for popular times across multiple channels and tracking relevant metrics in one place.

You can use this data to see what works and what doesn’t and tweak your campaigns accordingly. Whether you want to get some new ideas, or you’re just getting started, browse our 25 social media content ideas to get you inspired.

Trends and particularly trends on social media can develop overnight. These rapid changes require marketers to always be alert and looking out for the latest hype to adapt and keep pivoting with the ever-changing social media landscape.

Use social listening tools to help you to track mentions to know what customers are thinking about you and monitor certain topics in your industry to catch a trend when it emerges. Setting Google Alerts can help you keep up to date as well, but even constant vigilance can only get you so far.

To combat the unpredictability of trends, you can create your own hype and have planned events as part of your successful online marketing strategy.

Stuck for ideas on the kinds of campaigns you want to run? An easy way to get inspiration is to look at holidays throughout the year. When you set out to create your social media strategy, make sure you include an editorial calendar with any special days you want to include for your social media content. This can help to populate your plan with content for the year.

For days of importance, show what your company is doing to help. To avoid the pitfall of being accused of just jumping on the bandwagon with nothing to back you up, ensure you’ve earned your posts with real-life actions.

These significant dates on the international calendar require a full campaign where you can post about what you’re planning to do a few weeks or months in advance, coverage of the day itself, and a recap post a few days later. And don’t forget to use the relevant hashtags to ensure your posts are visible to the right audience.

One of the major lessons brands had to learn in 2020 is that today’s consumers expect businesses to take a stance on social and political issues that impact people’s everyday lives. How your business impacts society and the environment or corporate social responsibility is no longer just a respected business practice but part of consumer demand.

For this to work, it’s important to research the facts and be aware of the history and any sensitivities you have to avoid. Be authentic and participate in the conversation in a meaningful way to avoid any faux pas that might backfire. The goal should be the opportunity to make a difference and use social media to your full advantage to communicate successfully with your target audience.

Everyone loves the chance of winning a prize and getting stuff for free. You can build on that by running a contest or giveaway. This is an incredibly effective and quick way to gain new followers and up your engagement rates.

For example, a study by Tailwind found that 91% of Instagram posts with more than a thousand comments are contests. Particularly on Instagram, the algorithm is geared towards prioritizing posts with the most engagement, which creates an extra boost for your competition showing it to more and more people.

Born on Twitter, hashtags are now widely used on all social media platforms as a way to categorize posts and make it easier for users to find posts around a certain topic. Adding hashtags to your posts increases the likelihood of the right people reading them.

Use social media management tools specifically focused on finding the most popular hashtags to curate a list of keywords around your niche. For the best results, test different hashtags, monitor which ones increase engagement more than others, and tweak your list accordingly.

Try using hashtags like #MondayMotivation or #ThrowbackThursday to see if participation in these general hashtags every week improves your reach.

If you want to show off your brand’s unique style and you’re looking to create a more fun atmosphere on your social media channels, surprise your audience with something quirky. This is your chance to throw a few crazy ideas in the mix to create a social media campaign that has never been done before.

For example, get your followers engaged by posting image scrambles. This is an image that has been scrambled up or is a zoomed-in part of the whole to make it harder to recognize what’s on it. Your followers have to guess what’s on your image and you can awaken their competitive spirit by offering a prize for whoever gets the right answer first.

Visual content performs better on social media than simple text posts. An image or video can be your tool to stop people from scrolling past your posts. When creating videos, be sure to include a hook in the first few seconds and add subtitles to ensure followers can read what’s happening in the automatically muted videos on their feeds.

Make sure all your social media content conveys your brand identity consistently by adding your logo and using your brand colors and fonts.

Social media algorithms favor live videos, as they get more engagement than regular video posts. To get the most out of your live event, make sure you let everyone know about it in advance. Interview industry experts, influencers, or give your followers a behind-the-scenes look at a new product or service you’re working on.

To make it even more engaging, consider having a Q&A as part of your live session and get your audience to submit questions. You’ll get invaluable information on what kind of content your customers are looking for that you can also use as input for your website.

Get creative and produce visual content to share on your social channels. It’s important to keep this kind of content simple and bite-sized.

Short educational clips that help your customers solve a problem are one of the best ways to get started with video content. Make sure you hook your audience in the first few seconds and include subtitles, as most people have videos muted in their feed.

Turn any interesting facts, helpful data, or step-by-step guides into an infographic. Well-designed visuals like this get more shares than if you simply used a text post to promote your refined content. You can use an infographic maker like Piktochart to easily design one.

Your customers want to see that you’re human and connect with real people. The best way to create great social media content around this idea and stay authentic is to give your followers a look behind the scenes of your business. Highlight employees and show what they do to keep the business running every day and deliver high-quality services or products to your customers.

Visuals do best, as your audience gets to see your employees instead of being impersonal figures behind desks. For example, if some employees go to a conference they can share photos of the events throughout the day or short video clips about what they’ve learned.

Have a bit of fun and create polls. People love giving their opinion about something and polls are an easy way to just do that. It’s an effective way to get a quick answer to questions around the preferences of your target audience and get some feedback on your product or service.

Give your brand a boost by creating a challenge and getting your audience to participate. To have viral potential, your challenge should be easy enough and involve filming a short video or taking a photo of the result to post and participate with your branded hashtag.

Consistency is one of the most important factors that make marketing campaigns work. Provide regular and relevant content that your audience can look forward to every week or month. This allows you to interact with your customers regularly and establish a relationship with them and build trust in your brand.

What type of content you put out there and in what form depends on your business and the skill set of your employees. It can be a roundtable, news round-up, or interviews with industry experts. You can share these as weekly or monthly blog posts, podcasts, or videos.

Find ways to collaborate with another business, your followers, or influencers to increase brand awareness and generate leads. This type of marketing builds on recommendations and being as authentic as possible to establish trust in your brand, which is essential for your business to grow.

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For a successful start in collaborative marketing, research opportunities for collaboration, contact your list of potential collaborators, and build a network of like-minded businesses or influencers in your niche that you can work with.

A tool can be used for helping you in marketing, an AI for marketing. It can be useful to answer questions...

If you join forces with another company for a social media campaign, you both get exposure to a wider audience. Choose the business you want to collaborate with wisely to show your products or services to a new target market that might not be aware of you yet but should be interested.

Your joint campaign can revolve around a webinar, ebook, special promotion, or any other content you can create together to increase brand awareness. Another idea is to join your collaborator’s live event or podcast and vice versa for an interview or a discussion about the latest industry news.

Influencer marketing is rapidly evolving. It moved from companies only choosing celebrities to contacting people with thousands of followers to selecting content creators, who want to provide high-quality content to the followers in their niche. The emergence of the content creator means that collaboration is always going to be highly creative ensuring high engagement rates on channels like Instagram or TikTok.

If you’ve found a trusted influencer, consider handing over your social media channels for a day. This is a great way to inject your social media feed with some fresh and never-before-seen content. Your influencer is also highly likely to promote a brand takeover before the special day creating excitement and anticipation that gets your content in front of new pairs of eyes.

Get your customers involved to create your authentic and trustworthy brand. User-generated content is an advanced form of recommendation. Your followers are more likely to buy from you and trust your brand if they see someone like them going to the trouble of posting about your products or services.

Keep sharing your followers’ images or videos of your products and you get one of the best ways to generate brand loyalty. Put a spotlight on your most loyal advocates and offer them something in return to give others an incentive to do the same.

This also provides you with the opportunity to grow your content library. If you want to use your fans’ content in the future, be sure to ask for permission and credit the creator.

Another proven technique to foster brand loyalty is to show off your happy customers and their success stories. Share testimonials as a photo with a quote or a video showing customers talking about or using your product making it more relatable than any sales pitch ever could.

If you haven’t got any reviews yet, social media is one of the best places to reach a large selection of your fans and directly ask them for testimonials. It’s much more likely for your followers to be willing to write a review, as they’ve already shown interest by following your account.

If you’re looking for something different and fun to add to your social media feed, share Spotify playlists around a certain theme. Trial this by only getting your employees involved at first and creating playlists around getting motivated on a Monday or looking forward to the weekend on a Friday.

Next, you can ask your audience to contribute songs and even create a competition around the best song suggestions with prizes they can win. A collaborative playlist is also a great way to build excitement about an upcoming event and build your community of dedicated fans by using audience targeting to find like-minded listeners on Spotify.

Providing helpful information to your audience, sharing it, and engaging with your followers should be the pillars of your social media strategy. Only if you provide value and communicate with your target audience will they keep coming back for more.

Promoting valuable and up-to-date content is at the center of every successful social media campaign. To get you started, think about the content you already have that’s shareable and brainstorm new ideas. This should give you some topics for your social channels and help you populate a plan.

To give the valuable content you’ve created a boost, be sure to promote it on social media. These should be helpful resources for your target audience like blog posts, infographics, white papers, checklists, case studies, or ebooks. You can direct traffic to a landing page on your site or provide a branded downloadable pdf.

Monitor your posts and check engagement rates, views, and clicks to see what works well and what doesn’t. This way you can create and share more of the content your audience enjoys. This way you can refine your campaigns and post the type of content your followers like regularly.

Repurposing is all about reusing a previously created resource in a new format. For example, if you’ve included a large number of statistics or other useful information in a long blog post like a guide, you can break that down into smaller chunks and create multiple infographics to share.

Pull quotes from your articles and share them as an attention-grabbing graphic with a link to the full blog. For videos, split longer videos into bite-sized information that is shorter and easier digestible for your social media audience.

Don’t be afraid to share your content again and again even if it’s been a few months. As long as it’s still relevant you can post about a certain topic multiple times. Consider using hashtags like #ThrowbackThursday to remind your audience about a valuable piece you’ve shared before.

When marketers talk about evergreen content, they usually mean blog posts that are always relevant. These might only require minor updates every year to be ready for sharing again. Our pro tip here is to update the published date, as search engines prefer showing new content to their users.

Show that you’re part of the conversation within your industry by sharing articles, research, and news about your industry. As a leading expert in your field, you can also share your advice as bite-sized quick tips to add your own thoughts and generate that conversation with other experts.

Are you following any industry experts that could be relevant to your followers? Don’t keep them a secret. Recommend them and tag them in your next post. This way you’re helping your followers and initiate a relationship with an influential expert in your industry at the same time.

If you don’t have the budget or the time to create scroll-stopping imagery for your social media feed, consider using high-quality stock photos. Be sure to select images that fit with your brand style guide.

Use stock photos as beautiful backdrops for new designs, or quotes related to your niche when you don’t have a photo available of the person who provided the quote. In Pik Wizard, you can add text to a photo of your choice easily and schedule or post it straight away.

Your social media channels should be places where the usual rules of business are relaxed. Stiff and sales-y posts alienate your audience. Instead of the serious tone of a business email, they expect fun and engaging posts.

Don’t hide behind your products and show your customers who you are to connect with them on a personal level. Find the stories you want to tell, the successes you want to share, and the people you want to highlight to show the personality of your business.

Don’t be afraid to share your company’s history on social media. You can do this on anniversary days like the birthday of the founder or share pieces of your business story in certain intervals that you’ve marked on your social media calendar.

Make it interesting by accompanying your post with a fun fact or emotional story. You can also share your goals with your audience. This is not about giving away the numbers you want to achieve by the end of the year but rather about sharing milestones like how sustainable you want your business to be by a certain date.

If the members of your team are happy to be featured on your company’s social media channels, sharing what it’s like to work in your business is a great way to create a personal connection with your audience. The people that your customers contact for support are no longer hidden behind a phone or email inbox but become real.

Your feed becomes more human with photos of your team at a product launch or when you introduce your new hires. This will also give you a boost when you’re hiring. It makes your business much more attractive to work for if you’ve featured your happy team in previous posts.

Don’t be shy and share your success stories. Did you move into a new office? Has your business been featured in a major publication? Let your followers know and celebrate your milestones with them.

This doesn’t have to be an event in the past. You can also create a countdown to a specific date and get everyone excited about it.

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Creating social media posts with inspiring and motivational quotes can be a quick way to add to your content pool and help with consistency. Due to the fast-paced nature of social media, your content disappears off the feeds of your followers quickly, but the more you post the higher the likelihood that your followers see your content.

Adding quotes is an easy way to generate more content for your social media calendar. Just make sure your quotes are relevant and fit with your vision and mission to give your followers more clarity on who you are as a business.

Social media is a great place for networking and asking questions that are relevant to your niche. Make your audience part of the conversation and ask for their opinions. To get your followers engaged, create a poll or ask a simple question that can be answered quickly.

You can also initiate conversations by sharing your predictions. This could be a piece of content you share at the start of the year that talks about your thoughts on trends in the upcoming year.

With all the marketing tips, advertising techniques, etc... you should become a great content creator!