Today is a very special day because it marks an exhilarating milestone: We’ve reached DOUBLE-DIGIT BLOG POSTS! And we’ve got a great one for ya today folks. Let’s get into it.
TLDR:
- Every business has daily content at their fingertips
- The best content comes from how well you know your audience
- Creating a posting schedule can give direction in your search for new content with increasing automation of your social media campaigns
At Wave Media, we thoroughly subscribe to the philosophy that your business should be posting on social media, and doing it regularly. Now, if you’re answering this call to action with a “But how could we possibly have enough content to post even 4-5 times a week?”, then you definitely need to read this blog post. It might sound crazy, but your business has enough content within its reach to post 2 times a day each week and to do it easily.
Before we get into some of the low-hanging fruit for social media posting, I need to get one thing through your head: Know. Your. Audience. Know your audience like it’s the back of your hand or like it's the front of your foot. Your audience is the entire reason for your posting so you need to keep that in mind, always and forever.
Start by asking yourself these questions: Where does your audience exist? Are they on Facebook or Instagram? What does your audience want? Do they want to be educated or do they want to be entertained? What do they want to learn? What entertains them? Answering these questions is the first step to creating unlimited content for your social media.
Types of Content for Social Media
Once you're familiar with your audience, then you can start thinking about what to post. Let’s go over some general content ideas that literally (yes, literally) every business can utilize:
Educational Content
Your business can be a great educational resource to your audience. You are trying to earn their trust so that they choose your business over the others and what better way to do that by showing them you know what you’re talking about.
Your process
An easy way to create content is by documenting the day-to-day operations of your business. Giving your audience a ‘behind the scenes’ look at your business lets them into your world and gives them a sense of connection to the people involved and how they all work together to carry out daily operations.
Articles
Giving your take on an article you found online is another easy way to educate your audience. You could search for articles about current events affecting your market and your audience to keep things relevant and worthy of attention. Using articles is also a great way to make content because it allows you to give your two cents without having to sink a bunch of time into writing a meticulous analysis on your own.
Product Demos & How-to Series
If your business sells products, make videos describing the products and how to use them. You could even go with the ‘review route’ and talk about what you like most about each individual product. A good example of a how-to series is from Flute Specialists who make videos on how to clean and repair your flute or piccolo.
Educational Video Series
Stellux Management is a client of ours who sells and installs LED lighting systems for commercial use. We started a video series with them called Enlightened where each week, they educate their audience on a different topic concerning anything LED.
Testimonials and case studies
I firmly believe that testimonials and case studies are some of the most powerful pieces of content a business can use because they tell the story from your prospect’s point of view. I touched on this in an earlier post where I talked about how relating to your audience through storytelling evokes a sense of mutual understanding for the challenges they face on a daily basis. But here’s my takeaway from the different types of testimonials and case studies along with the kind of value they offer:
Client Testimonials
The most powerful
Team members' accomplishments inside and outside of your organization
Humanization of the machine
Completed Projects
The cold hard facts
Branded Creative Content
Another option when it comes to thinking of content to post is what I'm coining as 'branded creative content'. These are things that can be weekly or monthly pieces of content that revolve around a recurring theme. Here are a couple of examples:
“Share the Light”
“Share the Light” is Stellux’s business motto - it is a facet of their brand. So once a week, we post “a feel-good story” from the news or from an experience they’ve had recently. It’s not always something larger than life either. Its purpose is to entertain the audience, keep them engaged and give their day a little pick-me-up while staying on topic with the Stellux brand.
The DMA Blog
Another one of our clients, Divine Mercy Academy, is a school for children with learning differences like dyslexia and ADHD so they are constantly having to educate their audience on their educational program. We found that a blog is a great way to do this because it allows us to expand upon the nitty-gritty details of their program and how it is fundamentally different from a vast majority of the schools in the US.
Make A Weekly Schedule For Posting
Last and definitely not least, post scheduling for the upcoming week is not only a great way to automate your social media campaigns, but also is an extremely clutch way to find new content quickly. Stellux’s educational series Enlightened and DMA’s blog are two examples of weekly content we schedule and post for clients. The blog post I am writing right now functions in the same exact way (I’m actually a day late on posting this but hey, better late than never). The point is that you can assign any of the content topics I laid out above to each day of the week so you know that when Tuesday rolls around, you better have an article with your take on it cued up and ready to be posted to your LinkedIn page.
I think I’m gonna leave you here because I’ve been racking up the word count on my blog posts lately so I hope you feel like you learned something that you can immediately go put into practice but until next time…
McKendry Bade