The Best Ideas for Social Media Content

1. This is social media content
2. Types of social media content
3. The best 36 ideas for social media content with examples
4. The Implementation
5. Tips and Tools for Your Social Media Content
6. How best to proceed in creating social media content
7. Conclusion to Social Media Content

You use social media to achieve your communication goals in customer and brand loyalty, or want to start now? Great decision! Because around 90% of the German population scrolls daily through the social media platforms Facebook, Instagram & Co. Consider how many people you can thus transform into potential new customers via social networks. If the content idea drought has so far prevented you from getting started, it's time for 36 inspirations from our guest author Pia Heßler.

This is social media content

An excerpt from the marketing textbook could read: "Social media content is the content with which the accounts in social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, are fed. Companies can interact directly with users. This means that social media content includes any form of information that you spread through your account.

Types of social media content

There are many different types of social media content that you can publish through your account.

The most common social media formats are:

• Text
• Images
• Graphics
• Videos
• Webinars
• Podcasts

The best 36 ideas for social media content with examples

1. Create content series

Content series is a series of posts that focus on a particular topic or follow a common storyline. This works with all kinds of content like introducing employees or customers, how-to clips or expert interviews. Your followers will definitely be eagerly awaiting your next post. In this example, the bag manufacturer Picard has created a series for the action "rewrite the sheet". Customers can design their naked bags themselves.

2. Bring out your spendthrift trousers from the wardrobe

People love gifts! Reward your audience for their interaction with free parts. Through giveaways, you can draw a lot of attention to yourself. In this giveaway, participants have to like the post and comment on it to get a pair.

3. Fire up your community with challenges

This works particularly well in networks where users like to voice their opinions such as Facebook. With challenges, you motivate your followers to express their opinions and show them that you care.

4. Encourage your followers to link other people

Feel free to choose questions that everyone can relate to and that ideally match your core topic to include as many people as possible.

5. Include either-or questions

Either-or questions are answered quickly. Your followers can react quickly and easily to your questions. This post from Nutella is a great example both visually and content-wise.

6. Point out your current actions

With this post, Nutella draws attention to a promotion where Nutella lovers can reclaim their money and combines this with a great question that encourages their followers to comment.

7. Be close to your followers in answering their FAQs

Your followers will appreciate the direct exchange via livestream or in the video post to the most frequently asked questions with you.

8. Make a documentary on a topic that interests your target audience

OMR made an original documentary about the manager Thomas Middelhoff, who was convicted of infidelity, and generated 481,490 views on this video on YouTube to this day.

9. Take your followers to your events

Pictures are great and videos are even better. Show your followers what you're like and score with positivity and personality.

10. Give insights into your everyday life with reels

With this reel, OMR pokes fun at everyone who thinks that as a social media manager, one just scrolls through the social media platforms all day. A great way to give insights into the working world and to arouse the engagement motivation among the social media managers in the community.

11. Survey your community and share the answers via your account

The loving words of the Balea community in response to the question "What does your mom mean to you" create a great feeling. The emotional statements of the individual people create a special connection for the rest of the community. This promotes a sense of community.

12. Share helpful content

With this post from Vogue, their followers can get information on how their diet can affect their skin. A great example of content with added value!

13. Create entertaining content

Icons like Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy have shaped the fashion trends in 2021. Vogue shines with entertaining content instead of drowning in self-promotion.

14. Celebrate the "World-What-I-Know-Days"

Let's be honest, a whole bunch of appointments in your editorial plan can already be filled by fixed action and theme days. Grab as many of them as possible from this overview of German action and theme days and celebrate them extensively on social media.

15. Create your own memes

Your creativity knows no bounds. Immerse yourself in your target group and go for it. ProSieben shows you how to do it!

16. Show who your customers and partners are

The word "social" is not for nothing in social media. It's a togetherness - so introduce as many other profiles as possible.

17. Behind the scenes: Take your followers everywhere

Picard shares behind-the-scenes footage from the photo shoot of the new collection with this video. Super exciting for their fashion community!

18. Stand by your fails

Fails are human and make you appear more approachable. If you can entertain your community with it and also give tips and lessons on the way, all the better!

19. Share quotes and wisdom

Who doesn't enjoy reading phrases that automatically make them nod in agreement? Therefore, share quotes and wisdom that deserve to be heard in your opinion.

20. By the way: these are your products and services

In this post, Snipes brings the shoes into play but immediately shifts the focus to a topic that everyone has an opinion on: Hawaii Pizza!

21. Share user content whenever possible

Show the content of your community as often as possible: repost stories in which you were tagged and publish pictures and videos of your followers. In this example, Picard posts a customer with their Picard bag.

22. Share delicious recipes

Let's be honest: everyone loves fancy dishes and drinks. DM shows in this video how easy it is to implement the recipe for the Pumpkin Spice Latte and uses of course the products from the DM market.

23. Introduce your team

Through social media, you can be very close to your followers. Invite them into your world and show them the faces behind your company name.

24. Share recommendations

You have had good experiences with a certain product, read a great book or have an unbeatable music tip for your followers? Share the recommendations with your community. In this example, Impericonde introduces their album of the day.

25. Create pet content

People love animals! When possible, bring your two-legged or four-legged friends into the game. In this example, Rossmann uses the World Dog Day as an opportunity to spoil their Bilbo with the dog snacks from the Rossmann shelf.

26. Introduce company internal news

In this sympathetic video, Rossmann presents the advantages of their new app.

27. Collaborate with influencers

Each partner and each customer brings a certain reach with them. Through collaboration with the right influencers, you can spread your advertising messages even faster.

28. Build suspense through sneak peeks

If you're bringing out new products, get your followers on board early. But don't give away too much and instead let your community guess what to expect.

29. Content adapted to the news

Raise attention with nicely packaged news and use the positive mood of the community. In this example, Nutella reminds their community of the upcoming football game in Munich.

30. Publish your commitment to social projects

Of course, you should not only do it for your community, but if you are committed to a cause close to your heart, feel free to share it with the rest of the world! In this post, Starbucks points out their action to support the military.

31. Communicate what makes you special

In this video, the CEO of Picard talks about how it all started.

32. Create content that addresses current social issues

This is a clear statement: Douglas shows that everyone can wear make-up, whether man or woman. Show your community what you stand for.

33. Build anticipation for upcoming events

In this post, Rossmann has got prominent support from musician Max Giesinger. You can do this on a smaller scale as well.

34. Share guided interviews with other experts

As long as your content appeals to your community, it's good content! Vogue shows how little self-promotion successful accounts can have.

35. Provide your followers with puzzles

Your followers will have a lot of fun solving your tricky puzzles, as ProSieben nicely demonstrates in this example.

36. Celebrate achieved milestones

Whether you've reached a certain number of subscribers, or are celebrating a company anniversary, share your happiness and gratitude for achieved goals on social media with your community.

The Implementation

Before you start content production, you should develop a marketing strategy based on your target customer description and market segmentation to develop suitable competitive and growth strategies. If you set clear goals and develop a corresponding strategy for yourself, you will win the hearts of your followers and potential followers with value-added social media content.

DERTOUR has taught us how wonderfully social media can work even in times of crisis. The tour operator has managed to double its number of followers in Corona times - when the tourism industry had it tough.

How did they manage that? They put themselves in their subscribers' shoes and developed a grandiose content strategy. This was carried out in three phases: the information phase, the inspiration phase, and finally the offer phase.

Facebook became the live ticker and news forum: the main channel for sales information, cancellations as well as cancellation and rebooking rules. The first place to go for quick answers to their questions. DERTOUR created a crisis content hub.

On Instagram, on the other hand, they focused on personality and infotainment. They answered live the questions of their community and took their followers on trips to reduce travel inhibitions. For Facebook, the updates were thus presented in a factual manner, while a very personal and interactive live format was created on Instagram.

They differentiated themselves from the competition through their viral campaign strategy for maximum visibility right from the first relaxations. In addition, they created their own face filter just in time for the opening of German tourism, when the whole country was happy to be able to travel again. The filter came out together with a giveaway. Next to it, they started on TikTok with the #DERTOURGÖNNTURLAUB giveaway.

Tips and Tools for Your Social Media Content

1. Tip: Quality over Quantity: With tools like Canva Pro you can super easily create professional media. The different social media formats are already available as templates. You can directly select the appropriate format.

Once you've decided on a format, like I did in this case for an Instagram post, you just need to click on it. Now you can choose to individualize one of the many ready-to-use posts, or design your post completely freely. By the way: Some of the templates are completely free. With the pro version, you have a huge selection available.

By drag & drop you can now insert all sorts of elements, uploads and texts. With the ProVersion, by the way, you can save your media directly in compressed form, which is really great for online media to keep the loading time as short as possible.

Canva Pro is a great software for you to create professional media for your social media content.

2. Tip: Continuity with your postings:My absolute favorite tool for planning my social media activities is Hootsuite. In the publisher, you have a calendar view in which you can create and schedule your posts in advance.

Simply click on the desired date in the calendar to create a new post. Choose the desired social media accounts, write the text and upload media such as photos and videos. On the right side you have a preview at the same time. Now you just need to save and schedule the post - and off you go! If you want to not just save, but schedule the post, it will be published automatically by Hootsuite at the time and date mentioned. All posts are also visible after publication, giving you an overview of your social media activities at the same time.

If you want, you can also manage your interactions directly via Hootsuite and evaluate data.

Canva and Hootsuite are the two programs I most like to work with when creating social media content. But that's a matter of taste. You should best browse through all software solutions of the category Social Media, that have already been evaluated on OMR Reviews to find the best solution for you.

3. Tip: The perfect hashtag mix:For me, the perfect mix is a combination of popular hashtags for the range, rarer hashtags that are used specifically by your target group and a few of your own hashtags.

4. Tip: See social media as a boomerang:Block off regular time to comment on and share relevant content from other accounts. This has two positive aspects: The accounts you support will presumably also not skimp on interaction with your posts. In addition, you stand out to other users who deal with the same topics.

5. Tip: Value your community management:At this point I have to praise the company Zappos. It responds to Facebook messages within 60 minutes, at absolutely any time of the day or night! Not only the speed is top. The content also leaves nothing to be desired: A Facebook user wanted to know if they have fixed locations, which is not the case. Zappos wouldn't necessarily have had to go into it much. Instead, they even searched out stores that offer the requested product. This is top-notch service! They show that the person comes first. Even if they're not buying from them at the moment. That of course stands out positively. The user probably won't forget that in a hurry.

How best to proceed in creating social media content

1. Please don't go into it without a plan. Even if it takes some effort: first create a Social Media Strategy.
2. Don't simply publish exactly the same content everywhere. Parallel publishing of the same information makes sense, but please adapt the content according to the respective user behavior of your followers on the different social media platforms.
3. Create an editorial schedule. Everything you need to know and which tools you can use can be found in our article on Social Media Editorial Scheduling.
4. Keep an eye on your success and need for optimization. There is a detailed article on Social Media KPIs Analytics with tool recommendation on OMR.

Conclusion to Social Media Content

Social media is a great thing and never gets boring. Especially if you are just starting out: No master has fallen from the sky yet. Stay on the ball and be authentic. Social media offers so many great opportunities to be really close to your community.