Keep in mind when social media content material was restricted to Fb statuses and, er, “pokes?” Even just a few years later, cutting-edge content material was restricted to a blurry photograph with an oversaturated filter on Instagram.
It appears weird now, given how a lot you are able to do with social media immediately. With the ever-growing listing of platforms releasing new options day by day, it is an thrilling time to construct a following on-line — nevertheless it’s not a simple one.
With the plethora of social media content material choices accessible each time you open your favourite app, it may be tough to know what sort of content material your viewers most desires to see. Short-form video? A carousel? old style selfie?
Effectively, that each one relies on you and your viewers. The right combination of content material would be the candy spot between what your viewers most desires to see and what’s best so that you can create persistently.
To pinpoint what works greatest for you, I might encourage you to begin with a social media content strategy and, from there, experiment with several types of content material in your social media content calendar.
Use the concepts on this article as a springboard that can assist you work out what sort of content material is most probably to resonate along with your followers.
With all that in thoughts, let’s dig in: Listed below are the varied kinds of social media content material, plus some concepts to spark your subsequent put up:
Textual content-based posts
Textual content-only posts have survived from the early days of social media, and with good cause — they’re nonetheless the bread and butter of many a social media marketing technique.
With the rise of the LinkedIn personal brand, decentralized networks, the launch of Threads, and even long-form posts on X, the ability of text-based posts on social media platforms shouldn’t be ignored.
Not satisfied but? Even Instagram permits for text-based posts (within the type of Instagram Notes and ‘Create-mode’ Instagram Stories), and TikTok launched its personal text-based put up type in 2024.
In abstract: textual content posts aren’t going wherever.
Maybe the most effective factor about this social media content material sort is how straightforward it’s to create — versus, say, video. This can be a essential consideration when you’re seeking to get more followers on LinkedIn, X, Threads, and different platforms that enable for text-based posts.
Constant exercise on the platform is way extra necessary than busting your intestine to create high-effort movies. If all you may have time for is, say, a fast tweet or Threads put up, try this, relatively than sit in your palms.
Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne just lately summarized this in a (text-based) put up throughout platforms:
Textual content-based put up concepts
1. Chop up long-form content material into threads
Written an ideal weblog put up or newsletter? Platform character limits don’t imply lengthier posts like this are off the desk. In actual fact, thread performance on platforms like X, Threads, and Bluesky (when you put up with Buffer) actually lends itself to summaries of long-form content material.
Here is a thread instance from Buffer visitor put up contributor Gaetano DiNardi, which shocked him by going viral on X — his explainer exhibits that repurposed social media content material can shock you once you give it life on a brand new platform.
2. Share trade information
A round-up of all the newest goings-on in your trade could be extremely useful on your followers and positions you as a first-in-the-know thought chief.
Right here’s an ideal instance of Girl Power Marketing’s weekly social media round-up. Discover how she makes it tremendous straightforward to digest with brief, snappy sentences and emojis as bullet factors.
3. Embrace thought management
Talking of thought leadership: constructing your self up as a thought chief on platforms like LinkedIn, X, Threads, and past is a wonderful strategy to future-proof your profession.
Sharing your distinctive insights, experiences, and experience may also help set up your credibility and entice others in your space (and potential shoppers or hiring managers).
Contemplate discussing trade traits, providing profession recommendation, or sharing classes realized from your personal journey. These posts can spark significant conversations and would possibly even open the door to your subsequent huge alternative.
Buffer’s Director of Development Advertising and marketing, Simon Heaton, usually shares posts that element how the Buffer advertising group works, like this one:
4. Ask participating questions
Participating your audience with thought-provoking questions is a intelligent, light-weight strategy to enhance engagement and collect helpful data on your content material, work, or life.
You could possibly share your ideas on present occasions and ask others to weigh in. You could possibly additionally go the extra private route and collect recommendation from folks in related industries or conditions. The latter is a very nice technique on Threads, the place area of interest communities are sometimes able to assist.
Here’s an ideal instance from Buffer’s Head of Content material and Communications, Hailley Griffis:
Most of these posts may spark social media content material concepts. In actual fact, leveraging YouTube Community Posts to assemble new video concepts or suggestions is a profitable YouTuber staple.
Ali Abdaal makes use of this tactic typically, utilizing responses to spark an entire new video collection. Right here’s an instance:
5. Share behind-the-scenes tales
Audiences love to attach with manufacturers (enterprise or private) on a deeper stage. Sharing a relatable story that can make a viewer suppose, “Hey, I totally get that,” or, “They’re just like me,” could be a superb strategy to strengthen their help of your work.
The extra genuine, the higher.
6. Create polls to spark dialogue
Polls are a staple function on most social platforms. Virtually all of them have some form of ‘poll’ put up sort that you should use to assemble suggestions and immediate dialogue.
They’re an effective way to generate engagement and even spark concepts for brand spanking new content material you may share.
In case your most well-liked social media platform doesn’t have a ballot performance, you might ask people to react or remark with a sure emoji to decide on a particular choice. The better it’s for them to have interaction, the extra doubtless they’re to take action.
Professional tip: Supply your audience a strategy to share a solution not in your ballot by creating an ‘Other’ choice and asking them to remark with extra context.
Brief-form movies
Brief-form video is thought by many names throughout platforms — ’Shorts’ on YouTube, ‘Reels’ on Instagram and Facebook Reels, and ‘TikToks’ on nicely, TikTok. Movies will also be shared on LinkedIn, Threads, Twitter/X, Mastodon, and extra.
No matter your platform desire, short-form video — often clips which are 90 seconds or beneath — is without doubt one of the strongest kinds of social media content material you may put money into.
In keeping with Buffer information, movies are the content material format most probably to get engagement throughout most main social platforms. It is sensible — short-form movies are tailor-made to cell units, the place you may discover most social media customers consuming content material lately.
So when you have the assets to create short-form movies, they’re nicely price investing in.
Brief-form video concepts
7. Chop up long-form video content material
Waste not, need not. On the subject of creating sufficient content material to take care of a powerful social media presence on any platform, repurposing is your greatest pal. Chopping key moments out of longer YouTube movies is the most effective instance right here (resized for that all-important 9:16 ratio, after all), however don’t sleep on different movies, both.
When you’re internet hosting a webinar or talking at skilled occasions, be sure you get the recording — even a 30-minute session can yield a number of completely different one-minute clips on your social media platform of selection.
Here’s a spotlight snippet from a podcast recording I did with Simon, which I chopped up into shorter clips for Instagram and TikTok:
8. Faucet into trending audio
Trending audio and music are likely to rear their heads on TikTok first, then pop up on Instagram and Fb Reels — so you may be forward of the curve when you keep watch over TikTok.
Here is our information to discovering trending sounds on TikTok and trending audio on Instagram which you could leverage right here.
Tiffany Morris, Proprietor of Luxe Collect, does an ideal job of holding on high of those trending sounds and making use of them to Instagram Reels to advertise her enterprise. (Here’s her clever system for creating these movies).
9. Document ‘stock footage’
My Buffer teammate Mitra Mehvar put me on to this, and it’s genius — she keeps an album of ‘stock footage’ she will use for short-form movies with a easy textual content overlay.
This could possibly be something: working at your desk, going about your day, placing the ending touches on a brand new product, and even some stunning surroundings you occur to move by. Here is a information to creating social media stock footage of your personal.
10. Add textual content to movies
Questioning how one can convert your intelligent textual content posts into content material for video-focused social media channels? Put your message within the medium.
This concept is especially well-paired with thought no. 9 above — relatively than saving your textual content for a caption, you might add some ideas as textual content over your inventory footage with a easy video modifying device CapCut.
@tripleotami hashtag distant work struggles
11. Attempt a ‘spend a day with me’
Whether or not you’re a creator, a enterprise proprietor, or a marketer, this versatile pattern can work. These movies, which give your audience a fly-on-the-wall view of a day in your life, are literally comparatively straightforward to make.
They merely contain grabbing some clips of a few key moments in your day and stringing them collectively in your modifying app of selection. You possibly can select so as to add a voiceover contextualizing issues, add a trending tune, or simply use the ambient noise from the clips (howdy, #asmr).
The important thing right here is to method your day from an fascinating angle — what about your life is perhaps fascinating or relatable? So relatively than ‘Spend a day with me,’ opt for ‘Spend a day with me as a business owner in Toronto,’ or ‘Spend day 5 of my 4-day workweek with me,’ as I did beneath.
@itsmekirsti My firm has a 4-day work week! Right here’s how I spend my Fridays. ✨ @Buffer #4dayworkweek #remotework #spendthedaywithme #adayinmylife #dayinmylife ♬ Autumn Leaves – Timothy Cole
Creating the video for your corporation? Remember to tie it again to the model indirectly: ‘Spend a day with me as host a founder event’, or ‘Spend a product launch day with me,’ may provide a behind-the-scenes look and humanize the model on your prospects.
12. Crosspost Instagram Reels and TikToks
It is practically inconceivable to foretell what social media content material will carry out greatest the place — so do not draw back from sharing the movies you create on different platforms.
As creators or social media managers, we regularly fall into the entice of considering everybody in our viewers has seen all the things, however in actuality, solely a small fraction of our viewers will comply with us on a number of social media channels.
X, Threads, and LinkedIn all help video. LinkedIn, specifically, is doubling down on short-form video content material with an in-feed ‘Videos for You’ section that has seen video attain on the platform skyrocketing.
That ‘spend a day with me,’ video I shared above? It was one I created with TikTok in thoughts as a part of my 30-day TikTok experiment, and I shared it on LinkedIn on a whim.
On TikTok, the video had a stable 6.8K views. On LinkedIn, it had nicely over 50K.
13. Encourage user-generated content material
When you’re a enterprise, partnering with different video creators and customers in your viewers on UGC (user-generated content) who align along with your model may also help you enhance credibility, reward model ambassadors, and attain audiences past your personal.
Creators who use your product or providers (and discuss it) are like social media gold mud, however don’t underestimate the ability of social media content material created by common customers, both.
Use Instagram’s Remix or TikTok’s Duet or Sew options to place your personal spin on their social posts — however I’d advocate asking for permission first. In the event that they’re enthusiastic about your model, there’s little question they’ll be pleased to be featured in your feed.
Picture posts
Traditional social media photograph posts can nonetheless garner a wholesome attain on platforms — and aren’t completely for Instagram.
X (previously Twitter) and LinkedIn each help picture posts, and even Fb nonetheless sees engagement with visible content material.
Picture put up concepts
14. Do not draw back from the selfie
Placing a face to a put up — ideally yours — could make or break it. That is one thing I can personally attest to. A few of my top-performing posts as a creator on LinkedIn have all featured my face.
15. Share a product sneak peek
When you’re getting ready to launch a brand new bodily product, a sharing easy sneak peek picture — both a blurred-out photograph, or solely a small piece of the merchandise —is an effective way to whet your buyer’s appetites and drum up pleasure for the launch.
You could possibly even flip the put up into some form of guessing recreation and giveaway within the feedback, and provide the primary person to get it proper a prize.
16. Create a collage
Social media instruments like Canva and Instagram’s Format make modifying collectively a number of photographs a breeze. Inform a visible story by juxtaposing a number of components in a single picture, the way in which Buffer content material author Tami Oladipo did in this clever Threads post.
Picture carousels
Take all of what I discussed above and multiply that by 10 (or 35 and 20, within the case of TikTok and Instagram, respectively.)
Carousels are a enjoyable strategy to provide a window into your world or share behind-the-scenes content material each as a model or creator. The very best half about photograph carousels (if an aesthetic feed is necessary to you) is that they don’t all must be picture-perfect.
Edit the primary picture to remain on model, and the remaining is usually a little extra uncooked and genuine. In actual fact, a stage of authenticity is par for the course on this put up type (thanks, Gen Z).
17. Attempt a weekly ‘photograph dump’
Out: Completely polished feeds on Instagram. In: Messy, genuine, candid snaps. This pattern lends itself completely to carousel-style posts, the place all you want are some latest snaps out of your digicam roll.
Health creator Meggan Grubb shares ‘photograph dumps’ like this each week, and her followers cannot get sufficient of them:
18. Add textual content to your photographs
Another choice could possibly be to incorporate brief sentences on every photograph in a carousel for extra context.
This carousel type turned widespread on TikTok, however now Instagram has added the flexibility so as to add textual content into your photographs natively, too. On different platforms, apps like InShot, Canva, or CapCut will get the job executed even higher.
The trick is to maintain your textual content easy to make it straightforward to digest — not more than a line or two per picture.
Graphic carousels
To not be confused with their easier sibling, photograph carousels, graphic carousels are photographs or PDFs (on LinkedIn) that your viewers can swipe or click on via like a slide present.
Created in instruments like Canva or Visme, they’re often visually interesting and have brief, snappy, useful data. They work significantly nicely on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads — they usually’re additionally nice for engagement.
We now have a information to creating LinkedIn carousels and a complete listing of LinkedIn Carousel ideas right here (which could be tailored for Instagram and different platforms). Right here’s just a few of the latter.
Graphic carousel concepts
19. Give step-by-step directions and recommendation
Carousels are an effective way to share step-by-step directions or guides. This may be helpful for sharing how-to content material, tutorials, or ideas. For instance, you might create a carousel that walks customers via organising a particular software program or device.
20. Spherical up new options or trade traits
Carousels provide a strategy to share bite-size snippets along with your customers, prospects, or followers that they’ll truly digest. The Instagram @Creator account is a superb instance of this.
They usually share new platform updates in a easy carousel format like the instance beneath:
In addition they use this format to showcase social media traits that creators can faucet into, as on this put up:
21. Highlight your prospects or followers
With their permission, a function in your feed will go an extended strategy to present how a lot you worth your largest supporters.
Right here’s a latest instance of how Buffer shined the highlight on one among our customers on Instagram:
Lengthy-form movies
Lengthy-form video content material stays a strong device for participating audiences throughout numerous platforms.
Longer movies enable for in-depth storytelling, detailed explanations, and complete tutorials. Platforms like YouTube, Fb, and now even TikTok are nice for this format.
On platforms that perform as social search engines like google like YouTube and TikTok, these movies additionally are likely to have extra longevity than their short-form counterparts. On YouTube particularly, a stable YouTube search engine marketing technique may imply your movies proceed to get views for years after posting.
However on this planet of short-form video focus, holding your viewers engaged for something longer than 30 seconds could be robust.
There are many methods to do that (as we unpack in our information to rising your subscribers on YouTube), however in broad strokes:
- be certain your video is high-value and delivers on its promise
- use inventive inventory footage or delicate animations and sound results
- section longer movies into titled chapters to assist your viewers discover what they’re on the lookout for.
Lengthy-form video concepts
22. How-tos or tutorials
Most of these movies are good for demonstrating complicated processes or strategies — and constructing report along with your viewers when you do it.
For instance, a make-up artist may create an in depth tutorial on attaining a particular look, or a software program firm may produce a complete information on utilizing their product.
Here is an ideal instance from Todoist:
23. Behind-the-scenes content material
Give your viewers a peek into your world. This could possibly be a day-in-the-life video, a tour of your workspace, or a have a look at how your merchandise are made.
24. Video podcast
The age of the podcast has developed to the age of the ‘vodcast’ — that’s, a podcast recorded with video in addition to audio. This podcast type has change into a staple for each podcasters and YouTubers, with a lot of them even organising stunning studios during which to take a seat down with their friends.
Listed below are some nice examples from advertising podcast Nudge and YouTubers Colin and Samir:
After all, you completely don’t want a high-tech set-up to faucet into this format. Even a high-quality video name recording, when you host your podcast just about, will do the trick.
Bonus: You’ll be spoilt for selection in terms of video content material to make use of on different platforms.
25. Interviews with specialists
One other nice strategy to highlight leaders in your trade or knowledgeable prospects is to ask them into your studio (digital or in any other case) for a chat. There are many advantages to creating social media content material on this approach:
- it gives useful, expert-led content material on your viewers
- permits you to faucet into the viewers of your friends (if they’ve one)
- it’s one other strategy to highlight and construct relationships with knowledgeable prospects or thought leaders.
The very best half? As I touched on above, you actually don’t want any fancy tools to make this occur. A video name and a good set of headphones is a good place to begin.
26. Repurpose webinars and occasions
I’ll say it once more: waste not, need not. When you’re internet hosting occasions as a model or enterprise, do hit that file button. Worth-led periods like these are a simple win for long-form video content material and, if structured nicely, require little to no modifying.
Right here’s a latest instance from a webinar the Buffer group hosted with Threads:
URLs or hyperlink posts
That is an fascinating social media content material sort in that social media posts that include hyperlinks typically don’t carry out as nicely. Whereas most social media platforms don’t promote the very fact, it’s extensively believed that link-only posts aren’t seemed kindly upon by the algorithms.
The thought is that the platforms need the expertise to be immersive for customers, and don’t essential need them clicking or tapping off to a different vacation spot.
That stated, there’s a time and place (and platform) for link-only posts.
Hyperlink put up concepts
27. Persist with Pinterest
There’s no platform fairly like Pinterest for sharing hyperlinks, significantly when you or your model match into way of life niches.
Pinterest was constructed for exterior hyperlinks. The thought of the platform is to avoid wasting these exterior locations in order that customers can go to them once more later — suppose recipes, design concepts, exercises, and the like.
In case your model doesn’t fairly match into probably the most Pinterest-y niches, don’t low cost the platform simply but. See our Pinterest how-to guide for a step-by-step explainer and concepts.
28. Use the primary remark or final thread to share a hyperlink
When you’re sharing a hyperlink on platforms like LinkedIn, think about inserting it within the first remark or because the final merchandise in a thread.
This method permits you to share useful exterior content material with out doubtlessly triggering algorithm penalties for link-heavy posts. You need to use link-shortening providers (like Buffer!) to create cleaner, extra visually interesting URLs.
When sharing hyperlinks, at all times present context and clarify why the content material is effective to your viewers.
29. Attempt Fb to drive clicks
In keeping with Buffer information, of all the key platforms that help link-only posts (Fb, LinkedIn, and X/Twitter), Fb hyperlinks are likely to get 5 instances extra clicks than these posted on LinkedIn and 4 instances greater than these posted on X.
30. Leverage a link-in-bio device
Whereas this isn’t strictly a social media put up thought, it’s price noting right here that it’s poor social media follow to incorporate hyperlinks in posts on TikTok and Instagram. The hyperlinks received’t be clickable, and your viewers will not be capable to copy and paste them right into a browser.
When you’re seeking to direct people elsewhere on these platforms (or any actually) it’s an ideal thought so as to add the CTA (name to motion) ‘Find the link in my bio’ or ‘Tap the link in bio to read more’. This can ship viewers over to your profile the place it will likely be straightforward for them to click on on a hyperlink.
After all, if the location you need to ship them to just isn’t entrance and heart, you’ll want a link-in-bio tool you may simply curate to point out a very powerful data first. Buffer’s Start Page is a good (free!) different.
I take advantage of it to curate an inventory of my high house workplace merchandise, one thing I get requested for sometimes as a creator. Somewhat than together with hyperlinks to fifteen completely different gadgets in every put up (truthfully, who has the time?), I merely direct individuals to my Start Page link.
Experiment to determine what social media content material works greatest on your viewers
Not all the social media content material concepts on this listing shall be a roaring success for you, and that is OK. Whereas a stable social media advertising technique will provide help to theorize what is perhaps the most effective match, there is no substitute for throwing the proverbial spaghetti to see what sticks.
And when you do discover one thing that sends your follower rely and viewers engagement skyrocketing, nice! However do not be tempted to put up one single social media content material sort till the tip of time. Your viewers will rapidly tire of seeing the identical social media posts again and again, so it is price developing with a number of content material varieties to combine and match in your social media calendar.
Your social media advertising must be an iterative, versatile plan that you simply refine and tweak as your social media accounts develop.
Completely satisfied experimenting!
