Posted by Let’s face it; small businesses are lost today. They don’t have enormous resources to manipulate paid media or have time to build organic reach.
But they still have one thing — social media, which is free and has a mammoth reach. As of 2020, over 3.6 billion people were using social media. And by 2025, the number will cross 4.41 billion.
Not just that, The Harris Poll conducted for SproutSocial in 2021 stated — 43% of consumers use social media to search for new products and 36% to purchase products.
So, social media is the best tool for small businesses to become visible and sell their products online. But, yes, there is a famous “But”!
But, to rule social media channels, you need content. You need relevant, relatable, consistent, and brand-specific content.
But, how can I generate unique social media content regularly?
With a proper social media content strategy!
A strategy is what you need to churn out high-quality social media content to grow your audience and brand authority.
Now, no need to stress out. This guide will walk you through some of the best social media content strategies and examples to help you create your monthly social media calendar. So, let’s get moving.
9 cool social media content strategies with examples
Not only B2C businesses can leverage social media today. In fact, social media impact on B2B businesses is significant to generate leads, develop relationships with customers and sell products
All it takes is high-quality and innovative content to grow on social media platforms. Now, it might look easy that you create some random posts, share them on your social media channels, and boom, leads will start pouring your way.
Ah, the reality is not that sweet, my pal. In the real world, posting any content will give no results. You need a proper social media content strategy to thrive today.
And here is the roadmap for creating a social media content plan:
1. Make a plan
It only takes a few minutes to set up a Facebook page or post on Instagram. But what after that?
Which content writing style will you follow? How often will you post on social media? Which social media tools do you need?
There are a series of questions that you need to answer to build your strong social presence. Thus, it is advisable to jot down your social media content strategy.
Well-documented social media content plan will give you a competitive edge, as only 32% of businesses have documented social media strategy.
So, here is how to create a social media content plan —
Set SMART goals
Use a SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely) framework to set your goals. You should not just chase likes or comments on social media. You should set some realistic goals that can impact your business. For example, higher conversion rate or acquiring more customers.
Research your competitors
Go through your competitors’ social media pages to understand what content style is trending in the market. You can also understand from your competitor’s pages what audiences prefer in your industry and how you can create better content than your competitors.
Audit your social media content
If you are already active on social media, this is the right time to step back and analyze your content. This will help you understand what content style or tone your audience liked more. Did live streaming on Facebook result in more engagement, or creating Instagram reels was a perfect strategy?
Social listening
Social listening is always the best way to know what’s going on inside your audience’s mind. Navigating through your social media comments, audience accounts and directly interacting with your customers will give you the insight to create a personalized social content marketing strategy.
Create a social media calendar
Creating a social media calendar is essential to deliver the right content on the right social media platform at the right time. To achieve so many rights, you need a well-structured social media calendar to create balanced social content across different channels.
Having the right plan in place will save you from the horrors of poor time management. So start right!
2. Select your social media portfolio
New social media platforms are today popping like hot popcorns. There are several local and international social media platforms available on the web.
In this vast social jungle, it is important to find and build a perfect social media portfolio suiting your business. To target the proper social media channels, you have to focus on two things:
- Your targeted audience
- And your products or services
For example, if your targeted audience is female and your product is related to beauty or motherhood, Pinterest is the best social networking platform for you. The reason?
As of 2021, 76.7% of Pinterest’s audience was female. Besides this, Pinterest gives a perfect layout to showcase physical products.
Here you can check out L’Oreal Paris’s Pinterest page. Pinterest has given the perfect layout to showcase beauty products and connect with their core audience to L’Oreal.
On the contrary, for B2B businesses, LinkedIn is the best platform. Simply because there are over 58 million businesses available on LinkedIn.
In addition, LinkedIn provides the best structure to highlight your B2B SaaS products. You can leverage LinkedIn just like HubSpot.
The brand has highlighted its top products first on the profile like form builder, service hub, sales hub, etc. Besides this, they used videos, posts, and other LinkedIn features to stay active and connect with potential leads.
3. Leverage user-generated content
It is not easy to produce new content ideas and develop them to suit different social media platforms every day. Especially if you don’t have a dedicated social media team, it is not easy to constantly stay active on different social networks.
Now, there is a simple solution to create unique social media content without any effort. You can ask your audience to generate content for you.
If you already have a good social media presence, using the UGC technique, you can engage with your audience and get free content in return. It is a win-win situation on your part.
Not only for small businesses but this technique is used by many big brands also. For instance, Apple launched the #ShotOniPhone campaign to promote its iPhone’s camera quality.
In this campaign, Apple asked users to click a shot with their iPhones and share it on social media platforms tagging the brand. With this technique, Apple gets great photo content to share on their social media handles. Besides this, when people see the photo quality of iPhone shots, there is no better social proofing technique than it.
4. Visual-aided content
Simple and plain content will not work on social media anymore. You need visually aided content to build a unique brand identity today.
In addition, using visuals, you can establish your unique brand identity with the help of different colors, fonts, and other components.
For inspiration, you can check out Cosmic Bliss’ Instagram page. This ice brand has literally refined whimsical visuals. Be it puzzle pictures or stunning product images; Cosmic Bliss has taken visual content to the next level.
Also think about incorporating videos into your social media content strategy.
5. Celebrate Your Milestone
Small businesses can leverage social media to celebrate their milestone. This content strategy will help you connect with your audience and include them in your celebrations.
If you have been working in your field for some time now, you must have achieved many milestones by far. So, select one of your milestones and go to social media platforms to tell the world what a great thing you have going on.
For example, Zoho used YouTube to celebrate its 25th anniversary. By creating a short video, Zoho talked about its work and achievements in the last 25 years.
This style of social media content is perfect to social proof your brand and connect with your audience.
6. Show and convert
Okay, this is the best and most simple social media content strategy. You simply show people your product’s demo and promote it without any hassle.
This social media strategy is used by Plated to become a leading meal kit service. Plated was an American ingredient-and-recipe meal kit service founded in 2012 and famed by Shark Tank.
They provided ingredients and recipes to cook a meal at home. So, they used YouTube to share mouthwatering cooking videos. This helped to stimulate viewers’ taste buds and motivate them to order from Plated.
And because of the innovative approach, Plated was sold for $300 million in 2017. So, if you sell products with multiple uses like Plated, you can create YouTube tutorials and grow your business.
7. Merge social media + your store
Do you have a physical store? Then, you can combine the real-world shopping experience with social media.
How is it possible?
Well, that’s something you have to learn from a jewelry brand BaubleBar.
They have literally created jewelry display cases that let shoppers find information on their websites. In fact, shoppers can explore BaubleBar social media while shopping.
Besides this, BaubleBar only displays its customers’ images on social media, not models. This is yet another perfect use of UGC.
8. Never underestimate polls
Do you want users to engage with your social media content? Do you want people to share or retweet your post?
Hell, yes!
Then, good old polls can never disappoint you. Polls are inbuilt on most social media platforms today like Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
So, just ask a relevant and fun question via a poll. And get tones of engagement on your post.
Here look at this Panera Bread’s relationship-building campaign on Twitter. With a simple question, they generated over 500,000 impressions on a tweet.
Besides polls, surveys, freebies, giveaways, or referrals also work like a charm on social media. So, when you run out of social media content ideas, just pick old marketing tricks like polls and you are set for the day.
8. Keep on tracking and refining your content
Don’t rest after getting good impressions on your social media content. In fact, you now need to track your individual posts’ performance and see which one has generated better results.
This way, you will know which social media content strategy worked the best for you. It will help you create high-performing content in the future.
For example, if you find that Instagram Reels are bringing more engagement than Stories, you can focus more on creating Reels.
For social media performance tracking, you need to invest in good analytical tools like Hootsuite, SproutSocial, Buffer, etc. Besides this, you can always leverage native social media trackers.
Let’s Customize Your Small Biz Social Media Content Strategy Now!
By now, you have explored 9 awesome social media content strategies with examples to grow your small business. Now, forget them all!
Yep, these strategies have worked for some brands. But, will they work for your business is a big question mark.
So, first understand your audience, products or services, and targeted social media channel to customize your own strategy, validate your content before sharing on the platform cause some social media brands use content moderation services. Take inspiration and ideas from all the social brands out there. But in the end, customize your unique social media content.
Now, let’s wrap up and focus on your brand’s social presence.