The internet is a wild and chaotic place of infinite opportunities. Social media is much the same and coming up with interesting, relevant content all while finding the balance between consistency and variety can be tough.
If you aren’t sure what your next post should be then take step one: Work out your INTENTION. An intention will shape and guide your content, clarify your message and help you define and achieve a goal with each post.
We see social media posts falling into one of seven different intention types.
Introduce, Advertise, Celebrate, Inform, Interact, Entertain and Update.
A good business social media should have a variety of these types of posts to give their clients and followers a helpful, interesting, entertaining and engaging experience. Pick and choose your intention and creating a post will become much easier. Here is a description of what each post type is along with examples of each.
- Introduce: Introduce is all about YOU. Your company, your culture, your successes, your plans, your goals, your morals. Let your supporters get to know you. Feeling connected to a company helps build brand recognition AND brand loyalty.
- Advertise: This one is self explanatory. These posts directly promote your product. These should be used sparingly on social media as customers often are inundated with ads as it is and may lose interest, unfollow or develop “ad blinkers” when they see your brand. Use these to promote new products, deals and specials and reward your clients for following you on social media.
- Celebrate: Holidays, anniversaries, successes, milestones, birthdays goals achieved by you, your staff, your clients, your country, a historical figure that inspired you, industry leaders any one that is connected to your brand, product, industry or would be of interest to your ideal clients.
- Inform: Obviously these posts are going to be going out with the intention of educating your followers. Tips and tricks, hacks, interesting tidbits, little known facts, the list goes on. Infographics are great for cross platform posting and for delivering info in an impactful way. Here are some examples of Inform posts.
- Interact: Having people interact with your posts regularly is the best way to grow your platform and increase your reach. Having posts that encourage interaction is a good way of getting people in the habit of clicking, commenting or liking your posts. Ask questions, post polls, run competitions, anything that gets those clicks!
- Entertain: these posts are fun. Let your lighter side show with gifs, memes, jokes etc. Poking fun at yourself or the industry or a challenge your clients may be facing can be a nice way to humanise your brand online.
- Update/Educate: These posts will probably be industry centered. Show that your company is paying attention and on the cutting edge of your field. Share law and regulation updates, newfound products, theories, techniques or technological advances.
Start with a manageable number of posts a week (i.e. Mon, Weds, Fri). Keep one a regular weekly occurrence and on the other two days pick a new intention from the list. (i.e. Mon = Update, Weds = Inform, Fri = Celebrate). Track what gets attention, what looks good, what works with your brand and shape it from there.
