Are your social media posts feeling uninspired, repetitive, and uninteresting? Do you find yourself struggling to come up with new social media content ideas? You may be in need of a social media refresh to help get you back on track to achieving your business goals.
Here are 5 ways you can breathe new life into your social media content.
1. Market & Competitor Research
Conducting regular market and competitor research and analysis provides a foundation for your social media strategy. You need to listen to your market in order to adapt for your audience, as well as analyse your competitors to compare their strengths and weaknesses to your brand’s. Your initial market and competitor research from years ago when first starting your social media strategy could be completely out of date now; social media and digital marketing move extremely fast.
Sprout Social emphasises the benefits of competitor analysis: “social media analysis of the competition can give you valuable insights into what works in your industry, some areas you might need to improve and how to shape your social strategy moving forward.” Competitors’ social media presences can help you identify the gaps in your own content, too. Of course, don’t copy other companies’ posts, but using them as a jumping-off point can help you come up with fresh industry-relevant ideas that you hadn’t considered before.
Social media market research “is just one avenue businesses can take to gain insights on their target consumers.” Whether you’re collecting qualitative or quantitative data (or both), social media can provide your business with valuable insights into consumer behaviour and industry standards. This can then inform your social media marketing strategy and give you new social media content ideas to refresh your feeds.
2. Diversify Your Content
Posting the same type of content every week gets stale fast. You need to make sure your content is diverse enough to interest and engage your audience while remaining relevant and meaningful. Getting the balance right can be tricky, and ultimately the right balance for your brand depends upon your goals, audience, market/industry, and branding.
Get creative with your content and categorise content types in a way that makes sense for your brand. Using a combination of content categories, you can organise your content and target different stages of the customer journey and/or different segments of your target audience. You need variety in your social media content that shows that you care for your audience; your target audience should be your focus.
As an example, a sustainable fashion brand may have content that falls under categories such as:
- Inspirational: outfit ideas, fashion and style trends; lists and compilations.
- Entertaining: light-hearted content such as memes, jokes, and other fun content; videos,
- Educational: posts explaining ethical and sustainable fashion; fashion news and updates; the benefits of certain products,
- Promotional: brand and product-focused content; product photography; promoting a discount code/sale; customer testimonials and reviews; user-generated content; behind-the-scenes content.
You no longer have to be a graphic design pro to create interesting, engaging social media visuals like graphics and videos. There are plenty of great and affordable tools available as alternatives to professional design programs and video editing software. Furthermore, smartphones have essentially become mini-computers and mini-cameras rolled into one, meaning you can easily use your business smartphone for capturing and editing content.
Do you already have a good range of types and categories in your content, but still aren’t meeting your social media goals? It’s time to dive into your metrics and historical data to see what works with your audience and what doesn’t work, then adjust your social strategy accordingly. For example, if ‘meet the team’ posts are getting lots of comments, likes, and shares, try implementing more behind-the-scenes content into your schedules, such as office tours and employee-focused posts. People like to see the human side of brands they admire. Likewise, where certain content types are not performing well, try refreshing the way you create that content type, using it sparingly, or ridding of it entirely if it’s not relevant or imperative to your brand.
3. Repurpose Your Existing Content
Creating a new social media post from scratch every single time is nigh on impossible. As Neil Patel points out, “part of any good social media marketing plan is sharing content on a regular basis.” This can be difficult to achieve if you’re not able to churn out multiple blog posts and other content per week, on top of all your social media marketing.
However, you likely have a whole host of old content that you’re no longer using to its full potential. Your content marketing efforts don’t have to die soon after they’ve been published. Evergreen blog posts, podcasts, videos, and e-books are all great examples of content that you can repurpose into shiny new social media posts and graphics.
Our top ideas for repurposing old content for social media include visualised quotes from your podcast, blog post, or YouTube video; short and snappy video clips edited for social media time frames; and social infographics (which work perfectly for carousel posts).
4. Optimise Your Existing Resources
Your existing team is your best resource. Analyse your current team and budget to work out whether you’re working as efficiently as possible. You may find that you’ve been sticking to the status quo for too long and your team’s time and budget could be shifted around and reallocated to efficiently produce high-quality social media content. Consider your existing resources in the following areas to refresh your team and plan your budget accordingly: business goals; employees and training; content creation and production needs; software and subscriptions; advertising; paid partnerships; analysis tools.
Furthermore, your existing social media profiles could be due an update. Update your existing profile’s profile pictures, bios/about sections, links, cover photos (where applicable), and other profile elements to optimise your profile for the current state of your brand and industry. For bios and about sections, keep it simple and snappy – too long/wordy and you’ll quickly lose the attention of the reader.
If this sounds like an impossible task, you might consider hiring an external social media management agency to create social media content for you. External, specialist agencies have the advantage of a team of social media experts on hand to create a content strategy, devise professional visual content and copy, and industry-leading software for reporting and managing social media accounts.
5. Invest in Social Media Advertising
If your brand is only utilising organic social media at the moment, consider investing in paid social advertising. Paid ads are a key tool in social media marketing to help elevate your brand with highly targeted campaigns. Whether you’re looking for brand awareness, leads, or purchases, social media advertising can help you achieve your goals with the right optimisations and creatives.
As with organic social posting, make sure you’re only advertising on platforms where your audience is active and engaged. For sponsored/promoted posts, this is the only option, as you’ll be promoted content you’ve already posted.
You will see a greater return on investment (ROI) by running ads on the relevant platforms that you and your audience already use. Regular optimisations for ads are also important if you want to see good long-term results and keep your campaigns dynamic.
Facebook ads are known for being highly customisable – with complex audience targeting options available – and effective, due in part to Facebook’s huge user base (1.8 billion daily active users and 2.8 billion monthly active users by the end of 2020). If your audience is on Facebook, Facebook advertising and promoted/sponsored posts are a great way to catch your target audience’s attention. A Facebook business page is also necessary for advertising on Instagram.
Influencer marketing is also another way to advertise on social media – and an effective one at that. An influencer can get your brand in front on new eyes, but also creates content for your brand that you can reuse/repurpose. This could be a great way to freshen up your feed and get a new perspective on your brand and products.
