Your content plays a crucial role in your social media marketing success. 

If you share cookie-cutter content, you’re not likely to drive engagement or meet your social media marketing goals.

After all, thousands of other brands and users post on social media, easily taking your audiences’ attention away from your content and brand.

You need to produce valuable, unique and captivating content to engage your social media audiences and help you successfully market your small business.   

Drive engagement and improve expected results by including the right mix of social media content types on the right mix of platforms —starting with the four below. 

1. Images and photos

Photos and images are excellent content types for social media since these are easy to digest and highly shareable.

Plus, visual content can capture your audience’s attention quickly, keeping them from scrolling past and enticing them to interact with your post and brand.

Learn from these tips when leveraging images for your social media content strategy:

• Avoid drowning your visual content in texts. Images and photos with too much text can drown out your visuals and crowd critical elements, such as your call-to-action (CTA) buttons. Keep your texts to a minimum or add them to your description instead – this way, your images look clean while emphasising the essential elements. The Instagram post from Urban Decay cosmetics is a classic example.

• Use royalty-free photos. You don’t always have to take stunning photos yourself or pay professional photographers to get beautiful pictures. Use free, high-quality stock photos from reliable websites such as Unsplash and Pexels. 
• Leverage photos with people and faces. Use photos with people to humanise your brand and make your content appear more relatable. You can connect with your audience better, helping you get more engagement.   

Images and photos can generally work well on most social media platforms, but these often shine on visual content-heavy platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest.   

When used strategically, images and other visuals can be some of the most effective ways to increase your social media engagement while helping you raise brand awareness.   

2. Reviews and customer feedback

People often trust the experiences and opinions of others more than what your brand says.

That said, you need the right approach to leverage reviews and testimonials to support your social media and overall marketing initiatives. 

Share positive reviews across your social media marketing channels to help build trust between your potential customers and brand. 

Reach out to your previous and existing customers and ask for testimonials. You can also share collective ratings of your products and services.

For example, you can use feedback emoji tools on your website to make giving feedback and ratings more fun and engaging for customers. Then, create engaging content out of the information and share it on your social media pages. 

Use Emoji Response to create custom feedback emoji forms easily, embed them to your website and gain valuable insights. 

Image source: emojiresponse.com. 

Using robust user feedback software can simplify and streamline collecting and analysing customer feedback and comments.  

Facebook and LinkedIn are some of the best social media platforms to share reviews and testimonials. Facebook even offers a built-in business page star rating option.  

3. Videos

Another popular visual content format is video. 

Videos allow you to provide educational, informational, and entertaining content that is more fun and engaging for audiences than plain text and images.  

Create video tours, how-to guides, product demos and updates, event and promo announcements, and other videos for your social media channels.

Some of the videos you can share on social media include the following.

• Live videos. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube Live videos are excellent channels to bring your brand-related and exciting events to your online audiences. For instance, share your product launching through Instagram Live to help draw more people to your new products and encourage them to participate and interact with your brand. It can also help viewers learn more about your new products, enticing them to buy.
• Video Stories. Posting Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram Stories can be an excellent tactic to get viewers to stay tuned to your social media pages, so they don’t miss out on anything. Stories disappear after 24 hours, but use them strategically and they can help you keep your followers updated about your offers, events, and content. For instance, use IG Stories to hold quick Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, run polls or surveys, and share Behind-the-Scenes (BTS) videos clips. The IG Story BTS from Urban Skin RX below is a classic example.

While creating videos for social media can eat up a huge chunk of your team’s time and resources, you can make the process more efficient using reliable task management software.  

Task management tools help you plan, organise, prioritise, and schedule your social media video creation process and related tasks. 

You can collaborate with your social media marketing team seamlessly and keep your content flowing for optimum engagement. 

4. Articles and blog posts

Sharing written articles, guides, and blog posts can help position your company as an expert in your industry. It can help you build your brand’s reputation and credibility. 

The challenge is that text-based content is often static and boring, making it easy for your audience to scroll past and overlook your articles and blog posts. 

After all, most social media users don’t often have the time or patience to click your link and go to your website to check out your content. 

The key is to make your content compelling. It should give your audiences a good reason to click and read and, in turn, like, comment on, and share your content.

Look at trending searches on social media platforms. It can give you valuable insights into your target audiences’ questions, helping you tailor your content to answer their queries and address their pain points.  

Also, use catchy headlines that grab your audiences’ attention while giving them a good idea of your content. 

If you share the same content on your email marketing campaigns, use a version of your headlines as email subject lines to encourage your contacts to open your messages. 

Doing so can boost your email open and click-through rates. You can also improve your email deliverability by ensuring you send messages to legitimate email addresses. 

Use a handy email verifier tool such as the one below from Hunter.io. 

   Verifying emails is critical before sending messages to new contacts to help you avoid bounces.

Facebook and LinkedIn are some of the best social media platforms to share text-based and long-form content. 

LinkedIn allows you to post the entire piece, helping your brand come off as an industry or subject matter expert and increase engagement.  

You can also share a snippet or link to the entire piece on Facebook and other channels to lead people to your website, increasing traffic and conversion opportunities.  

Leverage the right social media content for more engagement

While there are countless social media content types and strategies to help you drive engagement, gain a head start with your efforts using the tips in this guide.  

Know which content types work best for your audiences, the specific platforms, and content marketing goals. Doing so can help you get excellent returns and achieve social media marketing success.