4 Effective Content Ideas for Social Media

When you stop and think about it, social media is the perfect way to engage customers.

Let’s face it. We’ve all become more distracted. The power to connect in a few words or with a funny tweet is an amazing concept. We can reach customers with powerful images, engaging videos, and a few sentences.

The Problem: Not every business has the budget to invest in a social media expert. That’s why we’re doing this short deep dive into effective content ideas for social media. It will help you draw true engagement from your audience.

1. Learn more about your customers through online polls

One great way to engage your customers in a few words is through a poll. It helps you gain valuable insight which you can use for future customers.

Polls are short, engaging, and powerful tools for connection. Social media content manager Hootsuite used the power of polls with a quick Twitter post.

This quick poll allowed Hootsuite to learn how to help its customers. Think about the possibilities from this quick Twitter poll. They could use it to help new customers with short blog posts, like:

How 28% of businesses are driving engagement
The crucial mistake 21% of businesses are making when it comes to engagement
The best time of the week to engage your customers (according to major brands)

Do you see how this can inform your customers and help them solve their problems?

If Twitter doesn’t speak to your target audience, no problem. Facebook and Instagram use polls as a sticker option to add to your stories.

2. Use humor for sharable content

Humor is a great way to produce shareable content. You can use memes, funny quotes, videos, and more.

A great example of this is the brand Steak-umm. You may remember them as those frozen meat sheets you ate as a kid. Yeah, that brand. They have become masters at using humor to elevate their content.

As you can see, this post engaged their audience. This tweet has:

Over 6,000 views in a little more than one week
12 comments
30 retweets
Almost 200 likes

Not bad for a video that’s under 10 seconds. How could you engage your audience with sharable content?

3. Leverage social media to start a conversation

Being on social media is more than promoting your product. It’s also about connecting with your customers.

If you’ve spent time on Facebook, you may have seen those little math riddles that people comment on. Heck, you may be one of them.

Here’s a clever way the brand Nutella used that same kind of post to build a conversation. See how it piques your curiosity to solve the riddle.

It almost reminds us of the back of a cereal box as a kid. Who didn’t love those?

Creating engaging content doesn’t have to be rocket science. It’s about finding ways to be in the minds of your audience consistently.

4. Use promotions and deals to entice your audience to take action

Remember when you were a kid, you’d force yourself to stay up late for fear of missing something? It turns out adults are like that too. Only, it doesn’t translate the same way.

Adults hate to miss out on deals and promotions. The fear of missing out, or FOMO, is a clever advertising tactic to get your audience to take action.

Here is a clever post from the brand BirchBox using the same FOMO strategy.