Need to post something to your social media channels but don’t know what? Consider these popular types of social media posts to get your creativity flowing.
Maintaining a social media editorial calendar can be exhausting. You have to come with something awesome every day.
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Whether you want to diversify your social media feeds or to get more people to comment on and like your updates, this list of types of social media posts will come in handy:
1. Questions
Questions are great engagement triggers. In seeing a question, people feel that instant impulse to make a pause and find an answer. Therefore, asking questions on social media is such a good idea.
You can find popular niche questions to ask using tools like Text Optimizer that uses semantic research to extract underlying concepts behind each search query, as well as related questions:
2. Visual Quotes
Putting words on an image is a great and easy way to create a beautiful social media update that can motivate and inspire. If you are connected to whoever you are quoting, you can also tag the person in your update and even generate some engagement from the author.
Taking this idea further, you can reuse your customers’ words inside an image, and in this way, publicize:
A visual review
A visual testimonial
Tools like Canva, Snappa, and other online image editors make the process of creating visual quotes to publish to your social media channels very easy. (You can also check out one of our favorites, Easil, for your simplified graphic designing that doesn’t look simplified.)
3. Videos
Native videos are well-known to attract attention. There’s a well-educated theory (which I believe in) that to encourage users to upload videos (instead of sharing a link to one), social media platforms would somehow push them in users’ feeds. This always results in organic engagement.
You can upload all kinds of videos, from funny ads to customer testimonials.
Just make sure to:
Add subtitles to your videos (to make sure the content is clear without sound)
Keep videos short and attention-grabbing. Note that videos auto-play while social media users scroll past their feeds, so make sure the first 5 seconds of your videos are interesting enough for them to be curious enough to pause and watch.
Tools like Wave.video and inVideo make creating annotated videos easy and surprisingly affordable:
4. Screenshots
People love screenshots, especially if they are highly actionable. (It is easy to go ahead and replicate the steps to get the same results.) Whenever your update prompts an action, rest assured your followers will be back for more:
5. Slideshows
This is something we have described in this article on creating content for your LinkedIn feed—but it can apply to any social media network. For any content you upload, you can create a quick deck containing quick takeaways:
This has proved to drive 10X more views and clicks on your social media content. Venngage offers a variety of templates allowing you to easily create these interactive slideshows.
Related: FREE Social Media Content Calendar
6. Polls
Polls can make a great engagement trigger for social media feeds, especially if you make a question interesting enough for users to want to see the results.
Polls work differently from platform to platform:
Facebook: You can create polls on a page, in the group or inside your Facebook story. You can upload a GIF to go with it. You can only add two options to choose from (for example, yes/no).
Twitter: You can add multiple-choice polls for the maxim of 7 days. (After that time, your poll won’t be available for voting but anyone can still see the results). You have to stay within Twitter character limit.
Instagram: You can create polls inside Instagram stories. You can ask anything but you are limited to two response options.
Linkedin: For whatever reason, Linkedin has discontinued native polls but you can still create polls with third-party solutions like this one:
For any other social media platform, you can use third-party poll and survey makers to create interactive polls and collect the results. Most of those are easy and free (or at least freemium).
7. Shared Links
Sharing your own link on your social media feed can help generate some clicks to your site.
Don’t overdo, though, as links may be the least popular update on social media as links interrupt users’ experience driving them off their social media platform. However, once in a while, sharing a link is absolutely fine.
8. Comments on a Trending Topic
Keep an eye on trends and share your own opinion (or news update) on some of them. Social media updates on upcoming holidays also work very well!
Stay away from politics unless you want your customers to force you to pick a side. Getting edgy is fine on your personal profile, but keep your brand off that.
9. Resharing Someone’s Update
If you come across a hilarious update, go ahead and support it by re-sharing / retweet it. You do want your feeds to be 90% your own content, but random re-sharing brings in great content and build stronger connections with the update author.
10. Posts to Daily Hashtags
There’s a popular hashtag for every day of the week. Posting updates to these hashtags can diversify and refresh your social media feeds as well as increase engagement and discoverability. These include but are not limited to:
#MondayMotivation: Post something motivational and inspiring.
#TechTuesday: Post on some technological trends. Combine it with #TipTuesday to make it a more useful and actionable update.
#WellnessWednesday: Create an update with some wellbeing or fitness tip.
#ThrowbackThursday (also #TBT): Share your memory from the past.
#FollowFriday (#FF): This is one of the oldest traditions and a great way to build stronger friendships. Post a list of people you recommend following.
#ShoutoutSaturday: Send a shout-out to your featured customers, partners, or brand advocates.
#SundayReads: Post a list of recommended reading, or simply a link to an interesting article.
These have mostly originated from Twitter, but you can also use these hashtags on Instagram.
11. Emoji-Driven Updates
Emojis have become an integral part of our lives. No one is questioning that any longer. They can reflect (hidden) meaning, sarcasm, etc. Emojis can entertain and make you think. Sometimes, all you need to do is to use emojis in your updates to have your following guessing what you meant to say:
Visme offers a comprehensive guide on emoji marketing.
12. “Behind the Scenes” Updates
Sharing your company’s behind the scenes pictures and videos builds empathy and makes your brand more relatable. So any time you have something going on in the office, go ahead and turn that on your social media page.
13. Your Brand’s Milestones
Are you celebrating your company’s anniversary? Have you just built your 100,00th follower? Has your company won an award?
Adopt the habit of sharing all of these milestones on social media. Let your community be part of your success and celebrate it!
14. Your Customers in the Spotlight
Did your customer support team just receive an email from your tool users or buyers praising your business? Or did your social media monitoring team spot an enthusiastic comment on Instagram or Twitter?
Ask for permission to publicize that comment on your own channel and tag the initial poster. Doing so builds brand loyalty and trust helping you generate more positive feedback to publicize.
15. Memes
Love them or hate them, memes are hard to pass by. There is no need to turn your walls into meme broadcasters, but sharing an occasional (particularly ingenious) meme is not a bad idea.
Tumblr remains my favorite way to find cool memes. Here’s a detailed tutorial on how to use Tumblr tag search.
16. Animated GIFs
Despite all the skepticism, animated GIFs are not going anywhere. Even social media giants like Facebook and Pinterest have started supporting GIF animations.
You are welcome to re-share GIFs from other people’s feeds but you can also create your own which is easier than you may think. For example, you can easily convert videos into GIFs or create an animated GIF tutorial.
17. Rants
Ranking is a nice way to get your followers to feel compassionate. It is also one of those update types that can bring in an insane amount of comments as people love sharing their own experiences and rants as well.
Again, be careful and don’t get political here. You don’t want a fight: You want customers to relate to your situation.
18. Promotions of Your Favorite Charity
Every business has some favorite charities they support. But it is not just about giving. Use your social media channels to promote charities you support, and ask your followers to spread the word.
19. Quick Caption Contests
Caption contests are the easiest social media contests out there. I have found social media users to always engage in these fun collaborative brainstorming sessions.
On top of an engagement boost, these contests may also help you build fun and engaging content for future updates.
20. Your CTA
(You don’t want to overdo with this one.) Invite your followers to follow you around your other social media channels, become your subscriber, or download your whitepaper.
Twitter has revealed that “Download” is the most effective CTA on the platform, so you may want to start from there. But there are more:
Conclusion
You have a wide variety of types of social media posts that you can try, along with the tools and examples. No need to stick to one type per update either! You can post your question on an image or as a poll, repurpose customers’ testimonials as a video or a slideshow, and use GIFs to repurpose your video.
With all of these ideas and variety, your social media audience will surely appreciate your feeds!
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