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Top 12 Types of Social Media Content to Create - Coggle Diagram
Top 12 Types of Social Media Content to Create
6. Video Stories
Advantages: Stories are images and short videos that last 24 hours before disappearing for good. They’re available on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. Keep users updated about events, offers, or other announcements—or give them a behind-the-scenes glimpse of your business.
The possibilities are truly endless!
Disadvantages: The fear of missing out can be a powerful motivator,
but their short life expectancy also means that some users might not engage with them.
How to produce: The option to produce image or video stories is in each social media network’s app.
High-quality production is not needed, making them easy for any business to create.
4. Images
Advantages: Visual content is much more digestible and engaging than long-form blogs and articles.
Smartphone cameras are sophisticated enough to take stunning pictures, and apps help you quickly edit them, add filters to them, and more.
Disadvantages: Image-focused platforms like Instagram have a lot of competition.
If you want quality beyond a smartphone’s capabilities, a professional camera and editing software can cost a lot and be very time consuming to use.
How to produce: Pictures and images are some of the easiest content to create.
It's as simple as grabbing your smartphone or camera and snapping a picture.
3. Links to external content
Advantages: If you don’t have time to finish a blog post or your writer is on vacation, you can always link to relevant articles, resources, and websites from other sources that you trust.
Industry leaders are also excellent resources for content.
Disadvantages: When you link to content that you haven’t created, you’re effectively opening a door to another business’s social media experience. Readers may even find the other source more informative than your page. Content curation is a good digital marketing strategy to use on social networks, but it also can be time consuming.
It is important to check your social analytics to be sure that curated content is engaging and effective, and not to stop your own content creation process.
How to create: Research different blogs using keywords similar to those on your website. (Keywords are words or phrases commonly searched on the internet.)
Make sure to read every post and click around on the website, too. This will ensure you don’t share an article on social media accounts from a site that could negatively represent your brand’s views.
2. Electronic books (eBooks)
Advantages: An eBook tends to be longer and more detailed than blog posts, which helps showcase your industry expertise.
Far fewer businesses take the time to produce an eBook compared to blogs, too, so you avoid that heavy competition.
Disadvantages: Not everyone wants to read a whole eBook, and they take a lot of time to produce and find content that will appeal to your target audience.
While they can help generate leads, people don’t always actually read them.
How to produce: An eBook is basically several blog posts compiled together as chapters from the same category. You’ll want to choose your best content or even hire a professional writer with experience writing eBooks.
5. Videos
Advantages: Capturing videos is easy and convenient—and they’re more engaging than pictures.
How-to guides, video tours, and product updates and demonstrations all make for great video content that can both drive traffic to your website and increase sales.
Disadvantages:
It's inexpensive to make quick videos, but costs escalate if you want a high production level.
How to produce: Similar to images, video production has a range of difficulty.
Where you decide to land on that spectrum will dictate whether you need specialized skills and equipment.
1. Written posts, blogs, articles, guides, and more
Advantages: These articles demonstrate your company’s knowledge and expertise, which can help build your credibility and reputation.
Disadvantages: There is a lot of blog content out there, so competition is thick—and you need a lot of creativity to create new topic ideas. Writing also takes a lot of time to generate content ideas, especially if you’re explaining complicated concepts.
How to produce: To help you think of compelling content, look at trending searches. This will give you insight into the questions people want answers to, which can spark ideas about what to write about.
Testimonials and reviews
Advantages: People trust the opinions and experiences of others more than what a business says, which is why testimonials and reviews are so valuable.
Disadvantages: Encouraging customers to offer their testimonials isn't always easy. Also, this is the only content type that isn't really in your control. With reviews, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be positive.
How to produce: Contact past customers and ask if they'll offer up a testimonial. It's bad practice to incentivize people to review your business, however, as this can come across as dishonest and review sites like Yelp may punish you for it.
Holidays
Advantages: Many users love holiday-themed content, and it’s easy for businesses like yours to piggyback on themes, traditions, and other holiday specific concepts.
Disadvantages: There are only so many holidays in the year, and major ones like Christmas create lots of competition because many other small businesses create festive content, too.
How to produce: Think about how you can use the holiday to enhance your content. What questions does your audience have around this time, and how can your content solve those challenges?
Contests
Advantages: Because people like to win, social media contests are engaging and fun to host.
Disadvantages: You need a prize, which costs money. And if the process to enter the contest is too demanding, participation may be low.
How to produce: Think of a prize that your audience will be interested in winning. Ideally, this will be related to your business, but this isn't mandatory. Then create a schedule for how long the contest will run as well as rules for entering.
Announcements
Advantages: Getting the word out about new products, events, livestreams, and other noteworthy things can help build hype and alert people about what's happening with your business. Audiences love having the inside scoop on their favorite stores and brands!
Disadvantages: Carefully plan out the length of time that’s appropriate to begin building buzz. Launch the announcement too early and you might not gain any traction.
How to produce: It's often best to trickle out information slowly. Think of announcements as a bunch of little teases leading up to the big news.
7. Live Videos
Advantages: Live videos are a great medium to bring events to audiences that aren't physically able to attend.
Unlike stories, which are gone after 24 hours, you can still watch livestreams later.
Disadvantages: First you need something to stream, such as an event. Then you need someone to operate the smartphone or other device and talk. The WIFI connection is also important. If your connection is bad, the video may need to repeatedly stop and buffer, which can result in poor quality.
How to produce: Like stories, social media platforms that support live content make the option readily accessible and convenient to users. They'll show a preview of what your audience will see, which gives you the opportunity to make sure everything looks good before you go live.
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8.Infographics
Advantages: Infographics use visuals to support explanations, statistics, and other written concepts. They are especially impactful for conveying complex ideas.
Disadvantages: Creating infographics requires both copy and graphics, which means you may need multiple people working together to create them. They also require a fair amount of creativity and research.
How to produce: First you need to create an outline for your infographic. Once the outline is done, your writer and graphic designer can begin creating the individual parts and piecing them together.