Social media is all about the content. But if you don’t do social media content creation right, you are bound to fail.
What value are you providing?
Marketers often question: Why is my engagement low? How do I better connect to my audience?
Well, a good content strategy is the key to a successful social media presence!
You build close relationships on social media by frequently interacting and engaging with the audience, but also by providing valuable content.
In turn, this content strategy helps to guide your actions so you know which metrics to consider when you’re evaluating your performance at the end of the month.
Read on and we’ll guide you through the steps to create the perfect content for your brand’s social media!
1. Research your audience and decide the content you want to publish
Just staying “active” on social media with sporadic updates isn’t enough anymore.
The first step of creating an effective content strategy is researching, curating and creating content that’s relevant, engaging, and informative. It is essential to evaluate company goals, create and distribute content on the right platform at the right time.
Dig deep into your brand values and research your audience.
Step into their shoes and try to understand them: What motivates them to make their purchase? What are their daily challenges and business goals?
Set clear content goals that align with your overall marketing strategy. The more specific your goals, the more it’ll help to tailor to social media posts.
For example, let’s say your content goal is to increase brand awareness of your SaaS platform. In this case, your strategy could incorporate posts that provide meaningful content that is educational, informative and improves user experience.
Once you have set clear goals, you need to conduct a social media content audit to help you establish with quantitative data what works best for your brand. Evaluate the type of content resulting in high engagement or increase in follower count (or whatever your goals are!)
If you don’t have enough data for content audit yet, you can go for A/B testing to see what resonates best with your audience. In this case, you can post a mixture of informative, entertaining, user-generated, feature-related and promotional content. Another solid way to collect data to know what works for your audience is using surveys. With well-prepared questions, you can easily get the answer you need directly from your selected audience. This can be done quite easily with a free survey maker.
While your content strategy is likely to evolve as your brand grows, it’s important to maintain consistency. This will help you understand your audience better. Keep building a customer persona of your target audience (demographics, psychographics, content preference) and note which platform your posts excel in.
Note: Keep in mind that it’s quite unrealistic to assume your posts are going to perform well everywhere! With these insights, you can allocate resources to the platform that suits your brand most – in the future campaigns.
2. Create a content calendar with scheduled publication dates
After you have outlined what you hope to achieve, it’s time to work on a content calendar.
But first…
What is a content calendar?
Content calendar is a plan of when and where you schedule your posts. This can be as simple or complex as your brand needs it to be.
For a social media manager, maintaining a content calendar will let you plan ahead and batch your posts to save invaluable time. It’s the best way to make sure you never have to waste time scouring through trending news articles everyday. This approach will also help your brand be consistent, rather than being unreactive.
Populate your content calendar with posts ahead of time to maintain a consistent presence on social media. Showing up on newsfeed everyday will lead to higher engagement, and high organic reach. You can even strategically observe global trends that are relevant to your industry!
If you’re disorganised, you might forget some things. A Content Calendar makes sure that nothing falls between cracks!
Pro tip: Similarly, you also do not want to spam your audience. Here are some suggestions for the optimal frequency for each day:
Note: Evaluate your analytics to find the best time to post on social media (which will be discussed later on!)
Further Reading: What REALLY are the Best Times to Post on Social Media in 2025?
3. Decide which content types you and your team will create
Social media platforms are like apples and oranges. They’re not the same and definitely should not be treated equally.
Each platform has its own audience. Content that may work on one platform may not necessarily work on the other. This may also affect how your posts perform!
While building a content strategy, note that your content won’t be suitable for each social media.
Let me give a quick snapshot of what each platform expects:
| Social Media Platform | Content |
| Emotion-driven content, videos, curated posts | |
| High-resolution pictures: trends, lifestyle | |
| Live events, News, GIFS, opinion | |
| Company culture, news, related jobs | |
| Step-by-step guides, infographics, aesthetic style |
The kind of content you share has the potential to convert potential leads into brand advocates. With the right content, people will be excited and looking forward to your content, ultimately making them more engaged when you post.
To break away from traditional style tweets, brands can also use humour:
That is why it’s quite challenging to think of unique and fresh content ideas that keeps your audience wanting more!
Read on for the most popular type of content your team should consider publishing:
Blog Posts
Content marketing involves providing value to your audience in an informative, yet strategic way. 70% of the marketers actively invest in content marketing, so it’s definitely worth investing your resources in.
The primary purpose of content marketing is to establish trust, and develop brand authority. How does this work?
Research the targeted keywords with a Google rank checker, evaluate where your company falls short and then determine the content that’s required to fill the gap. Distribution of the content is also essential.
You can keep in mind the marketing funnel while creating different kinds of content:
- Awareness Stage: Informative content (how-to guides, webinars)
- Consideration: Comparison charts, listing features
- Conversion, Loyalty: Instructional videos, Product videos, Demo Interviews
- Advocacy: Loyalty events, brand ambassadors
Pro tip: Remember to include share buttons on your posts so your readers can distribute your content on their social channels!
You can also encourage people to engage with the posts by asking questions, or sharing their opinion of the posts. Reposting or responding to people who have shared your content is also a good social strategy.
Infographics
Infographics are a mixture of content, data and graphic design that allow marketers to communicate complex information in a captivating graphic. Infographics can be an excellent tool to help your content cut through the noise. We, as humans, love facts, statistics, figures. If it’s appealing enough, this visual content will be an effective content strategy.
Videos
Video is the future of marketing – they’re memorable, engaging and more popular than any other kind of content. Viewers remember 95% of the idea of the video (as compared to only ten percent in text).Giving the stats of YouTube as of now, almost 5 billion hours of video are consumed there every day! It is also estimated that videos will drive 82% of the consumer traffic by 2022! Hence, you can increase your reach, engagement, and conversion by including video in your content strategy.
These videos can include:
- Stories (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat)
- IGTV
- YouTube (Product demos, Interviews, Explainer, Ads, V-logs, Previews and teasers)
- In-feed videos
- Webinars
- Live videos
- TikTok
Tip: Upload native videos on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to increase engagement! (i.e. Instead of sharing a YouTube link!)
Further Reading: How to Make Your First TikTok Video: For Newbies Only!
4. Write down your social media copy for your posts
The copy you write has the power of transforming mundane posts to viral.
Keep in mind the brand guidelines and what you hope to achieve from each social network. While LinkedIn calls for long, meaningful content, Twitter expects you to summarize your thoughts to only 280 characters per tweet. Tailor your copy with respect to each social platform.
Seek to engage your audience by encouraging them to join the conversation. Don’t forget the social in social media. Build to establish a two-way communication!
Most importantly, as you write your social copy, remember to ask readers for their feedback:
- Let us know what you think in the comments!
- Like if you agree.
- Share and tell us your story!
- Which feature did you like the most?
- Save this post for later
5. Schedule your content on social media
Now that you have planned your content and copy, the next step is to schedule your social media posts in advance.
You can plan your content with the help of social media management tools in advance (even up to a year!)
This helps you monitor all the content you’re going to post (while keeping track of important social media days in advance.) Also, that means whether or not you’re taking a day off, your content is going to post by itself! .
You can even build your audience in different timezones. If your SaaS business is targeting customers in North America, while you’re situated in Australia… Well, worry no more.. Your content will be auto-scheduled to post in their timezone when you’re (literally) sleeping!
Here’s what a week’s Content Planner may look like:
6. Respond to comments on your published content
Even after you share your content on social media, the work isn’t done! Being a responsive and socially active brand in 2020 means that you need to be prepared to handle customer support from a wide array of channels. Since social media is the most accessible and easiest platform for some users, always be on your toes for an influx of queries to come your way!
Your ultimate goal for content creation on social media is to make the service easier for your customers.
Providing Social Customer Support increases brand loyalty, sales, retention and reduces churn. For 33% of those under the age of 25, social media is the primary mode of communication with brands. Furthermore, 81% reported that they expect a reply from social media within one day.
Social support does not only address the person with a query, but it’s also a nod to anyone on the internet reading your posts. Since it’s public, not responding well is a slippery slope! Respond to every message you receive, as only responding to selective customers, or not responding at all, may shed a negative image on your brand.
7. Analyze engagement and metrics for the published content
The last step is to prepare a simple, easy-to-understand social media report that shows everything you’ve accomplished. With the never-ending social media metrics, this might seem perplexing to wade into. Although if you have established and documented your content marketing objectives in the beginning, the results will be easy to juxtapose with intended goals.
In other words, your social media goals determine the metrics you want to measure. For every goal, you need to have a metric you’re measuring its performance against. Ultimately, this is important because it determines how your content creation strategy is impacting your overall business.
For instance, if your social media goal was to increase brand awareness, you can measure the total number of new followers, total new likes, or website traffic.
You can use in-built Facebook or Instagram Analytics, or use a third-party tool. In the later, your analytics performance report can look like this:
This quick snapshot will help you gather the success of your content in each social media platform (which as we discussed in the beginning, will differ!
Fortunately, the results from this campaign can also help you determine the best time and day to post, which content resonates with your audience most, and which platform is most suitable for your brand.
Based on your insights, it also helps to guide your actions for the future.
Conclusion
You can’t expect to make a perfect content creation strategy in the first try. You may realise the inefficiencies after a while. You may realise some content is more successful with regards to others. You can tweak your strategy based on the results.
As your brand evolves, reevaluate your content accordingly to come up with the best social media for your team. Soon enough you will come to realise how these simple social media management techniques have amplified your marketing efforts!
We are also interested in learning what you do to smooth out your social media content creation! Which process do you wish to automate? Let us know in the comments!
Author Bio
This guest post was written by Mariyum Noor. Mariyum is a content marketer who is passionate about learning new things! She loves to write research-based blog posts for SaaS platforms that are seeking better ways to delight and engage their readers.
Hero photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
Thanks for sharing this blog content marketing through social media is very helpful for so many businesses, Very useful content Easy to understand
Thanks for the comment Manvi!