15 Ideas For What You Should Be Sharing On Social Media

Published in

Marketing And Growth Hacking

6 min readApr 19, 2019

So you’ve made social media accounts for your business, that’s one big point checked off your to-do list. Congratulations! You’ve joined 71% of other businesses who use social media.

Or, you’ve had social accounts for a while now, but they closely resemble barren land — no colors, no life, and no activity.

Either way, you’re blank about what you should share for creating an engaging social media profile. Jeff Bullas, social media strategist and content marketing influencer, highlights four foundational content types to strategize around.

These are:

Informative content
Educational content
Inspiring content
Entertaining content

Your social media success is guaranteed as you prepare a cocktail of these four content types for your social media channels. Here is a look at 15 things you can share on social media based on these four content foundations:

1. Tips related to your niche

Share valuable content related to your niches. For instance, if you are a clothing brand, your audience expects to get fashion tips from you. Likewise, if you are a productivity app, you can help your followers by sharing tips to increase their productivity.

2. Behind the scenes of your work life

Giving a look into how you work (if you are a solopreneur or freelancer) or how your team works is an incredible way to humanize your brand. Nobody appreciates working with robots. Instead, they love to know that the person/team behind a business, which is why such BTS content always does well on social, allowing your followers to know more about you and connect better.

Here’s Hootsuite giving a glimpse of their customer team:

3. Your take on industry trending news

Sharing industry news is a great idea but sharing your opinion about it is a better idea. Be careful not to jump into anything controversial though. Recently, Lush Cosmetics announced that they won’t be using social media. This was a great opportunity for sharing opinion, so this is what James Whatley, strategy partner at Digitas UK did:

4. User generated content (UGC)

UGC is a great way to humanize your brand and engage with your audience. You’d be surprised to know that more than 10,000 out of the 40 million images posted to Instagram daily are of the Starbucks logo. How? UGC.

Besides, Starbucks, Coco-Cola’s user generated content is worth mentioning here. Another example — Urban Decay:

5. Topics that your audience is talking about

Studying your audience will help you understand what interests them. Unearth your followers’ interest on social media by tracking the hashtags they follow. You can also look into the content that your competitors are sharing and how it is helping them grow. Next, give a creative twist to that content and you’ve more items growing your social media share list.

6. Your audience’s content

An important part of engaging with your audience is interacting with them on their posts and sharing their content as well. In this regard, see how Andy Crestodina sharing Gill Andrew’s post:

7. Industry influencers’ content

You can also share the content that influencers in your field share. A plus point of sharing this type of content is that it gives you an opportunity to nurture relationships with industry influencers.

8. Updates and pictures of events that you attend

So you attended an event in your industry, spoke at a conference, or delivered a presentation in your area? Why not update that on your social media account as well? It will put you forth as an authority in your line of work, all while providing you fodder to share on social.

Here’s a page from Andrew and Pete who shared the following for #Interact19:

9. A TED talk you enjoyed and inspirational quotes

A key point for success on social media is to abstain from sharing only the content that you create yourself. Think of it like this — posting content about your business only shows you as a self-centered business, which only uses social media for marketing and sales.

However, by maintaining a flavorful social feed that shares content from its audience, industry influencers, and more, you put yourself forward as a friendly, supportive business. This is why, you can always share content that you enjoyed, for instance, a TED talk related to your industry or audience’s interests or an inspiring quote to lift your audience’s spirit.

Here’s MeetEdgar doing just that:

10. Blog posts and infographics

Infographics add to the visual aspect of your social feed. HubSpot reveals that such visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than any other type of content.

Blog post, on the other hand, share valuable information with your audience. You can share both infographics and blog posts that you’ve created as well as those that others have created.

A case in point is Atlassian sharing a blog post with an attention-grabbing caption:

11. Research and case studies

Research such as data and statistics and case studies are also good raw material for social media content. These give your audience a quick peek into your industry.

For instance, Shopify shared the following:

12. News and business updates

Of course, social media should be the channel where you announce updates or news. Your audience expects to gather updates related to your business via social media. So, you can’t miss posting such content.

Here’s Trello, for example, telling its audience about the Weebly Awards:

13. Discounts and promo codes

A survey by MarketingSherpa highlights that 56% of the consumers connect with a business on social media to avail regular coupons and promotions. This adds another item to your to-share list.

Here’s Button Poetry offering a code:

14. Newsletter and webinar updates

Have a newsletter? Hosting a new webinar? That’s news! No, wait… That’s good news that you need to share with your audience. Not only will this drive traffic your way, it will tell people the efforts that you make for providing value to them.

For instance, Asana recently shared an event that their team will be part of:

15. Video content

As mentioned above, visuals have superpowers to catch your audience’s attention. A high-quality, engaging video also tends to be memorable. In fact, viewers retain 95% of the message when it is presented in the video format.

The demand for video content is also crawling with 54% of consumers wanting to see more videos from brands and businesses.

A case in point here is Mailchimp sharing an informative video about adding tags to send out targeted campaigns:

All in all, there’s a variety of content to share on social media starting from your blog posts to engaging videos. Remember to write attention-grabbing captions and use only high-quality images.

Masooma Memon is a freelance writer by day and a novel nerd by night. Follow her on Twitter or read her thoughts here.