The hardest part of running a social media campaign is coming up with new ideas.
It can be tough for marketers to keep up with multiple social profiles and post fresh content on a consistent basis. Your followers are hungry for new content, so you need to be able to deliver.
Planning your campaigns effectively will enable you to use the best ideas and make them your own. Here’s our effective social media ideas you can use:
Use Video
There’s a lot of videos on social media, and it’s a great way to get people to pay attention to what you’re saying. Video is also a more popular format than other types of posts.
It is advised that you storyboard your ideas in order to make sure your video is well-organized and effective.
Tag a friend
Tag a friend in a post to let them know that social posts are effective and appeal to the human need to be seen as a responsible member of society.
When you create a post inviting people to tag a friend, make it more appealing by offering an incentive. For example, if you’re an ice cream store, you could run a contest where you choose two lucky friends who will each get a free ice cream sundae.
Discounts, Coupons and Deals
Offers that are discounts, coupons or deals will always interest people on social media. The key to making these offers effective is to ensure that they offer real value. If they don’t, then only a small number of people, if any, will take up the offer.
People can’t resist the power of “free.”
Contests are a great way to get your followers engaged on social media.
When you plan your discount offer, try to channel traffic to a sales page to increase revenue.
All you need is a combination of the following:
- Something to give away. Ideally, the prize for your contest should somehow be related to your brand (think: free products or a membership). Big-ticket, unrelated items tend to attract freebie-seekers that won’t translate into long-term followers.
- Terms and conditions. To cover yourself legally, terms and conditions are a must for your contest. This template from Shortstack can clue you in on exactly what you need. Additionally, these points will make your contest seem more legitimate and not like a potential scam.
- A point of contact. On your terms and conditions page, make sure to leave an email address where people can get in touch with questions or concerns.
- A creative way to enter. Whether it’s through user-generated content or a hashtag, asking followers to post about your brand is the best way to encourage entries. After all, the purpose of a giveaway is brand awareness, not just to give away free stuff. Check out how Modcloth requires entrants to use a specific hashtag:https://www.instagram.com/p/Bbcn5bXnIvS/?taken-by=modcloth
Run a Competition
There are a number of great reasons to run a competition, with audience growth being at the top of the list.
When you plan your social media competition, make sure you know how you’ll track your growth. Just looking at follower growth before and after the competition is easy, but take your analysis one step further.
Partner With a Brand
Teaming up with another brand that doesn’t compete with your own is a great way to help both brands grow. If you can create a great offer for the other brand’s audience, it’s a win-win situation. You’ll get their attention and be able to deliver a great message.
Two brands create a campaign or piece of content together, such as a webinar, ebook or special promotion. Each company gets exposure to the other’s audience, increasing their reach.
Run a Poll
Polls are a great way to increase engagement on social media. People love sharing their opinions, and it makes them feel recognized and included. You can use poll results to generate offers and deals, making them even more attractive to your audience.
Polls don’t need to be formal or sales-related. Social media is a conversation, so be willing to listen to your followers’ feedback.
Live Stream
The popularity of live streaming is increasing rapidly, due in part to the convenience of being able to interact with brands directly via mobile phone. Because live streaming is video, it can be used to promote and communicate almost anything.
People tend to spend more time watching Facebook Live videos as opposed to pre-recorded videos. For example, marketers such as Seth Godin use live streaming as a way to answer questions and educate his audience.
If you want to make your live streams more effective, include a strong call to action for your audience. This could be a link to a longer video, a report, or a guide. The goal is to turn social traffic into leads for your funnel.
Share From Behind the Scenes
Revealing what goes on behind the scenes is becoming more and more popular, and it’s definitely worth a try. Showing behind the scenes content creates a connection between your brand and audience, making them feel like your company is more than just a business. It also looks like exclusive footage for viewers.
Create Instructional Videos
It’s no secret that tutorials are great content. Despite popular belief, they aren’t limited to makeup and cooking influencers. You can create tutorials for your brand, products, and services.
Think of tutorial topics that can be explained in less than a minute, for bonus points if the Instagram caption can also explain all the necessary steps.
Produce Native Ads
People often become less responsive to ads over time, but they are more likely to be drawn to content that is interesting and compelling. This is why ads that are designed to blend in with the rest of the content are more effective.
According to Adroll, these 7 tips will help you produce compelling native ads:
- Understand what you want your audience to do after they’ve seen your ad
- Always make the engagement valuable for your followers
- Personalize your ad to make it resonate with your audience
- Write how you would speak and not how you would sell
- Use your brand name to establish an association between it and the offer
- Keep your message simple and clear to make it easy-to-follow and understand
- Include an easy-to-understand call to action
Host an AMA (Ask Me Anything)
An AMA session is a great way to present a more personal side of your brand. Ideally, your host should be someone who has the time, knowledge and experience in their field to reply to questions.
Consider how an AMA ticks the following boxes for brands:
- You get to show off your personal side, showcasing the face behind the curtain of your business
- You raise awareness for your brand without being pushy or salesy about it
- You learn more about the concerns and interests of your audience
Run a Social Takeover
The idea of a social media account takeover is to have an influencer post content on your account for the next 24 hours.
There are many benefits to both parties when working together. The brand will be exposed to the influencer’s audience and the influencer will gain more popularity by being associated with the brand.
An influencer or celebrity with a large, active audience is a great way to get your brand in front of new people, as well as to have a new voice on your account if you feel you are running out of social media post ideas. You can also let someone else in your company take over your account to give it some personality.
Place Your Customers in the Spotlight
Showing your appreciation for your customers on social media is a great way to make your brand more appealing to prospective customers.
Do more than just retweeting people who mention your brand; start a campaign that really shows off your customers.
If you’re wondering how to incorporate customer appreciation into your campaign calendar, here are a few ideas:
- Prioritize it. Create a document that features all the great customer stories you have.
- Plan and schedule your posts. Make it a point to schedule your posts and always have a couple in the pipeline.
- Include a call to action. Don’t stop at saying thank you, position your brand as accessible and ready to help prospects like the customer you’ve just praised.
Interview Someone
People follow your brand because they have a good feeling about it. They’re probably interested in more than just buying your products.
Interviews give you the opportunity to explore the challenges your ideal customers and audience face at different stages of the buyer’s journey. When presenting these challenges, make sure to choose the right person to interview.
Run a Social-Exclusive Deal
Running a social media-exclusive deal is a more direct way of generating a return on investment. By making your deal exclusive to your audience on social media, you also create a sense of scarcity.
Conducting interviews via social media is arguably easier than traditional Q&A sessions.
By interviewing an influencer or professional in your industry on Twitter or Facebook Live, you can educate and entertain your audience at the same time.
Create a daily, weekly or monthly series
Do you want your social media feed to feel like an event, rather than a list of random posts?
You could start a series where you regularly interact with your fans and followers. By providing relevant content on a consistent basis, you could build a habit among your audience of looking forward to seeing specific content from your brand.
Here are 4 tips on how to make your social-exclusive deal a success:
- Have a clear offer that you know your audience wants
- Highlight the deal end date
- Promote it before you run it to generate interest
- Create supporting social posts around the deal to draw your audience to it
Get Nostalgic
Nostalgia is something that everyone loves, especially when it’s incorporated into a social media post in an appealing way. Lego does a great job of sharing nostalgic moments that are associated with their brand and the iconic toys that they produced in the early days.
Repurpose Video and Long-Form Content
Repurposing content helps you balance the need to generate valuable and on-brand material with the need to carry out campaigns that produce ROI.
After you’ve created your content, think about ways you can share it on social media in a format that will be engaging and easy to consume. For example, you can take a quote from your blog post and turn it into a shareable image using Canva.
You will need to be creative when you repurpose content so that your audience does not get bored.
Share Brand and Product Milestones
You should celebrate brand and product milestones, but only if they are relevant to your audience. Celebrating milestones that are not relevant to your audience will not generate interest or have an impact.
When basketball superstar Dwyane Wade retired, Budweiser created a moving video. During Wade’s final season, he made it a point to swap jerseys with NBA legends.
Use Holidays
Brands often use holidays as an excuse to run social campaigns. Any holiday can be used to good effect!
Share, pin, retweet & regram
Let your fans and followers do the talking for you and don’t be afraid of what they might say.
You don’t have to only post your own content on your social media feed. In fact, it’s often seen as a good idea to post other relevant brand’s content, articles, and photos from your followers. This shows that you’re part of your industry’s conversation, not just a parrot.
Many brands see the investment in video content marketing as being too complicated or out of their reach.
Creative social media ideas that incorporate video are much more likely to be shared than those that don’t.
Make a meme
Brands shouldn’t be afraid to show their sense of humor.
While not everyone may find success in memes as a marketing tool, social media platforms are often full of humorous images and satire.
Take advantage of trending topics
You never know when a great social media idea will come to you.
If you want your brand to capitalize on trending topics, you need to post about them on Twitter and Facebook. You have a limited time to do this before the topics are no longer relevant, but if you timing is good, you can get a lot of engagement on your posts.
Ask followers to tag a friend
The best way to get more people to view your social media posts is to simply ask them to.
Tag-a-friend posts are posts that people can respond to and that can also bring in new potential followers.
Run a social-exclusive deal
Although it’s not a good idea to bombard your followers with too many offers and deals, ads like Facebook carousel ads can help you earn a financial return on your social media investment.
Respond to your followers
Brands should expand on the concept of social media as a conversation by being willing to talk back to their followers. Responding to your audience shows that you care about their time and value their input.
How you respond to customer messages says a lot about your brand.
Which social media ideas catch your eye?
If you are bored with your current social media content, try some of these new ideas. Brands do not have to only use one type of content. With all of the available options, your social media should not feel like every day is the same.