What should you post on your social media page today?
And more importantly, how do you stay consistent with your social media content without burning out?
Every business should have some form of social media content automation to save time while remaining active on social media.
In this article, we will discuss the 3 best ways to craft a social media content strategy for your business.
By the end of the article, you will have a full-blown strategy and blueprint for your social media content.
And best of all, you will save a lot of time and avoid the headache of thinking what to post every day.
The 3 Best Social Media Content Strategies
1. The Content Pyramid
2. Share Trending Articles
3. User-Generated Content (“UGC”)
Social Media Content Strategy #1 – The Content Pyramid
The Content Pyramid is the best social media content strategy that we recommend.
Here’s how it works in 5 steps:
Step 1: Create Video Content
For video content, we recommend creating videos of at least 5 minutes long (the longer the better).
Your video could be an educational content (e.g “how to….”, “top 5 ways to….”), keynote speech, Q&A show, or even vlogs.
The content pyramid pillar will start here.
Once the video is done, post the video on YouTube and Vimeo.
Step 2: Write Blog Post
Now that you have the video content, you can transcribe the words and put it in a blog post format for posting to your website and social media.
Note: It is not mandatory to produce video content. If you are not producing video, simply start the content pyramid pillar from the blog post.
Step 3: Distribute Micro Content to Social Media
Here is where things start to get interesting.
With your video and/or blog post, you can break down the pyramid pillar content into a couple of micro content for distribution:
Micro Content #1 – Quotes
Find short quotes in your content and repurpose into an image quote for posting on social media.
Example of image quotes from Peng Joon:
This quote is probably extracted from one of his keynotes or short videos.
To get started with your own image quotes, find a couple of quotes in your blog posts and use tools like Canva or Promo Republic to create your own image quotes.
Micro Content #2 – Summary of Blog Post
Besides image quotes, you can also post a summary of your blog post as a micro content.
Let’s say your blog post is over 3,000 words long, summarize your blog post and post it on Facebook and Instagram.
Gary Vaynerchuk does it best by having long-form written content on Facebook from a summary of his video or blog post.
Here’s an example:
And people love it because they can read the post without leaving Facebook. Once they are done reading, they can continue scrolling to the next post on Facebook.
This also makes Facebook happy as they can keep the users on their site and your organic reach will be far greater as compared to sending people to your website and moving away from Facebook.
Micro Content #3 – Summary of Videos
This is the same concept as a blog post but in video form.
Find bits and pieces of your videos on YouTube, turn it into a few short videos and upload to social media.
Let’s say your video is 30 minutes long, you could create up to 10 short videos to illustrate each key point.
Here’s an interesting fact – A person WILL watch 30 minutes or hour-long videos on YouTube, but most people will NOT spend 30 minutes watching long videos on Facebook and Instagram.
We behave differently in each social media platform as the expectations and usage are different. Cater to your audience by having short 30 seconds to 5 minutes videos on Facebook and Instagram and upload long videos on YouTube and Vimeo.
By producing these 3 micro contents, you would already have plenty of content to post on social media.
Step 4: Tailor Image Size Requirements
Every social media channel has different image size requirement.
Here are some useful image sizes to take note of:
- Facebook shared image: 1,200 x 630
- Instagram photo: 1,080 x 1,080
- Instagram stories: 1,080 x 1,920
- Twitter photo: 440 x 220
- Google+ shared image: 497 x 373
For the full list of image sizes in every social media platforms, refer to this social media image guide.
Step 5: Content Automation
Once you have created all the content, it’s time to automate your content and ensure the content is being posted several times to fully maximize your reach.
Here are 2 of our favourite content automation tools:
#1 – Missing Lettr
Missing Lettr is a tool to help you automate your blog posting for a year.
The same blog post will be automatically posted to your social media pages EVERY month for a period of one year, without you having to log in and manually post each time.
You can also edit the scheduling posting in their 12 months evergreen editor:
This has helped us automate our blog posting for the year and send consistent traffic from social media to our blog.
#2 – Promo Republic
While Missing Lettr is great for blog posting to social media pages, Promo Republic is a tool we use to create image quotes and again, have it automated.
In the Promo Republic library, there are already hundreds of pre-made templates for image quotes:
You can either use them and customize from there or design your image quotes from scratch.
You can also repost as many times as you want:
Putting It All Together – The Content Pyramid Social Media Strategy
Here’s a recap of The Content Pyramid:
1. Create video content
2. Write blog post
3. Distribute micro content to social media
4. Tailor image size requirements
5. Content automation
Most social media pages have no clue what to post or how to strategize their content for maximum reach.
If you put in the work for content strategy 1 (yes, this is still the first strategy), you are already ahead of 80% of your competitors.
Let’s move on to the second strategy, we promise this is much easier!
Social Media Content Strategy #2 – Share Trending Articles
This strategy is simple as all you need to do is share trending articles that have garnered a lot of shares.
These are content that has been proven to be popular in social media and you would take the content and share it on your page.
The benefit of this strategy is, you won’t have to produce your own content and you will be sharing content that your followers would like and even share (given that it’s already been proven to work).
So the question, how do you find such shareable content?
There are 2 ways to do this:
1: Use Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a tool that finds the most shared content and key influencers in your industry.
Go to Buzzsumo and type in your search term. In this example, we could type in “social media content strategy”:
Buzzsumo will then search the shares around the web and give us the share results:
For example, the first article “5 Social Media Tips for Your Content Marketing Strategy” already have thousands of shares across all few social media platforms.
You can then copy this URL and share the content on your social media page.
2: Use Content Studio
As an alternative, you can use Content Studio. It’s similar to Buzzsumo as you can also find trending article based on the search term.
In this example, let’s go for the search term “online marketing.”
You will see the 659 shares and 608 shares respectively from the image above and this could be a good article to share on your Facebook page as well if your page is about online marketing.
One benefit Content Studio has over Buzzsumo is social media content automation. You can set the post for repeated posting throughout the year across all the social media platforms.
With Content Studio, you can share the content across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Linkedin on autopilot, while on Buzzsumo you have to manually post the article each time.
Bonus tip: Instead of sharing the content, you can find those best performing articles with a lot of shares and write a better article than that. Once the content is done, you can use strategy 1, The Content Pyramid to distribute your content and generate shares.
Social Media Content Strategy #3 – User-Generated Content
If you think strategy 2 is simple and easy, strategy #3 is even easier, and arguably more effective.
Utilize User-Generated Content (“UGC”) to enhance brand awareness without creating the content yourself.
A UGC is a content produced by your customers or influencers. You can then share those content on your social media pages and increase social proof.
Let’s look at an example, Healthish is a brand that sells water bottle with unique time indicators.
While Healthish does post pictures of their water bottle on Instagram:
They also use the UGC strategy to share what their customers/influencers are posting on their Instagram feed.
The UGC strategy will even help you generate more sales as people often buy after seeing how other people are enjoying your product.
And the best part is, you don’t have to create the content yourself!
Here are 2 ways to do it:
1. Giveaway your product in exchange for your influencers and/or customers to create the UGC
2. Pay your influencers and/or customers for a UGC post.
You can post UGC once per week to diversify your content strategy and establish your business as a trusted brand with happy customers.
Need Help With Your Social Media Content?
As a social media marketing agency in Malaysia, we have used the 3 strategies above to manage our clients’ social media accounts and ensure there is always fresh content on their social media page.
We are also recently featured in Trusted Malaysia as one of the top digital agencies in Malaysia.
If you need help with implementing the strategies, feel free to reach out to us and we will discuss how to incorporate all 3 strategies for your business.
Conclusion
There you have it.
A blueprint and strategy for social media content. Utilize all the strategies above and you will never run out of ideas on what to post on your social media pages.
As always, if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below or email us at info@axceldigital.com