40 social media post ideas to boost your business

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Not sure what to post anymore? Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us.

Instead of scratching your head, use this guide of social media post ideas as your playbook for growing your business with social media and social media posting tools.

Quality is key to a successful social media platform. Your consistent, high-quality posting record fuels a loyal following and grows their relationship with you.

But how does your business keep a steady flow of social media post ideas over time? Social media requires a lot of content, and if it’s too samey your audience will get bored. It’s key to have a social media plan in place.

It’s therefore essential to post regular, high-quality content that changes regularly. As part of creating an engaging social media presence, it’s vital to regularly post high-quality content. This means mixing up your memes with your infographics and following a hefty article with something lighter and easier to digest like a quick tip.

As part of our free content calendar template, we’ve outlined the different post types we use at ContentCal, and help you plan a great mix of these for the year ahead.

The fact is, great examples of social media are everywhere you look. That’s what makes it so obvious when you’re doing it wrong, or your posts are getting tired. But ultimately, every company with great examples of social media marketing has the social media mix that works best for them.

Here are some of the different social media post ideas for your business to throw into your social media plan.

Prefer to get some social media inspiration in the form of an inforgraphic? Check out this post from Mobile Monkey.

Infographics tell you a lot in a short space of time. The Economist magazine is the king of the infographic and has a whole data team working on visualizations that tell their stories.

That doesn’t mean you can’t pull together your own infographic yourself. You can use aggregated customer data and graph maker tools like Visme to build graphs of your own. Look out for some great social media marketing apps to help.

By sharing a quotation from a member of the business, you show a couple of things. First of all, you show that you’re the authority on the subject. Secondly, you’re giving your customers direct access to your team, so they feel as though they’re rooting for your brand.

For a follower to be truly engaged, they need to be able to join in on conversations, and feel as though they’re able to meet your team in the flesh. Inviting them to events is a great way to make a virtual follower ‘real’.

Curating content and using the correct social media management platform is valuable and a great tactic for any business. Publications like New Scientist spend huge amounts of time and money creating social media marketing content that’s better than your brand could ever dream of putting together yourself. So if an article relates to a conversation your industry is having at the moment, share the piece and give your own take at the top of the post.

Sometimes a number can speak volumes. Eliminate the words and use the strength of a single statistic to make a point clear. They can spark discussion, and make people sit up and pay attention. Statistics are the bite-size solution for a quick, impactful social media post idea for your business.

Polls are a quick way of getting the opinion of your audience and encouraging them to engage with a certain topic.Polls can be about pretty much anything. We find they’re especially helpful to ask our audience for feedback, but they can be about the color of a new product line, can be about something as random as what fruit your followers like best, or something sparky about the political climate, like the example below.

If something aligns well with your brand, go for it.

Social media isn’t the place to be overly humble. Instead, when someone tells you that you’ve done a job well, use your social channels to share the news. Sharing content using a social media marketing automation tool can also help save you time.

Your audience wants to hear from real people, with real experiences of whatever product or service it is you offer. They will relate to this in a far more authentic and powerful way than when you’re talking about your own company.

A picture tells a thousand words, and that really is the case with social media. Instagram is the natural arena for sharing photos, but they really enhance any post on any platform.Striking, memorable images don’t have to be expensive to produce, or of anything particularly exciting. They can be of a product, like the example from Vaseline below, or of your team.

Emojis are powerful at evoking emotions when used carefully alongside words. Used appropriately, they add impact to your posts. In this example, emojis are used as a fun way to draw the user’s eye to the post, and elicit emotion by showing the variety of species under threat.

We all love cartoons; they are quick and efficient ways of getting a message across on your social media platforms. They can convey a message simply, and with an emotive drive. They can tackle relatively complex subjects in a nutshell.Take this example, it’s difficult to imagine how Wrigley’s Extra could convey the same message in a different format, but with the same power:

Sharing about an employee who has done something well, or achieved something notable, is a way of demonstrating that your business has the best of the best. It also shows that you, as an employer, value your people and understand that it is individuals who make your business a success.

Again, this helps to make your company seem far more relatable and personable to your audience.

Offering something to your audience, for free, can push engagement through the roof. Everyone loves a freebie!

This can be a part of your product, or an Excel spreadsheet, like this free content calendar template.

If you regularly give things away, you’re more likely to attract followers and get more shares on your posts. Giveaways are also great for generating product awareness but don’t give away too much, or your existing customers might not be happy!

Similar to the give-away, the competition is a great way to give engagement a boost. Organize a prize with a partner, like we did with Social Day 2020, and get entrants to like and share your post to be in with a chance of winning. There’s a lot of opportunities to get engagement on several follow-up posts.

It’s always a good idea to get entrants to like and share a post or hunt for answers to certain questions.

There’s something compelling about a catchy GIF. Without the hassle of creating a video, you can use the impressive capability of a moving picture, focusing on a popular catchphrase, moment, or persona. Admittedly, businesses don’t always use GIFs as well as they could. Just because you love the series Friends, don’t force a Friends GIF on a particular post unless it fits.

The spoken word is really influential. For many, listening to a podcast is part of their daily life. There’s room for it on the commute, over lunch, or when you’ve simply had enough of sitting at a screen.

With a podcast, you can dive deeply into a topic without the effort required to read a long article. Your followers can save it and come back to it. What’s more, it’s another opportunity to partner with businesses like yours and become part of the fabric of your industry’s community.

Your followers have actively chosen to follow you. You’ve already hooked them in, to a degree. However, repeat business is always easier than new business. Therefore, by giving your social media followers something exclusive, that they can only use with you, you’ll help to secure another sale. Also, be careful you’re not being spammy with your messaging.

It can be a little laborious to pull together news from across your industry. However, putting together a weekly or monthly news round-up shows that you’re the authority. Having a social media marketing plan is vital when it comes to communications. By sharing developments across the industry, you position your business as the source of industry information while also building trust.

Just like at school, it’s important to show on social media platforms that you know what’s cool and what’s not. Find out what’s trending on social media and either share something that’s going viral, or create your own post using the relevant viral hashtag. This is particularly important on Instagram and Twitter, where everyone wants to be seen as ‘on trend’.

Linkedin is the obvious place to post if you’re hiring, but did you know that recruitment posts are legitimate content in their own right?

They don’t just spread the word about your latest vacancy, they also demonstrate that you’re a vibrant company to work for, and paint a picture of you as a great employer. The best recruitment posts don’t only attract talent but grow your following and influence.

You can draw from some of the other social media post ideas to help you create a great recruitment post for your business. Social media posting tools can help here.

User-generated content (UGC) can be incredibly influential. It tends to carry greater weight than anything you can do and is particularly valuable in retail. Evidence of a satisfied customer using your products in their real life is worth more than you can do. It also demonstrates that you listen to your audience - and everyone loves to be listened to.

Businesses who conduct surveys or research should always publish the results, often in stages, on social media. Simply by undertaking the research or survey, you demonstrate that you’re knowledgeable about the things that are of interest to your audience. It shows that you understand them and demonstrates that you’re ahead of the game, and are a source of great information.

If you publish a blog, you should share it on social media, usually several times and always in different ways.

Crafting blog posts takes time, and getting people to read them takes effort too. However, it can be really valuable. It drives traffic to your website and boosts your SEO, and it offers something valuable to your readers. In a blog post you can go much deeper than you can in most social media marketing posts.

But your business needs some social media post ideas up your sleeve to ensure that blog gets a good amount of traffic.

If you have the resources to make a mini-series, they can be really effective. Plan the series well, hooking people in from the start.

If you produce something engaging and relevant, you’ll have people tuning in regularly for the next instalment. Series predominantly work well as videos geared around a theme, but you could also use podcasts or blog posts that build on a theme.

Not sure where is the best place to publish your mini-series? Check out our blog on Youtube vs IGTV "YouTube v IGTV".

Obviously, what constitutes as controversial will depend on your field. However, the modern consumer values a company that is willing to stand up for what it believes in. This will, inevitably, mean that you aren’t always ‘liked’ by the masses. However, all that really matters is that you are liked by the people that mean the most to your business.

Don’t quietly release a new product in your ecommerce store, but let people know when it’s coming and when it arrives. Build the buzz about the new product and you’ll have customers on board well before you try to make a sale.

Memes are easy to make, and plenty of free meme creation software is a click away. They allow you to make a quick statement in a popular and accessible way. If you can choose images that reflect your audience and their likes well, memes aren’t just funny but resonate with your audience as part of a community.

Users are drawn to videos more than any other type of content. Although it’s not a good idea to publish advertising straight to social media, that doesn’t mean social media marketing automation isn’t a great place to showcase your product in a creative way.

Starting a Twitter chat is a brilliant way to invite interested parties to discuss a topic relevant to your business. By sparking public conversation around a hashtag, your brand is positioned as an authority on the subject, you’ll be able to speak to your audience directly, leading the discussion, and you’ll attract others interested in the topic. You can read more about creating a Twitter chat in this article from Social Media Examiner.

Introduce a new member of your team to the world by posting a photo and maybe a short bio about them on your social media platforms. It’s a great way to make the newcomer feel valued while also showing your audience the faces behind your brand.

Looking to use this content theme on Instagram? Discover the best time to post on Instagram now.

Whether it’s an industry-relevant riddle or a mini Wordsearch, a weekly challenge will give your audience a great incentive to engage with your social channels each week. If you get it right, your audience will look for your social channels every week. Make sure you’re set up to achieve this with the correct social media tools. 

Your family and friends don’t appreciate your work-related jokes, so why not use social media to make someone laugh? It will make those within your industry feel ‘on the inside’, and gives them somewhere to share their own funnies.

There’s something innately compelling about story-telling. Use a story to talk about your brand. It may be how you started, what happened at a particular event, or something else entirely.

Show your audience the behind the scenes of your business by sharing some day-in-the-life stories of staff members, customers, or service users. These can be fascinating insights, leading your audience to appreciate what happens ‘on the job’.

Streaming live video engages your audience intimately with your brand, especially if you have a key brand figure, such as Martha Stewart. It works well for a range of scenarios including Q&As, virtual tours and demos, and you can do it from Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram and Twitter.

Is your product or service complicated? Have you introduced something new that people are puzzling about? Is your platform experiencing some downtime?

Drop a quick note on Twitter to let people know what to expect, and the best way to deal with the situation. It’s worth noting that you should also find a way to reach those customers that aren’t on Twitter.

There are a number of different ways you can provide interactive content with a

Social media posting schedule. For example, you could provide a slideshow presentation, or a free online course. This content offers your users something of real value which they wouldn’t associate with a standard social media marketing post.

We’ve mentioned the importance of quotes that come from people inside your organization. But what about inspiring quotes from famous figures? Find something meaningful for your business, and use the strength of someone else’s words to convey the viewpoint or core value your business is looking to present.

Whether you expect a sign-up email address, or are happy to give it away with no strings attached, offering an eBook has a number of benefits. They can provide a deep-dive into meatier subjects, and they demonstrate that you can add value, taking potential customers closer to a conversion.

Tips, tricks and hacks are easily accessible bitesize snippets of information. They are easy for your audience to remember because they aren’t wordy, and they also give a quick way of giving value to your audience. You could even new apps and tools such as Squad app.

Case studies allow your audience to relate with your service or product in a concrete way. Because they show how you’ve genuinely made a difference, your audience will find them engaging and authentic.

Which social media post idea is your favorite? Let us know over on Twitter at @ContentCal_io