You know that feeling where you just had tacos for lunch, and then tacos for dinner, and then the next day someone suggests tacos for breakfast, and it’s like, “Gregory, please, this is way too many tacos in a row.”
That’s how your social media followers feel when you don’t maintain the right balance of content!
When you’re planning out your social media updates – and especially when you’re doing it using a scheduling tool – you want to make sure you’re planning a strong variety. Otherwise, you’re giving your fans that too-many-tacos feeling.
But how do you do it?
How do you maintain that healthy balance of different types of content that’ll keep your followers from burning out?
By categorizing the different types of content that you share!
Categorizing your social media updates by type makes the planning and sharing process a whole lot easier – here’s how.
Think of your social updates like Skittles that you’re handing out one at a time – and you don’t want to keep giving someone the same flavor over and over.
Is it easier to make sure they get a variety if all those candies are mixed together in a big bowl, or if they’re separated into different bowls by flavor, so you can just rotate?
That’s exactly how categorizing your social media updates works – you sort everything into groups based on type, and that way, you can easily choose what types of content get posted at certain times.
This is something that a lot of marketers do already – you just have to know how to look for it!
Want to see how you can categorize your social media content to make scheduling a breeze?
Let’s check out some examples of how it’s done!
Categorizing your social media updates
Depending on how often you blog and how many evergreen posts you like to re-share over time, you might keep all of your blog posts lumped together in one giant category.
If you want to make sure you’re maintaining the strongest possible variety, though, separating your homegrown content into different categories can make your life a lot easier!
Categories like…
Tutorials and How-tos
If you create a lot of instructional content for your blog, you might benefit from putting it all into its own category.
Social Media Examiner is a perfect example:
Learn how to create a Facebook page post ad using Facebook Business Manager ???????? https://t.co/N68uVOwRJ8 by @tristan_biz #facebookmarketing #facebookads
— Social Media Examiner (@SMExaminer) May 24, 2018
Their site publishes a wide variety of content types, including how-to posts like the one they shared above – and when you look at their social feeds, you can see that those different content types are nicely mixed up.
(So you won’t, for example, see links to 20 different how-to posts in a row without anything else to break them up.)
Behind the Scenes
Pulling back the curtain on your business is a great way to humanize yourself and create some teachable moments.
Maybe you’re going behind the scenes of how the business actually works:
Who at MeetEdgar has the home office that ✨speaks to you✨ the most? https://t.co/5l8uPW5ylN
— MeetEdgar ???? (@MeetEdgar) April 6, 2018
Or maybe you’re using something you experienced as the context for a post that provides tips and tricks:
We learned just how important it actually is to go back and add captions to your old Facebook live broadcasts: https://t.co/d3Nu0XOESp pic.twitter.com/kI1nwtnZZ9
— MeetEdgar ???? (@MeetEdgar) May 4, 2018
Whether it’s the entire purpose of your post or just a framing device for a larger lesson, taking your audience behind the scenes can be an engaging break from the norm, so peppering this type of post in with your usual material is a strong way to keep things fresh!
Podcasts and Interviews
Maybe you host the occasional podcast, or conduct interviews with other leaders in your industry.
When that’s the case, splitting that type of content into its own category creates a lot of opportunities for multimedia-rich updates like this:
That thing that makes you unique, that makes you YOU. ????Take THAT and make it your business, your success. https://t.co/vXLo8N6l5Z pic.twitter.com/s767yWqyZa
— Pat Flynn (@PatFlynn) May 24, 2018
When you look at Pat Flynn’s Twitter profile, you can see that he shares a lot of links to his podcasts, but with plenty of variety in the aesthetic and function of those updates.
While ones like the update above embed audio previews, for example, others just include an eye-catching graphic:
How to Get More Email Subscribers (17 Lead Magnet Ideas) https://t.co/JyIQCxY5jA #leadmagnet #emailmarketing pic.twitter.com/3LWPwcU9CS
— Pat Flynn (@PatFlynn) May 28, 2018
SEMrush is another strong example of this strategy, using different parts of the same podcast as source material for different promotional updates:
This type of variety is exactly what Twitter wants to see (here’s more on how and why), and spreading it out among other types of content helps you get the most mileage out of it!
(After all, you want that stuff to be seen by different audiences – posting ’em all back-to-back might not be the best way to do that.)
Vlogs and Videos
Just like with podcasts, splitting off vlogs and videos into their own category can help you keep things fresh on social media.
Take entrepreneur Marie Forleo for example!
Her Twitter profile is a strong mix of quotes, tips, and links to videos like this one (among other stuff, too):
This interview with the incredible @GilbertLiz is a treasure map to unleash your most creative & expressive life. ✨ #creativeinspiration #bigmagic https://t.co/tbKLttq1dM
— Marie Forleo (@marieforleo) May 24, 2018
Sprinkling video links in among other categories of social media content keeps them from being overwhelming, and breaks up the other stuff, as well!
And here’s another great example of how this can make your life easier:
That video is from 2015.
Because the content is so timeless, it can be shared on social again and again over time – and just like SEMrush did with their podcast promotion above, the actual text of the update can change, too:
Stop everything & watch this magical conversation w/ @GilbertLiz now! Ur heart & soul will thank you for it #BigMagic http://t.co/Eranyb1bMc
— Marie Forleo (@marieforleo) September 22, 2015
This is one of the biggest ways that categorizing your social updates makes your life easier.
When you categorize, you can crank out a whole bunch of different updates for a single piece of content (here’s how), and you don’t have to worry about posting them all in a row – they’ll have stuff from other categories spreading them out!
Instead of your timeline looking like this:
[Random social media update]
[Random social media update]
[Random social media update]
[Random social media update]
[Random social media update]
It’ll look like this:
[Blog post – How-to]
[Quote of the day]
[Blog post – Video]
[Inspiration]
[Blog post – Infographic]
See? Guaranteed variety, built right in!
Lists
Lists and roundups can be a nice break from types of blog posts that might be more dense – and separating them from those more involved types can inject a little more variety into your social media.
Here’s an example that makes it clear that what you’re about to click on is a roundup of easily-digestible tips and strategies:
Here are some tips from my online community, The Front Row, about what to do when you are stuck with content writing #blog https://t.co/QWkMHiFupW #JenTips #contentmarketing pic.twitter.com/VBhC9Gebhd
— Jen Lehner????"Alexa, launch Front Row Entrepreneur" (@jenrgy) May 29, 2018
This sort of thing is also perfect for spacing out your shoutouts when you tag the profiles of the people or brands that a roundup features:
Here’s our list of the best #copywriting quotes of all time, with examples from @MarketingProfs, @copyhackers and @JeffGoins to name a few! https://t.co/uupYJfjW7Y
— ActiveCampaign (@ActiveCampaign) April 11, 2018
And all of these examples of different ways you can categorize your blog posts are just a FEW of the options out there.
If you’re a health coach, for example, maybe you want to create separate categories for recipes and workouts – it’s all content that lives on your website!
Just don’t forget that not everything you post on social media will necessarily lead to your website – and that means some other categories you might create include things like:
Quotes, Inspiration, and Tips
When you’re trying to balance out the links you share to your own stuff on social media, updates that share content like quotes, inspiration, and tips are perfect.
A quote like this:
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
– Lando Calrissian & Han Solo pic.twitter.com/9pS9lAtq0d— The Star Wars Underworld (@TheSWU) May 26, 2018
Or an inspirational message like this:
https://twitter.com/yogatailor/status/1000499089417605120
Or even a quick, bite-sized tip like this:
Where to install smoke & CO2 detectors pic.twitter.com/uVTVOfGORL
— Lowe's (@Lowes) April 24, 2018
If you were to share 50 of these in a row, your audience might start to burn out on them – but by keeping them in their own category and alternating it with your other categories, you can effectively space them out over time!
Promos and Special Offers
Love writing guest posts for different blogs? Stick ’em in their own special category!
Mixing these in with the other stuff you post helps promote your appearances all over the web:
Writes one post for @copyhackers
Gets more clicks than any article ever written on my own site
If it's good, it's good
¯_(ツ)_/¯https://t.co/A7jBnVj64W— Kaleigh Moore (@kaleighf) April 30, 2018
That might also include upcoming appearances you’ve got lined up, like an AMA or a Twitter chat:
I'm doing an AMA on @IndieHackers on Monday! Go ahead and leave your questions about me and @MeetEdgar here https://t.co/lNOF9nHYrb
— Laura Roeder (@lkr) May 4, 2018
Depending on how much of this stuff you usually participate in, you might even break up this category into different, smaller ones!
For example, we’ve created different categories for some of our different webinars, so that we’re spreading out the promotions for all of them:
(That’s from our own Edgar account – because Edgar’s scheduling system is based on categories, you can set and forget your custom spread of different types of content.)
And these are all just a FEW of the different ways you can categorize the content you share on social media!
Splitting up the social media updates you share into different categories based on type makes it easy to ensure you’re always getting that perfect variety of content – and your audience will notice!
What are some of YOUR favorite ways to categorize your social updates?
Whether you do it using Edgar or you’ve got another method, how do you like to split up your own social media updates into categories?
Got a cat memes category you post something from every morning?
Or a weekend inspiration category you post something from every Saturday?
Share a few of your own faves in the comments, and link to where we can see ’em on social!
