20 Social Media Content Ideas To Grow Your Followers & Increase Engagement

Here’s a recent Edgar Live sharing 20 social media content ideas to help grow your audience.

There are a lot of buzzwords around about how you should create social media content authentically and how you should niche down in order to blow up. But what does all of it really mean? We're going to dive into those jargon-y words and explain how you can create a diverse, exciting social media feed, with some new content ideas for you.

Create Content That Connects

An authentic connection means doing a little bit of soul searching. That means discovering what is in your head and heart so that your followers are able to discover that and trust you and make sure that you're creating a space where people can be around other like-minded individuals who are also interested in the topics that you're discussing.

Think about what you and your company stand for. If you need to do some time of sitting down and journaling this out, it can help improve your social media strategy because every piece of content will be consistent with what you believe is going on in your industry and the value you can offer your followers.

Think about the ways that you can go all-in with this message. Amplify this content that you're going to create out to the other networks, but make sure you're always creating content for the one network that your audience truly engages with you on. It takes a network to grow a network and you want to authentically show up on all of them and engage with your followers with this sort of diverse content that we'll dive into.

Get specific when you're creating content. What is the specific problem that you're solving for your followers? You need to have this in mind to make sure that when your followers see it, they know they're in the right place. Talk to people about what their pain points are, what your specific experience with your product or service, and how it can solve those pain points.

If you can have that discussion with someone, it's going to help them understand that they are within the right community to solve and to make sure that they are up-leveling either a skill or getting a product that can bring them more time or more joy to their life.

Lead with a value-first approach when you're creating content. You want to make sure that you're teaching people how to use your product or service and that you're really making sure that the tips you're putting out there are going to progress someone from where they are now and have this transformation to where they want to be after using your product or service. So think about a value-first approach when we're going over what type of content you're adding to social media and thinking about how you can add your own unique voice into every single piece of content.

You're Weirdsies Are Your Edge

Weirdsies are those unique things that make you, you, and that make your company a little bit different. Here are social media content ideas that share your weirdsies and connects your audience to you.

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1. Share Your Own Story

Be your own story. Share how you use your product or service in your own life because it's going to be real people using these things. Don't just list off the features necessarily. Tell a story about how you use those features because it's going to be that story and that narrative that people remember more than just a feature list.

2. Nostalgia Posts

Nostalgic posts help move people to be more emotionally connected with your brand. These are posts like, what did you want to be when you were little? Ask your followers that question. Studies have shown that nostalgia is one of the strongest emotions you can use to connect with people. Go ahead and tell your community what you wanted to be when you're little and ask them back. Social media is about creating these emotional connections and having real conversations with real people who are on the other side of the screen.

3. Curated Content

Curated content is not only a great way to show that you're staying up to date within your industry, but it's also a great way to go ahead and add in a little bit of your thought leadership about what's going on in your industry. Tell people if you agree or disagree or how your opinion differs for what people are already sharing out there. It is a great way to make sure that when people come to your social feeds, they realize you're saving them time and being helpful and they don't have to go out and Google this information on their own.

Curated content is a huge value-add for your followers and you can then get your little weirdsies and you can get your spin on what's going on within that content and you can inject that in the status update just to get your thought leadership out there a little bit stronger.

4. The Desired Outcome

You want to have in your mind what the problem that person is trying to solve is, and what outcome they want. For example, at MeetEdgar, we're a social media automation tool. The desired outcome of people who are going to purchase from us is not that they want more software in their life. It's that they want more time, they want more time so that they don't have to jump onto social media and post all the time.

In our status updates, we are painting a picture for people to see themselves having that outcome, to see themselves being able to work on other areas of their business, or relax on a holiday with their family and not have to worry about their social media being updated all the time. Go ahead and look a little bit at your social media promotional posts and see if you can make them more outcome-oriented than just feature-oriented.

5. Your Gratitude

Whether that is someone who has used your product or service and you're giving them a little bit of user-generated content shout-out, or just telling your community who inspired you to take action to dream and how they did that to take action to help you start your company. These ideas of gratitude spread like wildfire on social media. Think of the ways that you can add a little bit of gratitude into your social media posting schedule. It'll really help to spark your conversation levels because people love to celebrate inspirational and joyous things. There's research that backs the fact that this some of the most shared content on social media focuses on inspiration and joy.

6. Show Your Face

If you are someone who's a little bit camera shy, I'm going to ask you to get brave and actually do things like take a selfie. If you don't want it on your beautifully curated feed, think about the ways you can use these in your stories, that's ephemeral content that'll just disappear within 24 hours. The reason that a selfie is such a powerful tool to use as a business on social media, is because it reminds your followers that there's a real person on the other side of the screen and it is a shared experience that that person knows exactly what you're doing when you're taking that selfie. They can picture your hand up there, they can picture the face in the camera there, and this again is a way that you're having an experience with them that they can actually relate to.

If you're not sharing your face on social, if you're not getting that brand recognition out there, it is a lot harder for you to gain the trust of your followers. As humans, we're wired to know what faces and kind of emotional reactions are happening in order to get what we call a brand voice tone. A lot of the actual communication that goes on when you're having a conversation is nonverbal. You can read people's cues, whether it's their hand gestures, whether it's them nodding or whether they're spacing out and not listening. The more you can add in these facial recognition ideas, the more that you're able to get a tone across on social media than it's just you sharing link after link.

7. Share Tips

You might already know you should be sharing tips about your niche but not all your tips have to do with your product or your service. They can be things like common tips that you know humans love. Things like, when was the last time you saved money or when was the last time you saved time doing something? You know everyone out there wants the goods on how to save money and how to save time in life. If you can save someone time or money with a tip that you know, it's likely going to get a nice bond with them that is going to create a really high emotion of your brand. Think about ways you can share tips that have worked in your life even if it's not related to your product or service. Again, that is doing what we call a value-first approach to social media content creation.

8. Host AMAs

"Ask me Anything" is just a way that you can collect questions from your followers, whether you're sourcing the tickets that come into your inbox from your customer support agents, or whether this is putting out an Instagram story using the Questions sticker. The reason this is powerful is that it reminds you that if one person is asking this question, it's likely that 10 to 20 of your followers also have this question and they might not even have known they had it.

Bonus points if you do your AMA live because you'll get that bump in the algorithm.  You're also giving your audience facial recognition so that when it comes time they need your product or service, they trust that you're going to be there to take care of them because you've held their hand the whole way and you've given them this value.

9. Promote Your Live

If you are doing a live video, I always suggest scheduling out some posts to let people know you're doing this. Let people know to show up live you can add in an action bonus tip that you're saying, "If you show up live, I have a special discount for you, but only for live people." Stuff like that could be really fun just to gain a little bit more attraction and a little traffic to that live video and get your community there together. Don't be afraid to build up some anticipation with posting that you can actually get out there to raise awareness that you have a live video coming up on a specific day or time.

10. Share Memes

As we said before, some of the most shared content on social media is happy, funny content, and inspirational content. We recommend using shares as an engagement goal for your content. Shares not only lets you know that it resonated with someone in a powerful way but it's also opening up your brand name to their audience. Focus on content that's shareable but might not have anything to do with the product or service that you're selling, but goes along with your brand voice.

11. Social Media Holidays

Goofy national social media holidays are super fun to add to your content calendar. You can just Google national holidays and it'll give you a list of each and every day that's been themed a certain holiday. Here at Edgar, we personally like to celebrate National Octopus Day. It's on October 8th if you are wondering, but go look at different things that you can do to celebrate these funny national days. People love to take part in these national holidays and it's a great way to join the discussion that's already going on on social media. I like to think about joining the discussion as being way easier than starting a new one with this type of content too, right? Think about if you're at a party, it's a lot easier to join in a discussion that's already going on than to just stand in the middle of the room at a party and shout, "Hey, a new topic that I want to talk about here." Right? It's the same deal with social media. It's a party that you just want to join the discussion already going on so that you can fit in with the vibe of the room and really get that great conversation going.

12. Share Discounts (In a Valuable Way)

Try offering discounts just for your followers. This sort of exclusivity per network works really well for enticing people to follow you on each of your social networks and it's also a great way to make sure that your promotional posts are coming across in a giving way. You're not just promoting all the time to your Facebook followers the same promotions that are going on on your website, but you're letting them know how much you care about them actually being there with you and actually discovering your brand on Facebook, by offering them a Facebook-specific discount.

13. Share Your Life Outside Your Business

You can also want to talk a little bit more about what your life is like outside of your business. Again, this goes into the fact that you have to build rapport and trust and a way to do that is to pull back the curtain and give some behind the scenes content to show you're a real person with a real family and that you're building this business in order to support that family. That's a really great message to put out there. So do you have a picture of your kids or your pet that you could share to humanize your brand and to make sure that people are seeing you're just like them? And that's going to create that trust and that's going to open up a channel for your followers to do the same. So you have to be out there and be a little bit more vulnerable first to give your followers permission to also be vulnerable and to communicate with your brand on social media.

Other things that you can do is, especially right now, take a picture of your workspace. People want to see your home office or if you have a really great system for organizing different things on your desk, share that out. It can really be fun for people to get that, again, behind the scenes look into your business. Or think about your morning routine. This is a really hot topic in social media. People love to hear about others' morning routines to increase productivity. Morning time when we wake up is all a shared experience. That rush to get to work versus having a little bit of downtime to center yourself during the day is a struggle that a lot of us actually deal with. So if you can share that with your followers, it's likely that they've had an experience that's similar to that and similar experiences are what connects people together and that is when the social media trifecta will happen, when you're able to bring those experiences and those people together on your social media to create a community.

14. User-Generated Content

User-generated content is the content that your users and your community have tagged you in or where they are sharing their experience with your product or service. You can really make sure that you're up-leveling the fact that you are appreciative of that gratitude in there, but also using these as testimonials. And this goes into the fact that social proof is what we do so much to have. Our purchases are influenced by social proof more than anything. If your friend tells you about a product or service, it's much more likely that you'll buy from that brand than if you just discovered it on your own because you trust your friend.

So how can you produce some stories that humanize other people who have used your product or service and make it feel like they're just telling your other followers about that product or service? Use that user-generated content to tell someone's story and to share it out to others who might be on the fence from purchasing from you, but if they see that social proof that someone has had the outcome or have the experience that they want in their own life, your trustworthiness on social media is going to skyrocket, making your job of selling just that much easier.

15. Be Relateable

Relate-ability is everything when you're producing status updates on social media and relate-ability goes into the fact that you want to make sure that you're not only sharing the moments where you're like in a rocket ship going to space. Those crazy cool moments. You want to share the everyday moments because that's what your followers are going through. If you think something is too boring to share on social media, that could actually be a signal that that's the perfect thing to share with your followers because they have likely had a boring incident like that. If you're someone who's only sharing the successes and good stuff on social media, think about the ways you can actually become a mentor to your followers by sharing some of your failures and sharing some of your struggles. If you can save them time and you can teach them something without them having to go through the pain of perhaps failing in the ways you have, you're approaching social media in a value-adding space in a service-oriented mindset and that is what's going to attract followers to know, like, and trust you as an authority in your industry.

16. Ask Your Followers What They're Working On

Show them what you're working on. Again, these are things that are super relatable and it's also a great way to get feedback on your product or service. This is keeping the social in social media and making sure if you're going to release a feature or if you're someone who has a product that has a new line out, go ahead and ask your followers for feedback on it before you release it. This idea of releasing something that has your followers actually helping you build it, is what's called the IKEA effect. If you take the time to help build something, you're much more likely to actually like that piece of furniture or in this case, your product or service, so much more because you have some stake in it. Think about the ways you can bring your followers into the building process of your work and actually get that great IKEA effect working for you.

17. Share Industry Facts

People are data-hungry in this world, so if there are some numbers about your industry that you can put on a beautiful background in Canva and actually share out, it's a great hook to get people really interested in what you're talking about. So go ahead and make a post that's called a "Did You Know" post or something that you can hook people in that's going to pique their curiosity. Curiosity, kind of like nostalgia, is another emotion that is perfect for social media because as humans, our brains are wired to want to close an information gap. If you can put information out there that someone doesn't think that they know, it's going to spark that curiosity aspect of them want to click to find out more.

This is a great technique to also take with your blog posts. Spark someone's curiosity and if they don't feel like they know the answer to what you're proposing there, they'll likely click through because they want to go ahead and close that gap of not knowing and get that information. We are curious creatures so use that to your advantage.

18. Document Your Day

We want to go ahead and see what people are doing on social media. That's why we go to these platforms. And if you're documenting your day, it's a way that you can show up in your follower's lives at the same time. They're likely eating lunch there. Show them what you're eating for lunch, how you made it, how you say time or money making it. These things again, that are more boring and more kind of relatable, actually do better on social media because people can see themselves in your posts and they can have a conversation with you and you can get that engagement. Go ahead and pull from people outside of your industry for inspiration. I always like to go ahead and say this because if we're paying too much attention to the movers and shakers in our industry and to those influencers who are just in our industry, it's likely that it might actually be scaring you away from sharing your own thought leadership here.

19. Learn From Your Peers

See what's working for people outside of your industry, not only in the types of content that they're creating but the way they're telling their stories in there. It'll not cloud your brain with any sort of those negative thoughts of being like, "Oh my gosh, everyone's talking about this," if you go too deep within your industry, but you'll still get that great inspiration from other marketers out there. So explore other industries to see what's working for people in marketing because it's likely some of those tactics can be used on your page.

20. Share Your Why

And lastly, remember you are selling yourself, your why, and your community more than anything on social media. People want to know why they should trust you over other brands. They want to know why you built your business and the values that your business encompasses. We are very much centered around buying from brands that align with our own personal mission and our own values these days. So the more that you can be transparent about these things, the better. The more you can share your origin story about why you started your company, the more likely you'll connect with people who have the same values as you, and that is all a what a building a strong community is all about.

Above all, remember that social media is supposed to be fun. It's a place to connect with your audience, share your story and build a community. When looking for social media content ideas, go with the idea that feels most exciting and interesting to you.