UPDATED September 22nd, 2017.
Creating great content is what separates businesses on social media. Do you like seeing sales pitches with every single post? HECK NO. We want to see interesting, engaging, and fun content that relates to us. The companies that figure that out and deliver on that are the businesses that see the value and benefit of a great social media content creation strategy. Like we talked about in Social Media Content Creation: The 80/20 Rule, we recommend focusing 80% of your efforts on creating engaging content and only 20% on sales material.
Finding great content is the hardest part. Let's take a look at eleven resources that will help you create, develop, and share great content on all of your social media pages.
1. Company Blog
There's nothing better than unique content developed by your business. It's time consuming, tedious, and can be difficult, but there's really no better content that you can share. Taking the time and investing the resources to create a great blog is a fantastic strategy for most businesses. Sharing that content on social media makes posting easy and it is the fastest way to be viewed as an authority in your industry and to deliver great and engaging content to your followers
2. FAQs
Interviewing your team (especially your sales team and account managers) can be a fantastic source of content that your followers want to see. If you have questions coming up frequently from prospects, leads, and even current customers you can answer those questions through social media! Give the people what they're asking for!
3. Canva
We all know that content on social media without some sort of media (image, video, link, etc) is just boring and we're all much less likely to engage with a post that is just text. Not a designer, but want to create great images to go with your social media content? Enter Canva. Canva will help you create a fantastic eye catching designs for any piece of content in minutes.
4. Piktochart
Who doesn't love a great infographic? We sure do, but the hours that they can take to build (even if you are a designer) can be too much time to invest. Piktochart makes it easy and fast to create visually compelling and interesting infographics to share your great information. Infographics are a great way to establish your business as an industry authority.
5. Pinterest
Doing research to find content that relates to your followers isn't an easy or small task. Pinterest is one of the best tools to find great information, images, graphics, and more that your followers will appreciate.
6. Feedly
Feedly makes it easy to find, organize, and share great information across many different industries, topics, and subjects. Feedly can help you turn what could be hours of research into minutes. We're all about saving time and getting back to your bigger tasks!
7. Buzzfeed
Want to share engaging content? There may be no better source than Buzzfeed! They're a great go-to for fun, engaging, exciting, hilarious, and even news content that your followers will enjoy. All of your content doesn't need to (and shouldn't) have to do with just your industry or business. Have fun with social media by sharing some of the interesting things that Buzzfeed has to share.
8. Buzzsumo
Not sure which content is resonating the best with your followers? Buzzsumo to the rescue. Learn which content is performing best and produce more of it! It's that simple. Buzzsumo can even help you understand which content is performing best for your competitors so you can start to produce content around that same topic or information.
9. Scoop.it
Take the work out of research with Scoop.it! With Scoop.it, you can create hubs to monitor content across the web and let Scoop.it do the work for you. You can constantly have shareable content at your fingertips. You can also share it directly from Scoop.it to your social channels.
10. Curata
Curata is a scalable solution to helping you and your team develop, find, and share content. Toss the messy spreadsheets, forget spending hours on research, and no more headaches trying to manage a team of content creators.
11. Contests
Contests make for great engageable posts, but can also help to promote sales. Within your contest you can promote a new product, sale, or service and get it in front of new potential customers. People will gladly engage with the post in the hopes of winning the prize. Check out our How to Run a Successful Social Media Contest for more ideas, inspiration, and details on how to effectively set up your contest.
BONUS: UpContent
Our new favorite tool for social media content is UpContent. With UpContent, you set up your search criteria around different topics and you're presented with news articles, blog posts, and more around those topics from reputable sources. There is a ton of great content at your disposal and you can update your search criteria at any time. Such a time saver!
Content is definitely KING, but man the king can be such a pain sometimes. We understand that you don't like to spend all of your time developing, posting, and analyzing your content. These tools are all there to help you create a great content marketing strategy on social media and save you time. Take advantage!
