Five content templates to keep your social output fresh and engaging

Along with the daily work of running your operation, almost all businesses are now faced with the task of creating content for their website and social media sites.

If you don’t have the support of an agency to do a lot of this for you, it can be taxing work. It’s often the reason why so many small businesses fall behind and eventually abandon their social media presence: “I just don’t have the time or energy!”

That’s totally understandable because resources can be tight for SMEs. However, rather than perpetually staring into the abyss of a blank FB post page, you can streamline your content production by concentrating on set types of content.

Once you lock into these content templates you can easily produce posts that will keep your output fresh, varied and engaging. When you’re comfortable with the basics of each of these templates you can then explore and experiment a little with them to keep things interesting for your audience and yourself!

Tap into the expertise of your staff

If you’re a business that employs some key technical staff, these people will have a wealth of knowledge that could be presented to an audience to shed more light on what your business does. The trick is to be able to tell people about this stuff in an understandable and engaging way. There’s a massive thirst out there for information about how things work and how things get done. You could get some of your staff members to blog about what they do or even have short video clips about how they go about their work. This includes yourself too.

Industry news and related commentary

This is a staple type of content for many businesses and you probably consume this kind of content without even realising it quite often. This can take the form of a two or three paragraph ‘news’ style story about something that has affected your business or industry (new legislation, government decision, public event, new technology, etc) or it could be extended into a lengthy white paper on an issue that seeks to position your business as a thought leader on a topic.

How-to and tutorial posts

How-to videos and tutorials are incredibly successful, especially on sites like YouTube. This type of content lends itself very well to technical, craft and mechanical demonstrations that can be presented visually. You might run a smartphone repair business and want to show people how to replace and install a sim card, or if you run a paving business, for example, you might want to show off the best way to pave a courtyard.

Q&A / audience interaction

Opening yourself up to questions from the public can be daunting, but it’s a great way of putting your expertise on show. There are lots of ways you can do this, whether it is as a live stream on Facebook, YouTube or some other social platform, or as a pre-booked webinar session. This kind of interaction allows you to really interact with potential and existing customers so you can create an even stronger bond that could reap more business.

Case studies

In its most basic form a case study can be a quote from a customer about what they got out of using your product. That can easily be expanded into a longer form article/video about the who, what, when, where and why of how your business was able to solve a problem for a customer. The format is quite simple: what was the customer’s problem and how did you go about fixing it. This is really effective because if done well it showcases what you offer in a concrete way to an audience.