In the last decade, social media platforms have radically increased their number of users, going from 970 million in 2010 to over four billion users in July 2021.
Over 57.6 percent of the world population uses social media for two hours a day on average and many of them follow brand channels. However, they don’t do that because they want brands to sell something to them.
On the contrary, they expect content that’s entertaining, informative, inspiring, and that makes them feel valued. That’s a tall order for any internet creator and like all internet creators, course creators will get in a creativity slump from time to time. When that happens, it’s time to reevaluate your content with the help of social media content bucket ideas.
By preparing social media posts in advance, based on content buckets, you’ll engage every type of audience, delight them with your content, and attract new followers. Let’s have a look at what these content buckets are.
What are social media content buckets and how do they help your strategy?
Content buckets are topics or themes that stand at the center of your social media strategy. When you don’t have a clear strategy for the content you want to create, you might be tempted to tap into all areas of interest, which can quickly become overwhelming and confusing for your audience. Instead, by only focusing on a few specific areas, you can establish yourself as an authority in the field.
For example, you can have a content bucket for each day of the week to ensure that you only post fresh content and don’t overwhelm your followers with too much information. A bucket can contain inspirational, informational, promotional content, depending on your goals.
When creating these, you can let your personality shine through as long as you ensure that they are closely related to your online courses and your personal brand.
8 Social media content bucket ideas
Before you start creating your content buckets, it’s good to take a few moments and analyze your audience, the demographics, and which types of content perform best.
As a course creator, you might be tempted to get inspiration from your competition. However, you need to remember that each course creator has a different purpose and specific challenges. Therefore, it’s not good to compare your goals with other course creators’. Instead, focus on what makes you unique. Below you can find examples of social media content bucket ideas that work well for entrepreneurs like yourself:
1. Inspiration
Inspirational content will never go out of style. No matter how many motivational quotes you see in a day, you usually like or save a bunch of them. Your audience also loves sharing, interacting, and coming across posts that brighten their day and motivate them. Did you know that posts that feature an image lead to more interaction?
Also, did you know that posts that feature an image lead to more interaction? This will boost 35 percent of retweets on Twitter, while Facebook posts usually see an 37 percent increase in engagement. While it’s recommended to include people in your images, those with quotes are just as impactful.
When creating these posts, you don’t need to have that much design experience, as you can find ready-to-use templates on platforms like Canva. Yet, it’s good to maintain consistency and use the same template for this particular content bucket.
Other inspirational content ideas include:
- Beautiful images
- Quotes
- Interesting facts
- Case studies
- Testimonials
Inspire your followers with social media quotes.
2. Educational posts
This is an essential category for you as a course creator. There are a lot of social media post ideas that you can implement in your strategy. Those pieces of wisdom that you share on your channels will gain traction and make your followers want to come back for more.
To make your ideas more engaging, you can match them with a specific hashtag. Carousels are also engaging as they allow you to explain your idea in detail.
Once you run out of ideas, you can start repurposing already published content. For example, you can provide a short paragraph from your blog or answer FAQs related to your online courses.
Offer valuable educational content to engage your followers.
Plus, when it comes to educational content, the more valuable it is, the longer your followers will stay on your page and engage with it.
3. Conversation
As previously mentioned, your followers want to interact with the pages they follow, not just be talked at. Instead of sharing a random post, you need to start a conversation when creating social media content.
Let your audience know your opinion on a particular topic and ask them to do the same. You can create polls on your stories. You can ask a question directly when posting a picture or tell people to fill in the blanks.
Social media has taught us that people love to share their ideas and stories. With a Twitter Poll, you’re just one click away from getting the pulse of your audience. You can be as creative as you like if you keep the content relevant.
Polls are a great way to start a conversation.
Additionally, by asking a direct question and giving your followers freedom to elaborate, you make it easier to start a conversation later in your direct messages.
4. Entertainment
Let’s be honest, no one comes on social media expecting to see serious posts. On the contrary, many creators only post hilarious content. Therefore, this is an excellent strategy to adopt, even if you’re a course creator.
People appreciate seeing memes that they can relate to or at least images that put a smile on their faces. Sometimes you need to take off your business hat and put on your creative one.
Use humor to gain more visibility.
You don’t even need to publish these posts regularly. You don’t need to post them on your feed — they work just as well for your stories. Another idea is to test these memes for a while. If you feel like they are not appreciated, it’s better to leave them out of your strategy.
5. Special days
By creating special day content, you can remind your followers about different days, which is really easy to do.
You can find a lot of great sources of inspiration that include national days or special days such as National Pizza Day. When creating and scheduling your posts in advance, it’s easy to decide which ones to include.
Never miss an opportunity to celebrate special days!
Of course, you need to ensure that the posts are related to your niche. Try to make the content stand out. There will be a lot of similar posts during that day.
6. Video content
Video is powerful content that you should include in your social media content bucket ideas.Video content marketing latest stats show us that people watch on average 16 hours of video weekly.
Whether you create vlogs, video presentations, testimonials, recordings, Animotos, or video ads, you will most likely see an increase in your shared content compared to your written posts.
There are plenty of online tools that you can use to create these types of videos. Remember that they don’t need to be perfectly polished TV-style ads. It’s more important to make them original and shareable.
Read more: 14 Awesome video editing tools for e-learning designers
7. Repurposed content
Think about the amount of time, dedication, and planning it takes you to create a new piece of content. Whether it’s a new online course that you publish in the learning management system or a blog article, it’s hard work. Doesn’t it make sense to squeeze as much as you can out of everything you post online?
You should consider repurposing every piece of content for social media.
Since visual elements work so well, you can even create a mini infographic or video using the information from your blog article, webinar, course, etc.
8. Promotional
Lastly, you should not forget about promotional content bucket ideas. Although this is probably the type of content you want to use the most, the general rule would be to share 80 percent engaging and informative content and reserve the remaining 20 percent for promotional posts.
Social media is about providing value. If you only post promotional content, your audience will lose interest fast, but if you don’t do that at all, you’ll also lose out on many opportunities, such as promoting:
- Webinars
- Client testimonials
- Discounts
- Freebies
- Online course updates
Back to you
Course creators often struggle to come up with exciting ideas to post on social media. To keep your content fresh and original, you can assign one of these buckets to each day of the week.
That way, you won’t bore your audience and also have a clear idea of what types of content to create in advance. If you feel that one of the social media content buckets doesn’t fit within the rest of the ideas, you can scrap it or reframe it. The whole point is to have fun and never run out of good ideas!
