Building a social media editorial may, at first glance, feel like a pretty straightforward task – and hopefully, it is most of the time. However, sometimes it can be hard to generate sufficient social media content ideas to maintain a regular, high-quality content plan that is unique to you and engaging and helpful to your followers.
But inspiration is all around you, particularly in current events, holidays, and other special activities that happen around the world.
So, how can we kick off January?
A new year for a new you
Here in Germany and in many countries around the world, much of the nation takes a well-deserved break during the winter holidays. It’s a time to recharge, spend time with family, perhaps escape town for a while, and prepare for the year ahead.
During this time, it’s also a widespread practice among people globally to create "New Year's `resolutions,"; pledging to make changes in ourselves or our lives for the better during the coming year.
Most people seem to lose sight of their goals when they realize after three weeks that going to the gym sucks. It's cold outside, it's full of people, you have to actually get up in the morning to go before work.
Is the sacrifice of chocolate and pasta really worth the suffering?
Remaking ourselves isn't easy, whether it's weight loss, learning a new skill, quitting smoking, or any number of other life changes.
According to various studies, it appears that only between 8 and 20 percent of those who resolve to make changes manage to stick to these goals throughout the year. That's pretty abysmal.
Fitness technology company Strava suggests based on data from nearly 100 million app users, the majority had lost track of their weight loss or other fitness goals (the most popular resolutions) by January 19th, which they dub "Quitter's Day".
Super abysmal since those gym memberships really lock you in!
It doesn't have to be fitness-related, but maybe there's something your organization can do to help while also boosting your marketing team's social media content editorial this year.
Remind your followers of what's important to them
Sticking to New Year's resolutions is difficult, and some inspiration can go a long way. Your social media team can use this as an opportunity to help encourage followers and maybe even give them a hand.
Social media devours inspirational content. Among the most common resolutions are exercising more, losing weight, learning a brand-new skill, or spending more time with family. These are goals just about anyone and any organization can get behind, and a bit of a nudge in the right direction can show your followers that you care about their well-being.
Goals are a wonderful way for your team to stir up some engagement through open dialogue. One of the easiest things you can do is simply to ask followers about their ideas and plans for the year directly. People are often happy to talk about themselves, and by pushing them to do so, by engaging them in meaningful conversation, you could A: learn more about your followers, and B: build some rapport.
Other things you can do include good text images with positive messages. These fast, easily digested content formats perform exceedingly well on social media, especially when paired with relevant, inspirational pictures, gifs, or short videos. This content is great for highly visible networks like Pinterest or Instagram.
You can also try implementing polls on platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn. Ask questions about their plans!
Goals can also be a terrific way to promote your brand!
Because so many resolutions are generic, quite common, and simple enough for just about anyone and everyone to support, many will provide suitable content ideas for just about any industry.
For example, many people wish to spend more time with friends and family in 2024. After tumultuous years in 2022 and 2023 for just about everyone, the desire to strengthen these bonds has only grown.
Your team can always send positive messages that subtly and tastefully suggest that your product or services could help facilitate communication, allow for easier travel, or provide tech solutions, special events, or more.
There's also nothing wrong with non-promotional content! Just say something nice. People like to be reminded that there are human beings working at a business, and a little bit of simple goodwill without pushing products can contribute to brand loyalty in a surprising way.
If you'd like to read our complete guide to employer branding and how you can use your own employees to your advantage during the holiday season and year-round, check out our guide to employer branding here.
Try out giveaways and promotions
While these event posts are not necessarily supposed to be your "flagship" content, you can turn them into something more significant than a simple inspirational meme.
Some sample ideas can include things like giveaways or raffles.
For example, another common resolution is to increase the number of books read in a year or spend more time reading each day. Just about any company could create a giveaway to help promote these goals.
In this example, a company could offer gift cards for a book retailer to a randomly selected commenter on a post each month or week. This would drum up a lot of enthusiasm and engagement, boost shares and organic reach considerably, and could be scaled up or down depending on resources.
Examples like this are good because promoting reading is something just about any company should be able to get behind, and even a one-time award of just twenty euros could easily net you a higher ROI than the same amount spent on paid advertising.
But it doesn't have to be books, or reading, or anything one thing in particular. People love free or discounted stuff, and saving more money is another hugely popular resolution.
Conclusion
Helping your followers with their New Year's resolutions doesn't have to be a challenge, and it doesn't have to be a big task for your social media management team, either. With some encouragement and perhaps a great giveaway, you should have no trouble drumming up some social content in January.
The goal is to help your followers stick to their resolutions and keep some interesting content ideas in your editorial.
So, take advantage of your followers' desires to create top-notch content this year.
Lastly, if you're looking to simplify the content scheduling process and ensure that your posts are created and ready to go well in advance and without much fuss, Facelift has you covered.
Not only that, community management is made easy with a centralized inbox, allowing your team to communicate quickly and easily with your followers.
You can even assign certain community management tasks to individual team members for increased efficiency.
Find out how this and more can help you increase your social media performance at scale and also make the lives of your teams worldwide easier and more productive by scheduling a demo with one of our product experts!
