How to Create Content for Social Media

Creating social media content from scratch can sound like an incredibly daunting task, but it’s the one thing that really moves the needle when it comes to social media marketing.

Great social media content creates a bridge between a brand and its audience, enabling both to get value from the interaction.

The best content is based on a strong social media strategy, one that aligns with your business goals and makes sense for your brand, niche, and industry. It’s worth knowing how to create content for social media that has a lasting impact.

So that’s what we’re going to cover in this guide: the what, the why, and the how-to of social media content creation, complete with essential steps and key strategies that will help you take this essential task to the next level.

Key takeaways

Develop your own brand voice and purpose, instead of copying the “chronically online voice” approach that worked for other brands; the results won’t be the same
Use a strategic content evaluation framework by asking yourself: What’s the purpose? How does this fit into my strategy? Will this entertain, educate, inspire, or sell?
Embrace the “60% perfect and timely” over “100% perfect and late.”, especially for trends, as speed matters more than perfection
Master strategic content repurposing - adapt one piece of content across multiple platforms by changing the tone and format while keeping your core brand voice consistent
Look beyond basic engagement metrics - focus on watch time, retention, saves, and shares to understand what truly resonates with your audience
Batch create content for efficiency - plan multiple strategic ideas in advance, then dedicate 3-4 hour sessions to create 20+ pieces of content for the entire month
Learn by analyzing what you consume - stop mindlessly scrolling and start asking why certain content stops you from scrolling; this analytical approach improves your own content creation skills

Social media content creation describes the process of creating content that gets shared on social media platforms. This can include anything from written content such as Facebook text posts, to short videos for TikTok or infographics on LinkedIn.

With all the types of social media content available, it can be hard to know which one is best suited for your brand. The best and most straightforward way to find out is to experiment.

Try out different social media post types and see if you can tailor them to your brand voice and personality. Then go into a social media analytics tool like Socialinsider to find out how they perform, based on your brand’s key social media metrics.

Along the same lines, you can trust a social media competitive analysis to give you more insights on what kind of social media content performs best in your industry.

Content creation for brands can get much easier once you know what works.

Recently, in a Socialinsider webinar, content strategist Caity Barnes shared actionable insights on building authentic content strategies, avoiding copy-paste mistakes, and staying agile with trends.

Learning how to create social media content for business can appear to be really challenging, but at the end of the day, it’s one of the most cost-effective solutions for generating traffic and awareness for your brand.

In other words, it offers a massive ROI.

Without content, you would have no real presence on social media. Or any kind of social media interactions.

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Are Social Media Interactions Decreasing? See what the data says.

What’s more, good social media content helps you showcase your brand’s personality and connect with your audience.

Each post can bring you closer to your community, but you have to walk a fine line between promoting your brand and offering real value.

Before diving into the content creation process, it’s crucial to understand what NOT to do. Many brands fall into one of these two common traps:

Following other brands’ playbooks without strategy

One of the biggest mistakes brands make is copying the “chronically online voice” that worked for brands like Wendy’s or Duolingo without developing their own original strategy. While this approach worked when only a few brands were doing it, it now feels inauthentic and dystopian when everyone uses the same copy-and-pasted strategy.

Ryanair is another example. But the thing is, Ryanair knows its audience very well. They know people are not over the moon with the services provided, and that they voice their opinions online every chance they get. There’s no point in painting a different picture, so they’ve pivoted their content and brand voice accordingly. However, if other brands tried to do a 180 and copy them, it would only come across as rude or trying too hard; it would definitely not have the same effect.

A mistake I see brands making is only going by the playbooks of what they're seeing well with other brands. Having a purpose on social media and knowing that purpose is so important in the content creation process - Caity Barnes, Freelance Social Media Strategist

caity quote about mistakes when creating social media content

Lack of clear purpose

Many brands create content without knowing their purpose on social media. Every piece of content should ladder up to a bigger brand purpose. Social media is an extension of your brand, so it needs to clearly communicate what your brand stands for, not just follow someone else’s playbook.

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Insider tip: Are you looking for more ideas on how to create content for social media? Make sure to also check out our webinar with Caity Barnes, Freelance Social Media Strategist - The Content Creation Process

The trick is not simply to learn how to generate content, but how to create consistent content on social media. Building a framework for social media content generation will enable you to never run out of fresh ideas, no matter what social trends come and go.

So what are the main digital content creation tasks for social media, step by step? Let’s find out:

Research your buyer persona’s pains and gains

When it comes to social media content creation, your work begins long before any posts land on your followers’ feeds.

To be able to produce quality content for social media, you need to do some serious research on target audience needs through surveys, customer interviews, and community listening.

Expand your research and get market insights and competitive data. This will help you uncover insights on what people want to see on social, why your audience engages with your brand, and the type of posts your target audience prefers to see.

You should strive to learn all you can about your audience: who they are, where they live, what they’re interested in, and so on. Only then can you start to create social media content that they can resonate with.

Doing research on your audience is not enough if you want to create truly original and unique content for your audience. To take your digital content creation efforts to the next level, you need to find content gaps that your brand is uniquely qualified to fill.

How do you do that? Through competitor analysis.

Start by comparing social media accounts (yours and your competitor’s) side by side, look at the data, and understand why your competitors are doing better.

Spot key topics that they don’t cover enough, and create content that addresses those topics in depth and offers a lot of value.

It makes sense to keep adjusting your topics and content types, and adding some good digital content creation ideas based on what your competitors are developing.

After all, social media is a jungle, and only the most engaging, valuable content can reach your target audience and bring you the results you wish for.

Set goals

Setting social media goals is essential if you aim for a complete content creation process.

They can either be general (e.g., increase brand awareness, boost website traffic, grow your social media following) or platform-specific (such as getting more saves on your Instagram, more impressions on LinkedIn, or more views on TikTok).

At the end of the day, goals are simply milestones you expect your content to reach, so that you know you are on the right track. Different goals result in multiple forms of content creation.

Social media goals alligned with business objectives

Brainstorm for creative ideas

Once you have some handy social media benchmarks, it’s time to brainstorm creative ideas. Social media content inspiration can come from anywhere; you just have to be open and collect as many sources as you can. But this process should be strategic, not random.

When evaluating any content idea, ask yourself:

What is the purpose of this content?
How does this fit into my content strategy?
Will it entertain, educate, inspire, or sell?
Is this the right fit for my brand?

These questions help you articulate your ideas and make them easier to sell to managers or clients. The more you practice this framework, the simpler content creation becomes.

Once you’ve validated an idea, determine:

Can you execute this on your own, or do you need team members?
What resources are required?
What will the structure look like (direct-to-camera, voiceover, B-roll footage)?

Consider planning multiple strategic ideas in advance, then dedicating 3-4 hour sessions to create 20+ pieces of content for the entire month. This batch approach is more efficient than creating content piece by piece.

Define your content pillars

Once you have a solid library of content ideas for social media, you can move on to defining your social media content pillars. These are the key themes or topics around which all your content is structured.

For instance, if you are a brand in the beauty industry, you may choose to create social media content around these content pillars: behind-the-scenes content (such as employee spotlights), educational (makeup tutorials), and conversational content (such as community stories or live Q&A sessions).

Create a content calendar

With a few definitive social media content pillars under your belt, you can start to create a content calendar for your social media platforms.

Ideally, you would have a unique calendar per platform, but if your social media strategy includes a lot of cross-posting and content recycling, then it makes sense to put everything in one place.

In any case, learning how to create a content calendar for social media is a very important part of your job as a social media specialist.

With a content calendar, you can plan posts ahead of time and have a bird’s eye view of your post distribution throughout the month.

To automate this process further, you can also use a social media management tool that will help with scheduling content and even provide additional features such as analytics and reporting.

Master content repurposing

Think of your brand like a person with one voice that adapts to different settings. You speak differently at work versus with friends, but your core personality remains the same. Apply this concept to your content across platforms as well.

From one piece of content (like a webinar), you can create multiple spin-offs to support the original content:

For LinkedIn: long-form summary posts
For YouTube Shorts: 90-second engaging clips
For TikTok: multiple short clips highlighting different points
For Instagram: carousel posts and Reels

Create detailed personas for each platform, understanding not just demographics but the specific needs and pain points your audience has on each channel. Then, tailor your repurposed content to address these platform-specific needs.

And make sure to revisit your content library from 6+ months ago as well. It’s not mandatory for content to always be fresh because social media moves so fast that less than half your audience likely saw the original post. Repackage that content in different formats and give it new life.

Prepare posts for publishing

Before publishing, you should make sure everything is in its place. Depending on the type of post you’re sharing, you may need to prepare visual materials such as images, infographics, or videos.

To make things easier for you, you can create a social media post checklist and populate it with all the necessary elements of a successful post, such as:

A catchy headline
Relevant campaign hashtags
Attractive visuals
Strong CTAs
Useful links

Then, as you’re making content for social media, you can simply check off every item as you add it to your post.

Constantly monitor your performance

Your best source of social media content inspiration is your own data. To be able to create business content for social media, you need to understand what works and what doesn’t.

To start making data-driven decisions regarding your content on social media, you can rely on a social media analytics tool like Socialinsider to do all the heavy lifting.

Once you add your social profiles in our app, the possibilities are endless. You can do advanced competitive analysis and benchmarking, compare campaign performance, get powerful individual or brand-level post insights, and download pitch-ready reports to present to your team or clients.

When it comes to figuring out what type of content performs best, you can rely on the Posts section to sort posts by key metrics (engagement, reach, impressions, and other channel-specific KPIs) so that you can see what content resonated the most with your audience and where you can improve.

Look beyond basic engagement metrics to understand the full story:

Watch time and retention: How long do people actually stay engaged?
Saves and shares: High saves indicate valuable, reference-worthy content
Share patterns: Heavily shared content is often relatable and resonates emotionally

Use competitor content pillar analysis to identify gaps in your strategy. Look at what content pillars drive the most engagement in your industry and spot topics your competitors aren’t covering enough.

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In a nutshell, here's a successful framework for effective social media content creation and management according to Caity: Start with idea → validate if it fits brand purpose → script & structure → production → scheduling → learning.

We live in a world ruled by content. Quality content. People expect to read exciting topics every day, see creative posts, and feel like they are part of a community.

Unfortunately, the main disadvantage of the social media ecosystem is that thousands of posts are added per second.

And there’s another thing any content creator for social media should take into consideration: users tend to easily forget the information they read or see on these channels.

Creating high-performing social media content can be challenging and time-consuming.

But here we have 5 key tips that can drastically improve your efforts and help speed up and simplify social media content development:

Get content and strategy ideas from your target platform

As a social media manager, you need all the help you can get to learn how to create content for social media. Not just any kind of content, but quality content that makes a splash and brings in more awareness and potential customers for your brand.

An underrated trick that will drastically improve your content creation for social media is to look at all social media channels as more than the place where you publish content. Instead, you need to see them as your primary source of first-hand, tried-and-tested content and strategy ideas.

So, for example, if you need ideas for your Instagram content, go on Instagram and look for content & strategy videos. If you’re unsure how to take your TikTok content to the next level, go on TikTok and listen to what first-hand users of TikTok are saying.

To make sure the right kind of content lands in your feed or explore page, you can look for and follow other social media managers, as well as agency owners, solopreneurs, or brands whose social media content you admire.

Create a content vault to store your best ideas

The trick is to optimize content creation for social media to the point where you never have to start from scratch. To do this, a great idea would be to build a content vault, where you organize all the content ideas you collect by content pillar.

You can do this using a productivity app like Notion, but it also works in Google Spreadsheets or other similar tools.

Vanessa Lau, content creator and business mentor, provides a ton of great ideas on how to create consistent content on social media, including content matrices and content vaults.

social media content vault — Source: YouTube

Embrace the power of video

There’s no doubt that we’re moving into the era of video. TikToks, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels are getting massive amounts of engagement and for good reason.

What’s more, stories are told more efficiently and authentically with video. Why? Users prefer to watch a video rather than read an article and get lost throughout the text when seeking information.

It’s just a quicker and easier way to learn everything about anything.

With that in mind, choosing to develop a strong video marketing strategy should be a no-brainer. For that to happen, you first need to learn how to create video content for social media and have a solid library of video content ideas ready to go.

Keep an eye on the latest trends

In your journey on how to create engaging content for social media, you soon learn that following the latest social media trends is an important practice.

You don’t necessarily have to join all of them, but it’s important to know what’s trending and how you can adjust some of the trends to fit into your brand’s social media strategy.

There’s nothing worse than a brand being a week late to a trend. If it doesn’t make sense for your brand, don’t force it. - Caity Barnes, Freelance Social Media Strategist

TikTok is one of those platforms where new trends emerge every single day, so if you want to take full advantage of them, you need to act fast. If done right, TikTok trends can definitely be your ticket to virality.

Instagram is another place where trends come and go pretty fast. Maybe more so than on TikTok, for Reels, you need to pay special attention to Instagram trending audios and use them to perfectly complement your video posts.

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Catch up on the latest Instagram trending audios

How to integrate trends strategically

Following trends isn’t just about jumping on whatever’s popular, though. The trend has to be relevant to your brand or niche.

When you see a trending topic or format, ask yourself:

How can my brand put a unique spin on this?
Does this align with my brand strategy and voice?
Will this make sense to my audience?

If it doesn’t fit naturally, don’t force it. Your audience will see right through inauthentic trend-following.

Keep in mind that trends also require quick execution (usually within 24 hours), so embrace the “60% perfect and timely” approach rather than “100% perfect and late.” A week-late trend post often comes across as cringey rather than relevant.

In order to capitalize on trends more quickly:

Create mockups to communicate ideas faster
Use a “newsroom approach” where team members pitch ideas in regular meetings
Build trust with decision-makers through case studies showing trend success
Consider having dedicated team members monitor trends (like Booking.com’s approach Caty explained in the webinar)

Attend conferences and stay on top of industry news

A good way to generate content for social media that offers real value is to never stop learning.

Go beyond the scope of your role and attend conferences, webinars, or take courses that improve your understanding of the social media world and your particular industry’s landscape.

Social media is a very dynamic field, so always staying on top of the latest news is crucial.

Collecting and sharing insights for social media will make you a better marketer and will make it easier for you to create content for your social media funnel. What’s more, it will improve your reputation within the industry, and you will start to be seen as a subject matter expert.

Get comfortable with imperfection

Perfect is the enemy of done, especially in social media. Start getting comfortable with posting content that’s 60% perfect rather than waiting for 100% perfection. This is particularly important for trend-related content where timing matters more than polish. The more you practice moving from idea to execution quickly, the faster you’ll improve and the more ideas will flow through you.

Final thoughts

Learning how to create content for social media marketing is one of the most basic tasks you receive as a social media marketer. It’s not always the simplest task to complete over and over, but thankfully, there are many resources you can access to make your job easier and deliver better results.

The definition of good social media content can differ based on your goals, but generally, good social content is the type of content that makes people stop scrolling to engage with. That means your post offers value, makes them feel something, or inspires them to take an action (click on a link, go on your website, book a demo, etc).

Writing social media content is a matter of figuring out what is the main message of your post, and saying it in a way that will make people read until the end. Your writing for social media should be clear and concise, and it can also be funny or sarcastic if that fits in with your brand’s tone of voice.

Creating content for social media can be simplified if you know when to rely on a few useful third-party apps. When it comes to anything visual, Canva is the undisputed winner of content creation tools for social media managers. For video editing, CapCut or Filmora can be real lifesavers.

Just start playing. Grab household products on weekends and practice creating content—whether it’s your favorite coffee, moisturizer, or any product around your house. Use simple tools like CapCut to experiment with editing. Remember, when creating digitally, there’s no risk—you can always click undo. The key is building the habit of moving from idea to execution quickly.

Also, stop mindlessly scrolling and start analyzing. When you see content you like, ask yourself why it stopped you from scrolling. Was it the format, the hook, your familiarity with the creator, or something else? This analytical approach will dramatically improve your own content creation skills.