Tell me if this sounds familiar. You’re staring at a blank social media calendar in your social media scheduling tool of choice with no idea what type of posts to schedule. It’s almost as if the calendar is taunting you. Frustrating, right?

It’s a tough position to be in and as a business owner myself, I get it. I too used to struggle with creating social media content for my business. One of the resources that helped me overcome this struggle was this episode of the Marketing Made Simple Podcast (which you should check out).

In the episode, the hosts talk about using holidays to their advantage. What this means is scheduling content around holidays like Christmas, Black Friday, Thanksgiving, etc. Using these holidays as building blocks for your calendar helps take some pressure off of you by allowing you to worry less about coming up with completely original ideas for posts. They recommend thinking about promotions or deals you want to post in relation to those holidays. Sharing a limited-time offer or discount around Black Friday or Cyber Monday, for example.

Once you have those posts taken care of, the real fun starts. Now it’s time to fill your calendar with other types of fun and engaging posts knowing that you have the basics taken care of as you come up with new content ideas. 

The guest on this episode mentions 7 E’s to keep in mind when thinking of content ideas. You want to make sure you are creating content that hits each of these categories in a given month. It’s also worth mentioning that typically posting 3x a week is optimal for most businesses or personal brands. 

Here are the 7 E’s:

1. Encourage

Think about ways you can encourage your audience. Whether it’s through a quote, a personal antidote, or sharing a piece of content you found encouraging from someone else. People need to know that you care about them, and encouraging them no matter where they are in their personal journey is a great way to do that.

2. Engage

We all know how important engagement is on social media. It’s called SOCIAL media for a reason. Find ways to create content that makes people want to engage. You can do this by asking a question, creating a funny post, and encouraging people to like, comment, and share. This blog post has some other great ideas to help you increase engagement. 

3. Educate 

Educating your followers is a great way to add value to their lives. We’re all looking to grow and if you consistently create educational content that helps people, chances are they’ll be more willing to share your content and or do business with you. The trick with this one is to provide an immense amount of value. This means having no fluff. Cut straight to the chase and share the knowledge that’s taken you years to acquire.

4. Expose

Expose is your chance to pull back the curtain and share some industry knowledge that individuals might’ve never known about if you didn’t share it. People love behind-the-scenes content because they get to see never before seen content and the magic behind what you do. Make sure what you share is valuable and is not often talked about by a lot of your peers.

5. Entertain 

This is one of the most fun types of content to create and the possibilities really are endless. Trends on Instagram Reels or TikTok, polls, and user-generated content are all great examples of ways to show some personality and have some fun with your audience. As long as your content is interesting and fits your brand voice, you really can’t go wrong. 

6. Empathize 

In order to connect with people, you need to have empathy for them and what they’re going through. It usually helps to share how you were once in their shoes and assure them that things don’t have to stay the way they are. If you have a product or service that can truly help someone’s situation it’s your duty to share that with them. Having empathy and then offering a solution to someone’s problem is a great way to make sales without it feeling pushy because you’re quite literally changing someone’s life. If you are confident that what you offer has the ability to solve a specific problem for people then you’re doing them a disservice by not sharing it. If you find talking about your product or service difficult, think about how you would bring up that product or service to a friend if they came to you with the problem that it solves. This takes some of that awkwardness away and helps you sound natural without being salesy. 

7. Excite

People who are excited about their life, business, and the future are so much fun to be around. In a world where it’s easy to focus on the negativity all around us having positive energy and being excited about something you believe in is extremely attractive. Find ways to infuse your social media content with this energy and excitement. Share things you’re looking forward to in your personal life or business. Are you going to be a guest on a podcast, are you giving a talk at an event, or are you about to hit a big milestone? Don’t be afraid to share things that get you excited. We’re human after all. Just because you’re posting on your business page or profile doesn’t mean you should suddenly stop behaving like one. 

Now that you have a framework for creating engaging social media content all the time,  life is going to be a whole lot easier. No more bashing your head against the keyboard as you try to come up with next month’s content so you can plug it into your social media scheduler. 

I hope you’ve found this content valuable and put it to use in your business or personal brand so you can get back to doing what you do best. 

If you’re struggling with finding the time in your busy schedule to create visuals for your posts (which have been shown to boost engagement by 2.3x more than non-visual posts) I can help you create a library of images so you never have to worry about pulling content together at the last minute again. I’ll work with you to create versatile images that fit your brand so you can focus on growing your business.

Book your session today!