TUTORIAL ARTICLE

Intermediate

5 min

How to drive and scale consistent social media content

The secret to creating consistent and high-quality social media content over time.

What you’ll need
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Producing great social media content takes work, but producing consistently great content over long periods of time? Now that’s another challenge entirely.

If there’s one thing a social media manager needs to be, it’s adaptable — especially with your regular arsenal of ideas growing stale, social media platforms in constant flux, and the onslaught of ever-changing and hard-to-track trends.

There comes a time in everyone's social media journey where ideation becomes tough and when that time comes, it’s important to remember that lacking inspiration doesn’t make you a bad content creator; in fact, a little bit of creator’s block is a perfectly normal part of the job. To overcome your struggles, we’ve outlined our favorite tactics below that’ll be sure to re-ignite your brain and help you come up with some fresh ideas in no time.

Before we get into content ideation, let’s talk a little about why consistency is so important when it comes to social media.

The importance of consistency in social media

Followers are not permanent. While one piece of great content can earn you a new follower or two (as well as some engagement), you can just as easily lose this attention the second your quality or frequency of content drops. It’s important to be regularly posting great content to keep your audience engaged, interested, and wanting to see more. After all, when you run a social media account, you are in constant competition for the attention of your audience. As soon as your quality or consistency takes a dive, you’re likely to lose favor with your audience and see a decrease in your social media metrics across the board.

If you’re an influencer, you’ll find that consistent content publishing will transform your followers into a very loyal and engaged audience that will continue to grow over time. Alternatively, businesses who are consistent with their posting could also see improvements in their overall business KPIs as their social media activity contributes to increased brand awareness and interest, greater sales, and improved customer retention.

Your goal when it comes to social media should never be to create one viral post and then reap the benefits. Once you’ve cracked the code for successful content, you need to keep learning and improving to hang onto your achievements. Getting followers can be easy but keeping them is hard.

Building your social media strategy

When it comes to your social media strategy, the first step is developing content themes. These content themes will form the backbone of your posting schedule and save you from having to come up with entirely new ideas every week. These content themes will ensure that your posting schedule is appropriately varied in content topics and formats, as well as provide a template schedule for you to build upon in your content calendar. Content themes are essentially ideas that you can re-use weekly/bi-weekly/monthly, such as team introductions, words of wisdom, industry news roundups, or weekly challenges.

Having set content themes can also help with consistency as it’s easier to generate content when you don’t feel like you’re starting from scratch. However, while structure and routine are wonderful things, you still need to mix things up every couple of months. Continue to reflect on your content performance and engagement levels to ensure that your chosen content themes are still resonating with your audience. If you find that any of your content themes have gone stale, then it’s time to swap them out for something fresh.

Ideation: Coming up with new and fresh content ideas

How does one continue to keep their social channels fresh and exciting, especially when they’ve been managing these channels for a while? Here are seven fool-proof ways to get your creativity flowing and inspire new social media ideas.

Ask for audience feedback

Idea generation starts with your audience research. After all, how do you expect to create appealing and engaging content when you don’t know for whom you’re creating it? The first step for anyone managing social media channels is to carry out audience research to discover who your followers are, what content they like, and what they don’t like.

Your social media analytics will give a clearer picture of who your audience is, with many platforms providing demographic information, as well as giving insight into which of your social media posts are getting the most engagement so far.

If you’re a business looking to get direct content feedback from your audience, consider sending out a survey to your email list with questions regarding social media usage and content preferences. You could offer an incentive for filling in the survey to drum up more responses. Alternatively, if you have a large social media following already, use features such as polls to ask for feedback on direct questions. When it comes to Instagram influencers, many like to make use of Instagram Stories to ask for content feedback, especially using polls and questions.

Whatever your method of feedback collection, it’s important to also put real thought into the questions you are asking your audience. Be sure to use a mixture of multiple choice and open-ended questions to get a variety of responses that’ll give your audience the freedom to articulate what they really think. Some questions you might consider asking your audience could include:

  • What are your favorite types of content?

  • What kind of content would you like to see more?

  • What kind of content would you like to see less?

  • Is there anything specific you’d like to see that we haven’t already done?

  • On which social channels do you spend the most time?

  • Can you tell us what some of your favorite social accounts are?

Remember that your audience’s tastes can change over time, so engaging in audience research and requests for feedback isn’t something you only need to do once. If you’re stuck for content ideas and it’s been a few months since you last put effort into getting to know your audience, it might be time to carry out some fresh research and see if your audience has evolved.

Competitor research

When in doubt, look at what your competitors are doing. While we don’t advise that you copy the social media ideas of your peers, taking inspiration from others is a harmless endeavor that can help you to come up with new ideas that will naturally fit your audience. Browsing your competitor's social channels can not only validate your current approach to this medium, but also give you new ideas that you can edit and re-use in your own special ways.

Before taking a leaf from your competitor's book, take note of how much engagement their content is receiving. While taking inspiration from other’s channels can be helpful, it’s important to also use this practice as a learning experience. Notice what goes wrong or falls flat and learn from the mistakes of others, without needing to make them yourself.

If you want even more inspiration, you don’t have to stick to watching competitors for content ideas. Have a browse through the social channels of any brands who have a similar audience to you for some additional inspiration.

Look outside of the marketing department

Anybody has the potential to come up with a great idea for content, and they don’t have to be a member of your marketing department. Tap into your other departments if you want to hear some original and out-of-the-box thinking from a different perspective.

Encouraging other departments to get involved with content suggestions and ideas can really take the pressure off your marketing team as well as make content more varied.

To get content ideas from your wider team, we would suggest either hosting a workshop to get some ideas flowing as a group. Or, if your team might be nervous about sharing ideas aloud, an anonymous survey can be a solid vehicle for input.

Explore other formats

You’ll have noticed by now that social media platforms are constantly evolving and releasing new content types and formats to keep their users engaged. Not only are newer formats more likely to be favored by the algorithms, but they can also force you out of your comfort zone and push you to create better content.

If any of your content is feeling a little overdone, consider if there are any content formats you haven’t tried yet, such as live-streaming or Instagram Reels. Think about how your existing content themes could be reworked into a new format, or even if there are any ideas that come to mind as a result of exploring other formats.

Repurpose your content

Similarly, taking your existing content themes and considering how you can re-use this content across other channels is a great way to fill up any gaps in your posting schedule and bring more attention to the content you’ve spent time and effort creating.

If you have created a video for YouTube, for example, it’s easy to use this footage to either make a shorter video to advertise this content, or to create smaller, bite-size clips that you can re-use as TikToks or Reels. Blog content can also be re-used on your social channels by publishing the content on X’s Notes feature, on LinkedIn as an Article, or by re-working it as a thread on X.

While there’s a limit to how much you want to re-use your content across multiple channels, it’s okay if your intentions are to promote the content you have elsewhere or reach a different audience with content they might not otherwise see. While you need to keep some originality between each of your social channels, borrowing ideas and re-using content is a nice way to make your content go further.

Try out some trends

Trends are popular, fleeting, and usually pretty fun — exactly what your content strategy needs. As long as the trend is appropriate to your brand, getting involved with them is a great move, as it allows you to keep your social channels relevant and shows that you’re aware of what’s going on in the world of social media. Social media trends can also be a great source of inspiration as a way to provide a starting point for your ideation sessions. Tiktok trends are a great place to start, as there are often plenty of opportunities to get involved.

Reflect on your analytics

Checking in on your content performance can not only tell you which of your existing content can be considered the most successful but also which content themes are not getting the attention you had expected. Your analytics will offer guidance on how to adapt your content strategy over time by providing information that will help you decide which content themes to develop further and expand to other social channels and formats, as well as which content themes to drop. Your analytics can also tell you about the demographic spread of your audience so you can understand who is engaging with your content or following your page, which will help you to create more targeted content going forward.

Yes, creating consistently great content over time can be challenging — but it’s a challenge that you are more than equipped to overcome. Make use of the above tactics for idea generation and you’ll be flying through your next brainstorm in no time at all.


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September 8, 2023

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