It’s an age-old question: what should I post on social media for my business? When it comes to social media, engagement is the ultimate name of the game. You want to start dialogues online with your followers. Many times that engagement can be a first or second step in getting a customer with a need to know, like and trust you. 

Social media can be an incredible tool to open up potential lines of communication with customers or clients. But in order to begin a conversation, someone has to say hi! By posting regularly on social media, through both organic and paid channels, you are saying hello and giving followers a starting place for additional engagement. 

You want to share content that’s meaningful and is likely to get a response from fans. Social media feeds contain lots of junk; you need to create something that captures attention in a sea of reTweets, tiger kings and memes.

Here are the three types of posts you should be creating for engagement on your business’s social media profiles. Each serves its own unique purpose, and when combined, they create a consistent, thoughtful online presence.

Brand Personality  

Introduce yourself to your followers and their friends. This is organic content that can only be shared by someone within your organization. Let your followers start to understand the type of culture that is within your company. 

People go to social media for the community, to take a break, for advice, all of which are very personal. This is not where you should be selling. Sales messages would be a distraction from their original goal when they turned to their social channels. Or worse an annoyance. 

These posts can be hard to plan because they’re about things that happen organically. Maybe you decided to bring your dog in for the day. Who wouldn’t love to see your office from your dog’s point of view? Or take this real-life example from Duct Tape Marketing. I shared a photo with a touch of humor and a touch of a positive message with the help of my coffee mug and I got some great engagement and feedback. 

Posts like this get a lot of engagement because they tell the story of the person behind them. You aren’t selling to anyone, instead, you are letting them in, showing them day-to-day stuff as you run a business. It’s this kind of content that’s most likely to generate comments and likes, while simultaneously creating a sense that prospects really know the people behind the brand.

Editorial Posts 

The majority of your posts should be culture posts. These aren’t as easy to plan as the majority of them happen in the moment. To fill in the moments between you can schedule more operational posts. 

These are posts around shared content, they help to demonstrate you as an authority in your field. It’s proof that you are an expert at what you do and is a critical trust-building element with leads.

Let’s say you own a home cleaning service. Maybe you’ve been a guest on a podcast or local TV news show about finding the right cleaning service to fit your needs and budget. Or perhaps you write a great blog post about how to clean up messes left by a pet.   

Whatever the case may be, share this content on social media. While it won’t get the same level of engagement as your brand personality posts, it’s more likely to capture a prospect’s attention because the prospect has already been drawn in by something else. 

If they do click on the link, they’ll find it contains meaningful information. That’s how they’ll develop a deeper level of trust in your expertise.

Customer Journey Progression Posts 

Once you’ve won your audience over with culture posts and earned their trust with editorial posts, you can move into paid posts, which are designed to achieve business objectives.

These paid posts should have calls to action that speak to a specific conversion goal. You can create a number of paid social campaigns that are designed to speak to prospects and customers at various stages of the customer journey. For those in the try phase, create a CTA that invites them to download an ebook or sign up for a free trial. Returning customers should see advertising that’s tailored to their needs based on previous purchases.

While we all know that paid ads are not anyone’s favorite thing to encounter on their social feeds, if you’ve already laid the groundwork with meaningful organic content that your followers genuinely appreciate, prospects will be that much more receptive to seeing an ad from you.

A smart mix of organic and paid social posts can help you to build awareness and trust. This is what drives engagement on your social profiles. Posts with a lot of heart pave the way for those that are more focused on achieving business objectives. When you strike the right balance, you create an opportunity to have your social efforts feed directly into your other marketing channels to guide people farther down a customer journey.