When creating campaign strategies for social media, your content should be closely related to your business goals and objectives, and should be rooted in topics that your target audience is interested in. 

Content ideas can apply to campaigns anywhere, including websites and other areas outside of social media marketing, but we will focus on social media content ideas in this article.

Why Does My Brand Need Social Content?

First and foremost, establishing your brand's social media content strategy is important to developing your overall social media engagement and brand identity. Outside of improving your social media marketing efforts, having a defined content strategy can be a great addition to your company's overall marketing plan. 

This can be beneficial if your business is looking for funding opportunities and needs to show off a well-developed marketing plan as part of its overall business plan. For example, investors looking at a brand’s overall marketing strategy would likely be impressed to see that the company already has a plan to engage potential customers with company news, topic-specific video content, client features, and any other applicable content types.

Cosmetics brand Temptu features real customer content and product walkthroughs that resonate with the brand’s online audience. Across Instagram and TikTok, Temptu employs content around makeup tutorials and user-generated content (UGC).

Looking at direct social media engagement, establishing a content strategy has a few notable benefits.

To begin, it gives you direction. There are endless possibilities of what you could post on social media, but if you don't have a clear focus, your content will likely be all over the place and won't be as effective.

Second, content strategy gives you a framework for creating consistent content that is aligned with your brand. This is important because social media users are more likely to engage with brands that have a consistent presence and message.

Knowing what you’re focusing on helps you measure the success of your social media content. By choosing a few specific topics, you can more easily track whether or not your content is resonating with your target audience and achieving your business goals.

How to Create Content Ideas

Before you begin creating posts for your content strategy, you need to establish what type of content you will be prioritizing. There are a few strategies for determining content ideas that will work well for your brand.

Review Your Target Customers‍

Take some time to review your target customers or audience. What are their needs and interests? What type of content would they find valuable? These questions can help you determine what topics to focus on in your content strategy.

At this step, looking at what customers are already posting about your brand on social media (UGC) can be especially helpful. Identify pain points, find inspiration for your own brand posts, and reshare that content to build a relationship with your brand community.

With Pixlee TurnTo, 24 Hour Fitness automatically collects, curates, and publishes UGC both on social media and in on-site galleries like this homepage display. The more your brand interacts with community members sharing posts related to your brand, the better equipped you’ll be to determine your most valuable content ideas.

Research Your Competition

See what topics your competitors are focusing on in their content strategy. You can learn a lot from what they are doing well, and you may even be able to identify some opportunities to focus on topics that they are not addressing.

Get Inspiration From Your Website

Take a look at your website and the content that you already have there. What topics are you already covering? These topics can be a great starting point for your social media content ideas. Your social media and ecommerce marketing strategies should work together and can both benefit from each other’s content.

Investigate Industry Trends

Keeping up with industry trends is important for all businesses, but it can be especially helpful when determining your content ideas. What topics are people in your industry talking about? Which ones are getting the most engagement? These insights can help you choose content ideas that will be relevant and engaging for your target audience.

Identifying content creators and influencers in your industry is a great way to identify some of the hottest trends your brand can integrate into its content. Influencer marketing can be a content type itself, but you can also learn from these niche experts and the content they produce.

Adjust Your Content For the Platform

Just because a topic is a good fit for your brand does not mean that it will be a good fit for every social media platform. When you are determining your content ideas, be sure to consider which platforms you will be using and how you can adjust the content to work well on each one. Content that works well on Instagram may not be suitable for LinkedIn. Choose your content based on which social media platforms work best for your business.

5 Content Ideas for Social Media

Remember that your brand's social media content ideas should be unique and specific to your business. With that in mind, here are five examples of content ideas that work well for a variety of direct-to-consumer brands, and can be tailored to your industry and brand specifically.

1. Tutorials/How-To Videos

If your business offers products or services that require some explanation, tutorials or how-to videos can be great content types. This type of content is usually helpful and informative, and it can help show your audience that you are an expert in your field.


Whether tutorial content comes from your brand’s team itself, UGC, or influencer content, social users can benefit from learning how to use your product and incorporate it into their daily lives. Morphe frequently features tutorials originally posted by community members, listing specific products featured in the post.

2. User-Generated Content

UGC is any type of content that is created by fans, customers, or any creator outside of your brand itself. This can include things like product reviews, photos, or even testimonials. Making UGC a prominent part of your content strategy is a great way to build trust and credibility with your audience.

So, how do you access and effectively scale UGC? Instead of searching through your followers’ posts, Pixlee TurnTo allows brands to automatically collect UGC via hashtag, brand handle mention, direct upload, and more, which can then be curated and published on social media, in email campaigns, and through website displays. This ensures you’re getting the maximum value from content that performs well on social media.

Optimal Print uses Pixlee TurnTo to discover customers and influencers already posting about the brand, and features this content in an on-site, shoppable gallery.

3. Influencer Marketing

Influencer content is a type of content that features someone who is respected or influential in your industry, and has developed an engaged audience on social media. This could be an expert in your field, a thought leader, or a celebrity, but smaller-scale creators can also be a great bet for long-term partnership and cost-effectiveness. Featuring this type of content can help you tap into the influencer's audience and reach new people.


Similarly to UGC, your brand can use influencer content both on and off of social media. HYLETE features customer content and influencer social posts in sales and community email newsletters with Pixlee TurnTo.

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Make sure you’re partnering with an influencer whose audience and values align with your brand’s. Using an influencer marketing platform like Pixlee TurnTo’s can help you discover new creators and potential ambassadors within your existing fanbase.

4. Social Media Contests

Social media contests can be an effective way to get more engagement, grow your following on social media, and even obtain UGC for later use in your marketing strategy. Whether you’re giving away a free product, offering a discount, or just giving followers the chance to be featured on your brand’s social media profile, using a branded hashtag can help you gather submissions and track the success of your contest.

Windsor runs weekly social media contests asking users to submit their best photos featuring the brand’s apparel. This is a solid way to drive engagement, generate buzz, grow trust in your brand, and establish an online community.

5. Company News

Keeping your audience up-to-date on company news is a good way to build relationships and keep them engaged. You can use this type of content to share things like new hires, promotions, or even expansion plans.

Employee-generated content can be especially valuable in giving a behind-the-scenes look into your brand’s company culture and new releases or deals. The more you humanize your brand on social media by featuring real people, the more your audience will be incentivized to engage and later buy from you.

Carnival Cruises and Delta regularly share TikTok videos made by its employees to show customers the real people behind the brand.

These are just a few examples of content that brands use to increase engagement with their social media channels. Keep in mind that the most important thing is to develop content that is effective for your specific business.

How to Tell If Your Social Media Content Ideas Are Working

Once you've implemented your social media content ideas, it's important to monitor their performance. Here are a few metrics that you can use to see if your content types are working:

Engagement Rate - The engagement rate is the number of people who interact with your content divided by the number of people who see it. This metric can be a good way to see if people are interested in the content that you're sharing.

Reach - Reach is the number of people who see your content. This metric can be helpful in determining how far your content is spreading.

Shares - Shares are a good way to measure how viral your content is. If people are sharing your content, it's a good sign that they find it interesting and valuable.

You can also take this a step further by measuring the sales impact of content-specific campaigns. Pixlee TurnTo allows brands to monitor both their own social content and top-performing posts from community members to determine which strategies are working most effectively.

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Monitoring these metrics can help you see if your social media content ideas are working. If you notice that engagement or reach is declining, it may be time to adjust your strategy. 

Don't be afraid to go back to the drawing board or cut content ideas as necessary. There is no point in spending time and resources on content that does not engage your target audience.

Brand-Specific Content Idea Examples

Now that you know how to create and monitor your content ideas, here are a few brand-specific social media content ideas to inspire you. Your own brand can have as many or as few content types as needed.

Food & Drink

• Recipes
• Kitchen Tutorials
• Influencer Chef Partnerships
• Brand Updates
• New Products
• Where To Buy Products

Fashion & Apparel

• New Merchandise
• Customer Testimonials
• Season-Specific Styles
• Outfit Inspiration
• Behind-the-Scenes (Photoshoots)

Beauty & Cosmetics

• Product Launches
• Makeup Tutorials
• Customer Testimonials
• MUA Partnerships
• Product Use Inspiration

Fitness & Health

• Merchandise Launches
• Client Spotlight
• Motivation
• Workout Videos
• Diet and Workout Guides

As you can see, content is an important part of social media marketing. Choosing the right content types can increase engagement, reach new people, and build trust with your audience. 

Just remember to choose content ideas that work for your specific market and closely track what works and what doesn't. Ultimately, your brand's content should let your followers know exactly who you want to be as a company.