6 Types Of Social Media Content For Your Retail Business

Social media can be a great medium for marketing your retail business. In order to get effective results from social media, it’s important to experiment with a range of different types of content. This post delves into 6 types of social media content, their uses, and the different ways to implement them.

Text posts

Text posts are the most basic types of social media posts. Typically, text-only posts get much less engagements than other types of content, because they’re not as visually engaging. However, text is often the best form of content for serious occasions – such as breaking bad news or making apologies. You can also tell stories through text (as is popular on LinkedIn) or ask short questions or tell short jokes (Facebook increases the font size of short text posts). Emojis and use of bold text can also spice up text posts.

Images

Studies show posts with images get 650% more engagements on average than text-only posts. Such images can include photos, screenshots or illustrations. Often images need to be accompanied by text to have context – this could include a caption or text edited into the image. Infographics, adverts and memes are typically a mixture of image and text. Images can be shared on Facebook, X or LinkedIn – while Instagram is entirely images! You can share photos and screenshots you’ve taken yourself, or you can pay professional photographers and graphic designers to supply you with images.

GIFs

GIFs are moving images. They are different to videos in that they are made up of only a few frames that repeat and have no sound. GIFs are most commonly used to evoke humour and can be great for accompanying an announcement or as a reply to a comment. They are heavily used on X, and also used regularly on Facebook and LinkedIn – in each of these cases you can search from a library of GIFs. It’s also possible to upload your own GIFs.

Video

Video is the king of content. Posts containing videos typically get the most amount of engagements and are excellent at generating leads. Some social media platforms are dedicated entirely around videos – TikTok is most centred around short-form videos under 90 seconds, whereas YouTube is centred around longer videos. Others like Facebook, X, Instagram and LinkedIn encourage videos alongside other content. Commercial videos don’t have to purely be adverts – you can also share explainer videos, video interviews, behind-the-scenes videos and a variety of other types of video. There are companies that specialise in corporate video production that can produce live action videos or animated videos for you. This is typically more professional than using DIY content (although there are still many uses for such content such as quick announcements or live videos of events).

Links

You can also use many social media platforms to share links. These could be links to your own company website (which could include product pages or blog posts) or links to third party websites such as news websites or brand partners. Links are often essential for helping to build leads through social media and could be accompanied by text captions, images, GIFs or videos to help make them more enticing.

Polls

The final form of content worth mentioning is polls. X, Facebook and LinkedIn all have in-built poll features. Such polls can be a great form of market research, but they can also be an entertaining way of sparking debates and conversation.