But this ad space

10 Creative Social Media Marketing Ideas For Businesses

Photo of author
Written By Carola Richter

Coming up with social media marketing ideas can be tasking.

As a social media marketer or a business owner (if you manage your social media yourself), you are expected to consistently come up with fresh content to keep your audience engaged. Even for the most imaginative person, the well of ideas eventually runs dry at some point.

It is made no easier given the times we are in. If anything, it has even gotten harder because most of the social media marketing ideas that worked before the pandemic cannot work now.

More so, the stakes are higher now because a lot of folks are home and are spending time on social media. If you can come up with social media marketing ideas that are unique and appeal to your audience, you can rake in profits. 

However, developing an idea right now is no mean feat. Every social media marketing idea you come up with at the moment has to take into consideration the dynamics of the pandemic. That means you cannot come up with social media marketing ideas that will require your audience to leave their homes.

Also, you have to be sensitive and make sure your social media marketing ideas are nuanced. For instance, it would be wrong to make use of pictures of crowds in your campaign or ask your audience to engage in any group tasks.

This is because when you do so, you’ll be counteracting the efforts of the government and health officials trying to stem the pandemic. Here are ten social media marketing ideas you can utilize in this pandemic.

10 Better Social Media Marketing Ideas to Utilize Now

1. Host Contests

Little can be as cheering as the promise of some free money or reward. In this bleak period, the effects would even be more visible. Hosting a contest is one of the easiest ways to ramp up engagements.

Whether it is on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, a clear pattern has been established to show that contest posts garner as much as twice the engagement of ordinary posts. It gives the audience something to do, with the promise of a reward at the end of it.

Hosting a contest is relatively easy. First, you have to determine what the challenge is. Considering the period we are in, you might want to settle on something that raises awareness about healthy practices.

For instance, you could host a ‘hand-washing’ contest. Then you have to determine what the prize will be. Ideally, it should be a product or service which you are offering or some other reward that is nonetheless intricately tied to your business.

Remember, the idea is to increase the visibility of your business. Next, make sure there is a means to contact you if they have any questions or concerns. 

With contests, when done right, you hardly have to worry about publicity. Given that most folks currently have time to spare, you can rest assured that there will be people willing and ready to enter your contest.

2. Run Polls

This period presents a fantastic opportunity to get to know your audience, and a poll is just the right tool for that! You can create a poll asking your audience for feedback on certain aspects of your business.

You may also solicit suggestions on how you can serve them better during this pandemic and even post the pandemic. Honestly, there is no shortage of ideas you can run with if you want to create a poll.

You have to bear in mind that the polls that get the most engagements are the ones that are fun to fill. People may have a lot of time on their hands at the moment, but it is also true that the attention span on social media keeps decreasing by the day.

Thus, you need to find a perfect combination of creativity and brevity. Craft a poll that is stimulating and fun to fill out, but also make sure to keep it short and straight to the point.

10 Creative Social Media Marketing Ideas For Businesses 1 Expert tips to grow your business to success.

3. Go Live

If there was a time people wanted to watch videos of others in their natural environments, it is now. This explains the success of the Tiktok app and the various other video-sharing applications.

Ordinarily, videos are more likely to generate engagements than written texts. In fact, in a survey of more than 1000 persons, 800 (or 80 per cent of them) preferred watching a live video over reading a blog text.

Again, little wonder social media platforms such as Instagram and Youtube have such dedicated followings, especially among young people.

Schedule a live video and promote it aggressively. The live video should be on something that concerns your audience. It may not necessarily be about your business at first. In keeping with the spirit of the season, your topic could be something related to the pandemic.

Fielding questions from your audience and answering (honestly) in real-time can help you form a great connection with your audience. They will come to see you as a person and begin to associate your brand with the image they have of you.

If you are successful and form a connection with your audience, this connection will translate to them becoming paying customers.

4. Consider having a Takeover

This entails handing over your social media accounts to someone else for a stipulated period. For most people, it is for twenty-four hours, but for others, it could be longer, depending on their preference.

The idea is to get your social media accounts in front of fresh faces and new demographics. For the period that the person takes over your social media account, they get to make posts as well as interact with the audience on your behalf. You can consider handing over your social media account to an employee for that given period.

Furthermore, you may want to consider social media influencers and celebrities. As stated earlier, the plan should be to get fresh faces to interact with your business.

Social media influencers and celebrities are ideal for this purpose, given the mammoth following they typically have. Of course, whoever takes over your account should share a similar audience demographic as you.

5. ‘Caption This’ Contests

It is really as simple as it sounds, and is quite effective too! You can put up a picture and have members of your audience have a go at coming up with captions. Typically, there should be a reward for the best caption.

You can also decide not to provide a prize, letting your viewers have something fun to do for a change. This strategy will work because it takes precious little for someone to come up with a caption for a picture.

However, the process itself is fun, and having to read the captions of others can be interesting too. This can also be a great way to obtain captions for pictures you have no captions for!

6. Short Video Clips

This time, instead of making live videos, you can upload small clips to keep your audience engaged. Videos are easy to manage because they do not need to worry about editing and keeping them professional.

Also, they are low-budget as most videos can be shot with the aid of just your smartphone. The videos can virtually be about anything.

However, you can try to focus on humorous posts. This way, your audience will come to look forward to your videos. It might just be the only uplifting part of an otherwise bleak period. 

10 Better Social Media Marketing Ideas to Utilize Now

7. Collaborate with Another Brand

Collaborating with another brand is another excellent social media marketing idea. It allows you to pool your resources, audience, and strengths together to achieve a win-win situation.

You can collaborate with a brand to come up with unique content for this period. It can be a one-off situation where you create a video or even launch an ebook.

Social media is ideal for any partnership because there is a low overhead cost, and also, there is the relative ease of merging audiences from different brands.

However, in partnering up with another brand, you have to choose your partner brand carefully. You should be able to complement them, and they should provide some unique benefits to you too. Collaborating with another brand adds some spice to your page and primes you for success.

8. Organize ‘How-Tos’ and Tutorials

The pandemic has provided a lot of folks with the free time they need to catch up with skills they’d hitherto abandoned. You need to cash in on that.

You can make use of the opportunity to educate your audience on how to make use of your products and services. This might be a great time to answer questions concerning your business and provide a comprehensive breakdown to provide clarity.

If you are making a ‘how-to’ video, bear in mind that the videos should be short and straight to the point. 

9. Repurpose Content

While seeking social media marketing ideas, you may want to consult your past. If there were campaigns you carried out in the past that were successful, you could recycle and repackage them now. If it did so well in the past, then your audience will certainly appreciate seeing it again.

Also, considering that you may have new viewers now, running old successful ideas will be a good strategy to draw them in. This works too if the content was used on one social media platform and has not been used on another.

You could change the form, e.g., from video to text, or from text to image, and re-share. Even if the content did not do so well in the past, you should still consider repackaging and reposting now.

Repackaging old content helps you maximize the effort and time that went into creating it in the first place. It is also one hack that ensures you have a near inexhaustible cache of ideas to promote your brand.

10. Conduct an Interview

A lot of people are conducting interviews on Instagram these days. You may want to jump on that.

You can conduct Q&A sessions, even on Facebook Live or Twitter. You can decide to interview some influencer in your industry, or a health expert, or even one of your audience members.

The subject of the interview can also vary, depending on whether you want to pursue an education or entertainment arc. A great tip is to keep the interview as informal as possible, mining nuggets that can be useful to your audience in their everyday lives.

10 Better Social Media Marketing Ideas to Utilize Now

Creative Social Media Marketing Ideas For Businesses

As a socially conscious brand, as you come up with social media marketing ideas, you should also work to complement the efforts of the government.

Your platform should be used as a tool for sensitization, especially given the nature and spread of the virus. It is imperative to adjust your strategies to reflect the situation at hand. Hence, you might want to discard marketing ideas that are not appropriate for the season.

Apart from being a move that showcases how empathetic your brand is, it could also have business benefits. If your social media marketing idea is not relevant right now or gets eclipsed by what is going on, you lose potential customers, and the novelty of that idea too.

More so, the fact that a social media marketing idea is irrelevant now does not make it perpetually so. After the pandemic, there will be a need for marketing ideas to fit into that particular circumstance; the discarded idea may just come in handy then.

Furthermore, keep your audience informed. Be that brand that disseminates accurate information about the virus. It can be as simple as inserting a hand-washing picture in a video. Of course, you should make sure that the pieces of information you disseminate are accurate. It would be a good idea to verify news sources before sharing (potentially alarmist) pieces of information.

Also, make sure your tone is personable and full of hope. Do not come off as tone-deaf, so please do not brag, bearing in mind that a lot of people are uncertain about their sources of income during this period. If there are any changes you are making to your business strategy, you should make sure your customers are made aware of them.

For instance, if you have to change your delivery strategy due to the pandemic, make sure alternative arrangements are being made. More importantly, make sure that your customers are aware of these changes. It will be upsetting for someone to make an order on your platform and have problems accessing what was ordered.

Finally, always position your brand to be of service. The social media marketing ideas that generate the best returns are those that offer some sort of benefit to their audience. You should make sure that is the case with you.

The benefit you provide may not necessarily be tangible. Your social media marketing ideas should be fun and could distract your audience from the realities of the effect of the virus. That is an intangible benefit and will keep them coming back to your brand.

Disclaimer. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of IdeasPlusBusiness.com. Any content provided by our bloggers or authors is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

For questions, inquiries and advert placements on the blog, please send an email to the Editor at ideasplusbusiness[at]gmail[dot]com. You can also follow IdeasPlusBusiness.com on Twitter here and like our page on Facebook here. This website contains affiliate links to some products and services. We may receive a commission for purchases made through these links at no extra cost to you.