If you take a closer look at a successful social media channel, you will quickly notice that the fundamental types of content often repeat. The core message is the same; only the packaging of the content differs. This is because there are only five different functions your content can fulfill—and good social media marketing content does exactly that. In this article, we’ll look at what these are and how you can use them.
Good Content Fulfills Different Goals
With a well-thought-out social media strategy, your content fulfills five different functions to contribute toward your marketing goal. Because good content always serves a purpose—it’s never arbitrary.
You do social media marketing to achieve a specific goal—whether that’s gaining customers, selling your products, or expanding your network. Every post you share on social media has the potential to help you reach this overarching marketing goal. Good content is never random; it always serves a function.
Therefore, it is crucial that you define the function of each post in your content strategy and how this individual post can contribute to your specific goal. Generally, there are five different functions your content can fulfill. More on that later. Knowing the intention behind your posts helps you keep your goal in focus, create strategically good content, and on the other hand, makes measuring success easier. Because when you are clear about your intention in publishing a post, it becomes much easier to evaluate whether your post performed well or poorly in relation to your goal.
In Social Media Marketing, Your Content Serves Five Different Functions:
Your content is either informative, promotional, aimed at fostering engagement, entertaining your audience, or building your community. A single piece of content can only fulfill one of these functions—either one or the other. That’s why it is important that these intentions alternate in your content strategy. Below, we take a closer look at each function.
Educational Content
As the name suggests, “Educational Content” is primarily about expressing your expertise and positioning yourself as the top-of-mind contact person for your topic. This type of content is especially important if you want to market services or your knowledge.
It consists of informative content that provides your target audience with real added value. Ideally, they learn something they didn’t know before. Good educational content manages to explain complex and specialized topics in a way that is understandable and simple for everyone—even absolute beginners.
When we talk about educational content, we mean things like expert articles, checklists, tutorials, how-to guides, and opinion pieces. This type of content is mainly liked and saved.
Promotional Content
If no one knows what you offer, no one can buy from you. Promotional content therefore primarily serves to draw attention to you and your offerings. You actively advertise your products and services. Advertising content is thus an important element in your content strategy. But beware—too much self-promotion harms you more than it helps, especially on social media. Promotional content should therefore only make up about 10% of your total content.
Examples of promotional content could be launch posts, product information, discount codes, webinar announcements, freebies. Generally, advertising doesn’t get much interaction—and promotional content is exactly that. So don’t be disappointed if you get very few interactions on this type of post. Often, interest in this kind of content is shown more in private messages with questions about your offer.
Community Building Content
The main function of community building content is to interact with your target audience and engage in direct exchange. You show with this type of content that you are open to conversations on equal footing, interested in the concerns of your audience, and appear particularly approachable. Community building content can lower the barriers for potential customers and provides a reason to start a conversation. Examples of this type of content include Q&A sessions, testimonials, behind-the-scenes videos, or mini-trainings where you explain things you are often asked about. The goal of community building content is to build a strong community. These posts are successful when they generate many comments and foster active exchanges.
Engagement Content
Interactions with your content signal to the algorithm that your content is interesting, which means your content will be shown to more people—even beyond your existing followers.
Engagement content is therefore important for increasing your visibility. This type of content is designed to actively promote interactions within your target group. The sole goal of this kind of post is to generate as many likes, comments, or shares as possible.
Examples of engagement content include polls and surveys, interactive graphics like “This or That” or puzzles, questions to the community. Your goal is to collect likes and/or comments. Your engagement content is successful if it achieves this goal.
Entertainment Content
Entertainment content primarily aims to entertain, amuse, or inspire your target audience. It should be fun, evoke emotions, and encourage users to engage with the brand or content.
Here, you have the opportunity to convey your personality and show your network who the person behind the service or product is. This way, you can build a positive connection to your brand and strengthen your image.
Examples of entertainment content include memes, GIFs, funny reels such as outtakes. Usually, you can expect entertainment content to generate many impressions. Additionally, these posts are shared more often—however, they rarely receive direct interaction.
A good content strategy thrives on a mix of these five content functions. Focusing only on one type can work if, for example, you only want to build a meme page without entrepreneurial ambitions. If you want to use social media for your business, however, only a mixture of promotional, entertaining, informative, community-building, and engagement-promoting content will lead you to your goal in the long run. As you have already learned from the examples, it mainly concerns the thematic and content-related orientation of your posts—it doesn’t matter whether they are videos, carousel posts, blog articles, podcast snippets, or whatever else. Which format you use to package these functions is entirely up to you.
The Form of Good Social Media Content
A good content strategy thrives on a mix of these five content functions. Focusing only on one type can work if, for example, you only want to build a meme page without entrepreneurial ambitions. If you want to use social media for your business, however, only a mixture of promotional, entertaining, informative, community-building, and engagement-promoting content will lead you to your goal in the long run. As you have already learned from the examples, it mainly concerns the thematic and content-related orientation of your posts—it doesn’t matter whether they are videos, carousel posts, blog articles, podcast snippets, or whatever else. Which format you use to package these functions is entirely up to you.
