In the previous lesson, you started learning how to develop a strategy for your social media marketing campaign. We discussed how to set goals for your campaign, identify your target audience, and choose the best platforms for your audience and goals. In this lesson, we'll get to the next pillar of social media marketing, planning and publishing your social media posts. Let's start by talking about the different types of content you can publish on social media. For your social media marketing strategy to succeed, you need to produce effective content that generates engagement from your target audience. To do this, your social media content plan should include a variety of content types. When you're developing a social media post, you first need to consider what content bucket the post will fit into. Content buckets are categories to group your marketing content. They are broad themes that are used to achieve a particular goal or to make your customers feel a certain way. These themes address different aspects of your business and target audience. Common social media content buckets include content that is entertaining, educational, inspirational, conversational, and promotional. Let's discuss each. Entertaining content appeals to people who are on the platform to enjoy themselves. It can help your audience relate to your content and your company. Entertaining social media content includes things like viral videos, jokes, comics, contests or giveaways, and memes. A meme is an amusing or interesting item such as a caption, picture, or video that is spread widely online, especially through social media. Educational content can build trust in your brand and position you as an industry leader with information and wisdom to share video trainings, infographics, industry research, case studies, FAQs, tips, and how to post a popular types of educational content. Inspirational content often features real people using your products or services. This content makes your brand seem more authentic and reinforces your brand's message, values, and vision. To create inspirational content, you might build case studies, find testimonials and quotes, share amazing facts and trivia, and tell personal stories. Conversational content encourages your audience to engage with you. You can begin conversations with your audience by suggesting a topic or viewpoint, then inviting your audience to join the dialogue. You can also ask a question, invite people to complete a poll, have them fill in the blank, or even ask for advice. Promotional content talks about your product and service with the intent of marketing them to the current customers and drawing in new followers. Things like coupons, discounts, or free gifts for sign-ups can boost sales and encourage people to buy things that they may not have purchased before. In addition to choosing content buckets for your post, you need to decide on their format. There are so many different content formats to choose from on social media. Images, videos, written posts, stories, GIFs, links, polls, and the live videos are some of the many content formats that you'll find on social media today. Let's discuss some of the most popular ones. Videos can be a great format for grabbing your audience's attention and they're easy to consume than a lot of text. With smartphones, capturing videos is easy and convenient, and they're also more engaging than pictures. Video contents such as how-to guides, video tours, and product demonstrations can both drive traffic to your website and increase sales. Images are the most frequently posted content types across social media platforms. Unlike most videos, still, images can be absorbed instantly. Images give social media users an immediate impression of your brand. Infographics, animated GIFs, caption photos, and screenshots are some of the many effective ways to use images on social media. Written posts such as articles, blogs, and guides provide your audience with information about your products and services and company. Written content can also be extremely valuable for starting conversations that help you and your customers get to know one another. Stories or images and short videos that last a relatively short amount of time, usually from 1-7 days before disappearing. You can add elements like stickers, filters, and sound to help you creatively express your brand's personality. Use stories to update your audience about events, offers, and other announcements. Live videos enables companies to broadcast conversation, performances, Q&As, webinars, and other virtual events. These live stream events gives audiences a chance to ask questions, comments, and react instantaneously to what they're experiencing. Live viewing also give people a sense of community. Now you've learned about some common content buckets on social media, such as entertaining, educational, inspirational, conversational, and promotional content. You've also learned some of the formats that are most frequently used on social media, like videos, images, written posts, stories, and live videos. The key to creating effective content is choosing the format that best match your content bucket. Coming up, we'll talk more about how to plan and publish content on social media.