HOW TO MASTER YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT CREATION in 2026

It’s a no-brainer that prioritizing social media content creation is fundamental to building brand awareness and growing your business. Never before have entrepreneurs had this kind of reach to customers and clients without the need for massive advertising budgets. And while the number of social media users continues to grow, not everyone growing a small business knows how to use it to their advantage. Stick with me for an in-depth look at creating social media content to support your small business growth.

CONTENTS

• The Benefits of Having a Social Media Content Strategy

• Who Are You Creating Content For and How to Serve Them

• How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar

• Social Media Content Ideas

• How to Plan Social Media Content

• How to Repurpose Content

• Don't Underestimate Pinterest

• How to Design Your Social Media Content

• Social Media Content Creation Tips and Tricks

THE BENEFITS OF HAVING A SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT CREATION STRATEGY

1. Social Media is Free to Use

Creating social media content is the easiest and most effective way to build brand awareness and the best part is it won't cost you a dime. However, if you aren’t strategizing your social media content calendar for your business, you might be saving money, but you're likely also leaving money on the table.

2. It Helps You Build Brand Awareness

With a memorable brand identity to make your brand easy to recognize, along with a content strategy that becomes reliably familiar for your followers, you will grow a loyal audience, stay top of mind with the right people, and earn their trust.

Learn 5 strategies for increasing brand awareness.

3. Grow Your Audience and Your Business

Hashtags aren't dead. Yes, even in 2026. Hashtags are still a useful way to make specific content searchable. Use hashtags that are relevant to your unique content, your industry, and your target demographic to expand your reach. Having a social media content strategy will allow you to keep your growing audience engaged, further building brand recognition and turning followers into customers or clients.

WHO ARE YOU CREATING CONTENT FOR AND HOW TO SERVE THEM

Understanding your audience will determine:

a) which social media platforms you should be using, and

b) what type of content they value.

If you haven’t already, create an ideal customer profile for your business. When you adopt the mindset of your ideal client, it reframes how you approach your own content strategy. This will allow you to optimize your content for them.

Here's what I suggest to get started: create one or two profiles for the type of clients your business is marketing to.

Your ideal customer profile should cover demographics:

• age bracket

• education level

• profession

• where they live

• annual income

But even more importantly, you want to focus on the psychographics:

• habits and lifestyle

• pain points/struggles

• motivators

• values

Understanding the real challenges your audience is facing, or the things that they are seeking from a business like you, will give you what you need to curate valuable, binge-worthy content.

What Social Media Platforms Do They Use?

Once you understand who they are, you’ll want to decide which social media platforms they’re using and create content tailored to those platforms. If your ideal client is B2B, you'll want to create content for LinkedIn. If your target audience is Gen Z, you'll want to be active on TikTok. To save you time while letting your content go further, be sure to have a content repurposing strategy that allows you to easily adapt existing content to your preferred channels.

How Do They Engage With Social Media Content?

Your ideal customer profiles will help determine the type of content they value most and how they prefer to engage with it. For example:

• If they’re looking for a coach, embrace video content so they connect with you!

• If they want content they can easily share with their own followers, use reels, beautiful carousel graphics, or thought-provoking quotes.

• If they want to be up-to-date on your latest product line, use stories to showcase your products and include a link to your shop.

HOW TO CREATE A SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT CALENDAR

How can you create a worthwhile content calendar? Decide how often you want to post and create a general schedule for your week. I recommend posting the more serious or insightful content towards the beginning of the week and leaving the lighter, more fun content towards the end of the week when people are looking to slow down. Use my Content Marketing Planner for Notion to help you optimize your content calendar.

Avoid creating throw-away content. What I mean by this is content that has no value. While you may be trying to post anything to ensure you’re posting regularly, you run the risk of posting a lot of useless content that will lose the interest of your audience and lower your engagement rate.

Prioritize engaging content. Start your captions with a question and carousel posts with a strong hook that will entice them to read more. Provide them with actionable advice, food for thought, and embrace storytelling—including visual storytelling. This helps shape your reputation as a reliable account to follow.

The goal is to create content that your followers will look forward to. The more intentional you are about planning your social media content calendar, the more value they earn through each post. Strategic content planning will generate brand loyalty and trust among your followers.

We'll get more specific shortly on how to plan your social media content.

Download my Guide to Content Marketing for Small Business

SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT IDEAS

• get personal: people relate to people, so tell stories and humanize your brand

• generate buzz by showing sneak peeks of upcoming projects or products

• offer advice or useful tips designed for your unique audience

• talk about lessons you’ve learned in your industry or business—don't be afraid to talk about your failures

• share your unique POV and what you disagree with in your industry

• shoot b-roll to tell stories through video content

• use carousel posts to educate or to share photos from your business and life

• celebrate your staff, your community, or your clients

• promote products and show people using them

• instead of sharing a written client testimonial, get in front of the camera and talk about their experience—people engage with storytelling

• boost engagement with polls, quizzes, and questions in Instagram stories

• showcase before and afters

• run contests and giveaways

• partner with another business for cross-brand promotions
  

This is just a start and will vary depending on your industry. Use these ideas to help shape your own content calendar.

HOW TO PLAN SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT

Choose one day a week or one day a month to plan your social media content. I personally work on a weekly basis but I'm often logging upcoming content ideas for the month ahead. This is all made easier with my Content Marketing Planner for Notion, of course.

Set weekly or monthly goals for your business. When planning your social media calendar, what content can you create that will directly influence these goals?

If you have an upcoming launch or promotion on the horizon, you'll certainly want to plan ahead for those. Create a work-back schedule for your launch that is designed to build hype and anticipation. Content ideas for your work-back schedule can include behind the scenes, dropping hints about what's coming up, or let them in on the action with a talk-to-camera post discussing the offer and why you believe in it.

If your business has a blog, have some social media post templates designed for you so you can share pull quotes from your blog and link back to your website.

Create a social media content planner for yourself.

Maybe the framework looks something like this:

• 3x story content:

  • what you're working on / are excited about

  • talk about your process or show behind the scenes

  • aha-moments you've had that your audience will benefit from and shows your expertise

• 1x carousel post with educational info that your audience is looking for

• 3x video posts:

  • adapt a current trend to be fun or educational or both!

  • educational or inspiring post alongside lifestyle content

  • talk-to-camera insight featurette

• 1x photograph of your shop/your office/your desk with insightful post or worthy story

• 1x insight from a blog to repurpose content

• 1x promote a lead magnet you created for your audience

Maybe each week follows a similar framework or you swap out a few of the content ideas each week. Perhaps you choose one day of the week that always features a particular type of post that your audience can look forward to.

Look for opportunities to direct users to your website. Share content that will provide your audience value while positioning you as an expert. Deciding what you’ll post is just the first step. The second step is creating the content.

How often should you post on social?

You do not have to post everyday. Striving for daily content if you're a solopreneur or doing your own content creation and management is a full-time job. Find the cadence that works best for you.

It's also not going to make much of a difference to your bottom line. You can achieve relatively the same brand awareness and engagement with four posts a week as you do seven posts a week. As long as your content is strategic and intentional.

TIP: Choose one day of the week that always features a particular type of post that your audience can look forward to.

HOW TO REPURPOSE CONTENT

The best way to avoid content creation ruts is to repurpose content. If you keep a blog on your website—which you most definitely should—you can easily turn one blog topic into 5+ posts on social media. Here's how one single blog can be repurposed:

1. share a carousel post that leverages the copy from your blog

2. save that carousel as a PDF and upload to LinkedIn as a document

3. elaborate on the topic by going live or posting a longer video piece

4. post about it in a story, incorporate a poll or question for engagement

5. create a shorter, fun reel on the topic

6. republish your reel to Pinterest

7. have Pinterest templates for your blog post to share multiple pins

8. post a pull-quote from the blog and dive into the topic in your caption

9. BONUS-send an email campaign on the topic to send value right to your subscribers' inbox

An example for repurposing one content idea into multiple forms of content

To make your content marketing game truly effective, I created the Content Marketing Planner template. This all-in-one tool is designed to make planning and repurposing your content insanely easy and effective. A must-have for any bootstrapping business owner.

DON’T UNDERESTIMATE PINTEREST

While Instagram has always been the preferred choice for content marketing—and LinkedIn saw a huge migration in 2025—Pinterest is an invaluable social platform not to be overlooked.

Pinterest is actually a search engine that presents like a social media feed. While on Instagram and Facebook your posts will appear in your audience’s feed for maybe a day (if they even see it at all), on Pinterest your pins have an engagement-generating life span of years. This means, anytime someone searches for keywords related to your content, it has a chance to appear.

Not to mention the fast growth and audience reach. As soon as someone pins your content, it starts circulating in front of their followers. If it gets pinned again, your reach expands again and the growth is exponential.

Pro Tip: Download your posted Reels and upload them to Pinterest as a Pin.

Over the last few years, I've committed to a semi-regular presence on Pinterest and my followers and monthly views have exponentially skyrocketed! Pinterest is my number one traffic source! Maybe that's how you found your way to this very blog post. All of which is to say, be sure to factor Pinterest into your social media content strategy!

Easily create your own lead magnet with this FREE template with 30 page layouts!

HOW TO DESIGN YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT

Do It Yourself

If you are creative and have the time to spare, there are plenty of resources out there that will allow you to create content yourself for free. Source images by using free stock photography from websites like unsplash.com or Pexels.com and create visuals with design platforms like Canva and Adobe Express.

Use Social Media Templates

When you know the type of content your brand will prioritize, shop for suitable templates to adopt for your social channels. Skip the free Canva templates that everyone recognizes to avoid blending in. Instead, hire a designer to create custom templates or look to a platform like Creative Market to find endless social media template bundles that will elevate your brand online.

Hire a Photographer

If you want high quality original content, it may be worth budgeting to do it right. Depending on your content strategy, you may want to hire a photographer to do a photoshoot with you or take product shots.

Subscribe to a Stock Photography Service

If you don’t need your own custom photos, you can also pay for a photography subscription service like Styled Stock Society to provide you with high quality, instagram-worthy photos. Check out my full list of creative resources to elevate your brand online.

branded mockup for apparel retailer

Photo Mockups

Create custom content for your social media feed using product mock ups. Do you host a podcast? Did you just launch a new website? Are you offering an upcoming online course? Product mockups can turn nearly anything into captivating visuals. Use the Smart Mockup feature in Canva to create custom branded content!

Increase your Perceived Value with Branded Mockups

SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT CREATION TIPS AND TRICKS

Create a Business Account

Set up your Instagram and Facebook accounts as business profiles. These platforms have built in features for businesses that allow you to schedule content, track stats on your audience, engagement, and activity.

Create Hashtag Lists and Leverage Keywords

Have different hashtag lists on standby that are geared towards specific content you post about. Look to others in your industry and to those industries your target audience hangs out and see what hashtags they regularly use. SEO keywords also play a role on Instagram and Pinterest. Include strategic keywords that your audience may be searching for within your captions and content.

Create and Engage

If you have trouble writing engaging captions for your content, hire a copywriter. Use emojis to break up the content, ask questions to encourage your followers to leave comments, and be ready to engage with them. You should strive to respond to every comment that is left on your posts. Keep the conversation going and grow your engagement.

Use a Social Media Scheduler

Use a scheduling software to post your content calendar. I use Meta Business Suite to schedule my content. There are countless others out there like Hootsuite, Later, and Tailwind plus many more. Some are free and others may require you to upgrade depending on the nature of your social media calendar.

Schedule Your Posts at the Right Time

When you choose to post your content will affect how your posts perform. Try to imagine what times during the day your audience is most likely using social media? During the week, evening posts tend to perform better. On the weekends late morning to mid-afternoon are generally peak times for posting.

It can take some serious time and effort to get started and find your flow but once you do, you’ll be happy you did. Keep creating content, pay attention to how your followers respond to different posts and tweak your content as you go. Make the entire process effortless with my Content Marketing Planner. I'm literally obsessed with it.

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