The 4 types of organic social content you need to drive engagement

Here’s a fact for you—I have led social media for communications offices in higher education for a decade now and I have never had an ad budget to work with. Thus, I have built my strategies around evidence-based content, content that has proven to be successful with our audiences. I have found that these four content types have consistently garnered a lot of public-facing engagements on the channels I have managed. I’m going to walk you through each type so you can make them work for you.

1. Content that intersects your culture with the current moment

The beauty of this type of content Is that the moment cannot be manufactured, it’s completely organic. It’s when your brand or your organization naturally becomes a part of the current conversation or popular culture. As social media managers, the best we can do is recognize the moment and act quickly to capitalize on it. When executed well and in a timely manner, the result is what I like to call, “social media gold.” I often use a diagram to explain this concept:

For example, in an episode of The Simpsons, Milhouse bet that Professor Bengt Holmström, (the name to the right of the circled name below) would win the Nobel Prize in Economics. And when he actually did win several years later, we scrambled to get an image of Milhouse holding up his betting card.

Fun fact: @TheSimpsons' Milhouse once predicted MIT Prof. Holmström would win a #NobelPrize. Today, he was right! https://t.co/CC0LRk1avy pic.twitter.com/syhMiJBK2A

— Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (@MIT) October 10, 2016