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Create Effective Social Content

Learn how to create a social media strategy and content plan that fits with your department and follower needs.

Decide What Content to Post

Social media success is all about creating content relevant to your audience, and sharing the right content at the right time.

A good ratio is to share:

  • 25 per cent of your own content
  • 75 per cent of the content from your community and related information

Doing this ensures you post unique content, and makes the work of creating new content manageable. Post on each of your networks throughout the week. It’s more important to post or share quality content rather than trying to post a lot of content.

How to create content with impact

  • Informative: It’s new information worth sharing
  • Meaningful: It solves a problem or addresses an issue
  • Pride: It builds pride in SFU, those involved or your audience
  • Awe: It inspires, surprises or impresses
  • Clear: It’s focused and concise
  • Timely: It’s related to current news or an upcoming event, or it just happened

Important content considerations

  • Does this content build or uphold SFU’s positive reputation? 
  • Is this content aligned with your department or faculty goals? 
  • Is your content written in SFU’s tone of voice: Positive, compassionate, witty, confident, conversational and/or concise? 
  • Does your content follow the guidelines outlined in SFU’s Privacy Policy?
  • Does your content treat members of the public, students, staff and faculty with respect and dignity? 
  • If your content is about a community that you aren’t a part of, are you using language that honours your subjects’ preferences?
  • Do your images, video, or language reflect the diversity of SFU and its surrounding communities? 
  • Does your content feature a variety of voices, perspectives, and experiences from your faculty/department/program/community?
  • Could this content offend or do harm?
  • Is the content written with gender-inclusive language?
  • Could your visual content be considered tokenistic? 
  • Does this content perpetuate stereotypes? Does it paint a community with one broad stroke?

Check out SFU’s Editorial Style Guide for user-focused writing tips. Read “Navigating equity, diversity and inclusion on social media” for more information about stereotyping, tokenism, and gender-inclusive language. 

Pre-publish content checklist

  • Have you asked yourself, "what is the value I'm offering to my audience, or action I'd like them to take after reading this post?"
  • Is your content creative, interesting, and compelling?
  • Is this content "on brand"? 
  • Are you covering diverse subjects and using interesting creative
  • Make sure you're not exceeding the daily frequency caps per channel
  • Is the destination URL correct?
  • Have you checked the spelling and grammar? 
  • Have you included SFU’s brand hashtag: #SFU
  • Have you included any relevant campaign hashtags: #ExampleCampaign
  • Have you tagged relevant influencers and/or collaborators: @Collaborator
  • Have you included a "call-to-action" at the end: "To learn more, visit ________," "Participate by ____," etc.
  • How does your content compare to a social media role model, such as NYT Twitter, NYT Instagram, NYT Facebook?
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