What Types of Social Media Content Should Businesses Create?

What types of social media content should businesses create? The answer isn’t one format or one platform—it’s a deliberate mix of three content categories that serve different purposes at different stages of the customer journey. This guide breaks down exactly what those categories are, how to use each one, and how to combine them into a strategy that builds awareness, loyalty, and conversions over time.

The Real Purpose of Social Media Content for Businesses

Most businesses create social media content for the wrong reason—they chase the algorithm instead of their customers. They see a competitor succeeding with video and copy the format without asking whether that format serves their audience. They optimize for views instead of conversions.

Here’s the better question: Is a post with 10,000 views that generates 3 conversions better than one with 200 views that generates 15? The answer is obvious, but most social media strategies are built around the first number.

The most effective social media content for businesses is client-first content—content built around what your ideal customer wants to see, finish, and share. When you get that right, your target audience does the distribution for you, reaching more people who look just like them. Going viral is a bonus, not the goal.

Your ideal customer is someone who recognizes your unique value, buys what you sell, refers others, and comes back. Every piece of content you create should be designed to attract and retain more of those people—not just rack up impressions from people who will never buy.

The Basic Social Media Content Formats

Before getting into strategy, it helps to understand the full range of content formats available. Businesses can choose from:

• Long-form video
• Short-form video (Reels, TikToks, Shorts)
• Live video
• User-generated content (UGC)
• Static images
• Carousel / multi-image posts
• GIFs and memes
• Influencer collaborations
• Text-based posts
• Long-form written content
• Polls and interactive posts
• Infographics
• Podcasts and audio content
• Guides and downloadables
• Industry trends and research
• Stories and ephemeral content

The format you choose matters less than the strategic purpose behind it. That’s where the three content categories come in.

The 3 Types of Social Media Content Every Business Should Be Creating

The most effective social media content strategies are built on three distinct content types: Hero, Hub, and Help. Each serves a different role in the customer journey, and each requires a different approach to production, promotion, and measurement.

1. Hero Content: Build Brand Awareness at Scale

Hero content is your highest-visibility, highest-investment social media content. Think of it as the Super Bowl ad equivalent for your business—something big, polished, and designed to reach the widest possible audience. This is the content that puts your brand on people’s radar and keeps it there during purchase consideration.

Hero content can take many forms: a brand launch video, a major product reveal, a high-production campaign, or a flagship piece of content tied to a seasonal moment. What defines it isn’t the format—it’s the intent and investment level. You allocate a meaningful portion of your marketing budget to both creating and promoting hero content.

Educational vs. entertaining hero content: The right approach depends on your product type.

• High-consideration products (laptops, financial services, medical devices, B2B software) warrant educational hero content—comparisons, demonstrations, proof-of-concept videos, and in-depth explainers. Buyers research carefully before committing, and your content needs to support that process.
• Low-consideration products (deodorant, snacks, everyday consumer goods) perform better with entertaining hero content. Old Spice is the classic example—their memorable, absurd commercials create strong brand recall in a category where switching costs are minimal. Entertainment builds recognition, and recognition drives purchase.

How to repurpose hero content: Hero content shouldn’t live in one place. Repurpose it across platforms—cut a long-form video into short-form clips for TikTok and Instagram Reels, pull stills for carousel posts, and use the core message across Stories. This multiplies your return on a single investment and keeps your brand consistently visible across channels.

You don’t need a Fortune 500 budget to create effective hero content. Creativity beats production budget at every scale. A well-shot, thoughtfully scripted video from a phone can outperform expensive studio content if it resonates with the right audience.

2. Hub Content: Build a Loyal, Returning Audience

Hub content is serialized, recurring content that keeps your audience coming back consistently. Where hero content creates awareness, hub content builds the relationship. People don’t engage with hub content because they love your brand—they engage because they love what you consistently produce. Over time, that connection transfers into brand loyalty.

The defining characteristic of hub content is repeatability. It follows a consistent format, cadence, and promise so your audience knows what to expect and when to expect it. Think of it like a TV show with a loyal viewership—people show up because the content itself is compelling, and the brand becomes associated with that experience.

Examples of hub content for businesses:

• A weekly podcast series (like The Branding Bros Podcast)
• A recurring interview series featuring customers, partners, or industry experts
• A regular “behind the scenes” or “day in the life” video series
• A weekly tips or “Did you know?” series in a consistent visual format
• A blog series covering a specific topic over multiple installments

Hub content is funded from whatever remains in your budget after hero content. It doesn’t need heavy promotion—consistency is the investment. The more reliably you show up with quality hub content, the more your audience grows around it.

When choosing your hub content format, consider where your audience actually spends time. YouTube and podcast apps for longer-form content; TikTok and Instagram for short-form series; LinkedIn for professional audiences. Match the format and platform to your audience’s existing habits.

3. Help Content: Drive SEO and Build Trust Through Answers

Help content answers the specific questions your ideal customers are already asking. It’s the most search-friendly type of social media content, and it compounds in value over time—a helpful video or post from six months ago can still be bringing in new visitors and building trust today.

Help content requires no advertising budget. It’s not designed to go viral, and it won’t—but that’s not the point. Its value comes from being found by the right person at exactly the right moment: when they have a question relevant to your product, service, or industry.

A classic example: a razor brand posting a short video explaining how to shave a goatee. That video won’t generate mass awareness, but it will be found by exactly the kind of person who buys razors—at a moment when that brand can demonstrate genuine usefulness and expertise. That builds trust, authority, and top-of-mind awareness in a way that broad promotional content simply can’t.

What makes good help content:

• Answers one specific question clearly and completely
• Uses language your customers actually search for (long-tail keywords)
• Is genuinely useful without requiring a purchase to apply the advice
• Positions your brand as a credible authority in your space
• Can live on social media platforms and be repurposed as blog content or YouTube videos for additional SEO benefit

The best help content topics come directly from your customers: FAQ threads, sales call objections, support tickets, and comment sections are goldmines for identifying what your audience actually wants to know.

The Triple Threat: Your Social Media Content Strategy Framework

Hero, Hub, and Help work best together. Each serves a different stage of the customer journey, and a social media strategy built on all three creates multiple entry points for the right people to discover, connect with, and ultimately buy from your brand.

• Hero content puts your brand in front of new audiences and drives awareness at scale
• Hub content keeps your existing audience engaged and builds the kind of familiarity that leads to trust
• Help content captures high-intent, search-driven traffic from people actively looking for what you offer

The exact ratio of each will depend on your industry, budget, and audience—but every business should have all three operating simultaneously. Leaning too heavily on any one type creates gaps: hero-only strategies burn budget without building relationships; hub-only strategies build audiences that don’t convert; help-only strategies attract traffic without brand awareness.

At Big Red Jelly, we help businesses develop content strategies grounded in their brand identity and designed to reach their ideal customers across every channel. If you’re ready to build a social media strategy that actually drives growth, let’s talk.