7 Content Bucket Ideas You Can Use (With Examples)
Content buckets make it easy to align your content strategy with your business goals.
You can use them to categorize the posts you publish for your social media accounts and provide a better experience for your audience.
In this post, we share several content bucket ideas that will diversify your social media calendar and lead you to your business goals much more efficiently.
First, let’s define content buckets.
What are content buckets?
Content buckets are categories you can group your posts into, categories that are more dependent on your business goals and less dependent on the topics you create content for.
Let’s say you have a coffee company, and these were your last five social media posts:
- Social Media Post 1: Promotional image depicting a freshly made cup of coffee with your brand’s coffee beans spilling out of the bag.
- Social Media Post 2: A clip from your podcast featuring an interview with an influencer who drinks your coffee every morning.
- Social Media Post 3: A poll asking your followers how they prepare coffee in the morning.
- Social Media Post 4: A how-to video on how to use a French coffee press.
- Social Media Post 5: A short, three-minute documentary on the journey your customer’s coffee takes from the farmer’s field to your customer’s kitchen table.
If you were to only organize these posts by topics, you would say Social Media Post 1 is about your classic coffee bean blend, Post 2 is about your podcast, and Posts 3, 4 and 5 are about coffee making in general.
However, there should always be a greater purpose when you publish content to social media. Each post should have a direct path to a specific goal for your business.
Content buckets make it much easier for us to categorize the content we create by the path they take to our business goals rather than the actual topics they’re about.
When we take content buckets into consideration, we can actually categorize these posts into the following buckets:
- Content Bucket for Social Media Post 1: Promotional
- Associated Business Goal: Advertise your products
- Content Bucket for Post 2: Inspirational
- Associated Business Goals: Raise brand awareness; increase your authority in your niche
- Content Bucket for Post 3: Engaging
- Associated Business Goal: Increase the amount of engagement you receive from your target audience so they’ll be more likely to engage with promotional posts when you advertise products
- Content Bucket for Post 4: Educational
- Associated Business Goals: Increase your authority in your niche; raise brand awareness, especially if you use your own products in instructional content
- Content Bucket for Post 5: Informative
- Associated Business Goal: Increase your authority in your niche; raise brand awareness
These are just a few examples of the content bucket ideas we’ll be sharing in this post.
Why are content buckets important?
The most important aspect of content buckets are the way they help you align your content strategy with your business goals.
Without a content bucket strategy, you primarily come up with topic ideas based on what you feel would resonate with your audience the most.
While this social media strategy is perfectly fine, your social media efforts will be much more effective if you keep your business goals in mind while you plan out your editorial calendar.
Content buckets also make you more aware of the types of content you’re creating. Some brands simply make social media posts about whatever idea pops into their heads.
Being active on social media is important, but you should have some type of strategy in mind when you post.
As you start publishing content based on content buckets, you’ll start to notice which types of content resonate with your audience more than others.
This can help you determine which types of content to focus on and which ones need a little more work.
Content bucket ideas to use for social media
These are the content bucket ideas we’ll be covering:
- Instructional
- Informative
- Promotional
- Engaging
- Personal
- Entertaining
- Inspirational
1. Instructional
This content bucket is an important one, especially for niches that can be taught.
These types of posts fall into the instructional content bucket idea:
- How-to guides.
- Guides.
- Tips and tricks content.
- Instructional infographics.
In a world of content creators who make longer videos intentionally so they earn more ad revenue or unintentionally because they don’t know how to edit videos properly, general consumers appreciate guides that are short and to the point.
Plus, if the way you present content is captivating enough, you may go viral or semi-viral. You may even attract consumers who weren’t originally interested in your niche.
Example of an instructional post
Here’s an example from a TikToker who only posts instructional content.
In this video, @jmg8tor is demonstrating how to replace screens.
He follows the simple guide line of keeping instructional content short and to the point. He even ends each video with his own catchphrase: “Next!”
He has 2.9 million followers on TikTok, and most of his videos are one to two minutes long.
Some of his videos receive a few hundred thousand views while others receive millions of views. This particular video received 3.9 million views, 174,500 likes, 1,700 comments and 38,700 favorites.
2. Informative
This content bucket is related to the instructional content bucket with both falling under the umbrella of educational content.
Social media posts that are designed to teach your audience something in a non-instructional format can fall into the informative content bucket.
Here are content types that fall into this bucket:
- Educational posts about your niche
- Posts that demonstrate facts about you or your business
- Short documentaries
- Experiments
- Video essays
While informative content doesn’t teach your audience how to do something, it can be just as constructive and even entertaining.
Example of an informative post
This example comes from a TikToker who only posts informative content.
In this video, @geodesaurus discusses the unfortunate source of the extravagant colors of one of Yellowstone Park’s hot springs.
Her video teaches you about the history of the spring and mentions every interesting fact within a one-minute timeframe.
She also uses a signature move in her videos: she opens each by saying “Um, yes, hello” and appears slowly from the bottom of the video. She also only shows her head from the eyes up.
Her entire TikTok page is dedicated to hydrology, the study of movement, distribution and management of water.
She has 1.7 million followers, and each video receives a few hundred thousand views with some reaching over 1 million views.
This particular video received 1.4 million views, 243,000 likes, 1,900 comments and 6,200 favorites.
3. Promotional
Promotional content has two primary purposes depending on if you’re promoting products or content.
Generally, only posts that promote your products or content should fall into this bucket. Posts you create to promote another business’ products should fall into other content buckets.
Here are content types that fall into the promotional bucket:
- Images and videos specifically created to advertise your product or service.
- Posts that promote your blog, YouTube and podcast content.
A lot of brands make the mistake of only posting promotional content. In reality, promotional content should only make up a small portion of your social media content calendar.
Attracting an audience with genuine instructional, informative and entertaining content, then promoting to them every once in a while is much more effective.
Example of a promotional post
Here’s an example of a promotional post from language learning app Duolingo.
In this post, Duolingo is promoting the Year in Review feature on their app, an end-of-year feature that assigns their users titles and ranks depending on their performance on the app throughout the year.
Duolingo is a brand that’s highly in tune with social media.
Most of the content they post is entertaining and references memes and current social media trends.
While most of their entertaining content receives hundreds of thousands of likes per post, their promotional content only receives tens of thousands of likes.
This demonstrates the importance of creating content in a way a regular social media user would and only creating promotional content every once in a while.
4. Engaging
Social media engagement is important.
If your target audience is not interacting with your content enough to like it and comment on it, what makes you think they’re going to interact with it enough to purchase one of your products or one of your affiliate products?
Here are content ideas that fall into this bucket:
- Polls
- Social media contests
- Q&A sessions
- Livestreams
If you find ways to encourage your audience to engage with your content more, you’ll find it much easier to generate revenue when you promote to them.
Example of an engaging post
Here’s an example of a poll from video game media publisher IGN.
In this poll, which was published to Twitter (X), they asked their audience to choose between two female protagonists from the video game Final Fantasy VII.
The poll itself received 35,000 votes while the post received 1,100 likes, 540 reposts, 330 comments and 200 bookmarks.
This is pretty good seeing as how most of IGN’s tweets only receive a few hundred likes each.
5. Personal
Social media platforms are very personal by nature. Therefore, you should be creating content that’s personal, at least every once in a while.
Here are content ideas for the personal content bucket:
- Vlogs
- Behind the scenes videos
- House/studio tours
- What’s in my bag (can be a gym bag, fishing tackle, photography bag, etc.)
- Storytimes
- X facts about me
- Shots of you in action in your niche
- Selfies
You can create these types of content in a team format as well if you create content with others.
Personal content is important to include in your content marketing strategy. It demonstrates to your audience that there are real people behind your brand.
Example of a personal post
Here’s an example of a personal post from science YouTuber Mark Rober.
In this Instagram post, Mark is sharing then-and-now images of his family attending football games for teams representing the University of Washington.
While not great for engagement, this personal post likely resonated with a very specific part of his target audience and will likely encourage their loyalty to his content for some time.
6. Entertaining
Your brand probably either creates too much entertaining content or none at all.
Entertaining content is important for your social media marketing strategy, but you should use other content buckets on this list as well.
Here are entertainment posts that fall into this content bucket:
- Memes
- Social media trends
- Funny images and videos
- Niche-related content that’s entertaining and has no educational value
This type of content will likely do better than most types of content, so it’s important to include it in your content strategy.
Example of an entertaining post
Duolingo is the king of entertaining branded content, so let’s use one of their posts as an example again.
In this video, @duolingo is demonstrating how the brand’s fictitious owl mascot feels when you ignore “his” app notifications to complete one of your daily language learning lessons.
The video received 60 million views, 6.4 million likes, 188,000 comments and 579,000 favorites.
7. Inspirational
Posts that are meant to demonstrate success in your niche or give your audience hope fall into the inspirational content bucket.
Here are content types you might place into this bucket:
- Your own success story
- A customer success story
- Customer stories in general
- Success stories from influencers in your niche
For customer stories and stories about influencers, you can either talk about their stories or interview them personally.
Example of an inspirational post
Here’s an example of a customer story from photography store B&H.
In this video, B&H customers Jack and Barbra, who are wildlife photographers, explain how they use B&H to have camera equipment shipped from a B&H warehouse to their remote town in Alaska.
The video has 17 million views on YouTube, 485 likes and 95 comments.
The video was likely used as an ad at some point, so naturally, it doesn’t appear to have as many likes and comments as you’d expect a video with 17 million views to have.
Final thoughts
Content buckets are important for your marketing strategy as you shouldn’t rely on search engines alone for traffic.
Consistent traffic to your site from social media can be powerful, and content buckets help you be more active on social media while not straying too far from your original business goals.
Two additional content bucket ideas you can use are trending topics and user-generated content (UGC).
Any post you create that covers industry news and current events in your niche and beyond fall under the umbrella of trending topics.
UGC is content your audience creates about your brand or featuring your products. Many brands repost this content on their own social media pages and tag the original creator.
If you need a social media scheduling tool to help you keep track of all of these buckets, check out our review of SocialBee.
It allows you to create categories for social media posts for multiple social media channels.
