✌️Your feed doesn’t need another product photo

Metricooler,

If you run an online store, this probably sounds familiar. The month starts, it’s time to build your social media content calendar, and all you can think about is product, product, product.

After all, that’s what you sell, right?

When you run an ecommerce brand, it’s easy to let your products take over every single post. But trust me, a feed packed with nothing but photos of your specialty coffee or hiking backpacks won’t get people to engage.

We wanted to find out how other brands are solving this, so we analyzed 3,234 posts from 72 leading US brands to see where, how often, and what they post. Do top brands send people to the link in their bio or straight to Amazon? Do they use TikTok Shop? Do they rely more on videos or images? You'll find the answers to all of that and more in our Social Media & Ecommerce Report. Just one click away.

But here are 4 ideas to help you out next time you sit down to build your content calendar for your ecommerce brand:

Spending your budget on a photoshoot for dozens of aesthetic photos can pay off, but people don’t just need to see what you sell. They need to see how it fits into their everyday lives.

According to our new report, launches and product-in-use content make up almost 4 out of every 10 posts from the brands we analyzed. In fact, 63 of the 72 brands create content that shows their products in real-life situations.

So when you’re building content for your ecommerce brand, take some time to think about what daily need or problem your product solves. If you sell headphones, turn a funny, everyday situation into a short Reel, like Skullcandy does.If you're a beauty brand, show people how to use your products, like Bubble does. Or give your followers a reason to feel like they can't live without your products, like NEMO Equipment does.

Another (not exactly shocking) finding is that short video is the undisputed leading format across every social network. 

On Instagram, though, the platform where the brands we analyzed get the most engagement, static content still holds its ground. There, 38% of posts are carousels, a number that climbs to 47% on Facebook (though that includes both single images and albums).

And that makes sense. Carousels can work like mini product catalogs, encouraging people to spend more time on each image while telling a story along the way.

The best format depends on what you're trying to show. If you want to walk people through assembling something, demo a product, or film an unboxing, go with video.If you want to highlight product details, show a before-and-after transformation, or break down a step-by-step routine, go with a carousel.

Break down a launch image by image, like Owala does. Show the before and after of a space with your product in it, like Sabai does with a customer’s living room. Or combine both formats, like Hydro Flask does by sharing different ways to use its food flask in a carousel of videos featuring recipes.

Sometimes we spend way too much time and energy coming up with different content ideas for every social platform. But the solution is pretty simple: reuse your content.

In our analysis of more than 3,000 posts, we found that two out of every three Facebook posts from the brands we studied reuse the exact same copy from Instagram. In other words, they publish the exact same post on both networks, sometimes without even adapting it to each platform’s quirks (“link in bio” and all).

If you want to save time, repurposing content can be your best friend. Just make sure you tweak it to fit each platform. Liquid Death is a good example, swapping the “link in bio” it uses on Instagram for a direct link on Facebook.

Purely promotional posts, like those with a "Buy Now" CTA or a "20% off" offer, tend to perform the worst relative to each brand's average.

Tutorials and posts that encourage community participation, on the other hand, tend to perform slightly better than average. Yet almost half the brands we analyzed don't use them as much as you'd expect.

It works the same on social media as it does in a physical store. Someone repeating the price over and over isn’t going to convince you to buy, but someone showing you the value of that product will.

So before you ask someone to buy, give them a reason to stick around. You can answer a question your customers always have, like Athletic Brewing does when it explains the difference between a Hazy IPA and a traditional one, or you can get the conversation going with a simple question, like BARK.