50 Social Media Post Ideas for When You Don’t Know What to Post

Social media is more than just kitten videos.

Social media is awesome for marketing your private psychotherapy practice. If you use it consistently and strategically, you can use it to build your online presence. In fact, social media is a central piece of any online marketing strategy.

Social media helps you build an audience and connect with them over time. It helps you share your content and expertise and allow people to get to know and trust you. These are the foundational activities that help you .

Social Media Post Ideas to the Rescue

As important as social media is, sometimes the ideas for social media posts just aren’t coming to you.

Hopefully these ideas for social media posts will save you from the staring contest you’re having with that blinking cursor in the social media post box.

These social media post ideas could be used on any social media platform (adjustment these ideas as needed to fit the platform). So whether you are writing a tweet to tweet on twitter or a post to post on Facebook or a link to share on twitter or an image to post to Instagram, these ideas may get your creativity flowing around social media post ideas for your private practice profiles:

Share Links and Resources

There are so many awesome free resources out there at our fingertips. Some of social media posting is about curating this vast content available for our audience. We’ve already shared some specific ways to find niche-focused content to share but what it’s really about is asking: from your professional experience, which resources are worth having people read? Which posts and articles would help your clients and potential clients? These are the types of links and resources that you should post about. (Bonus: this is a great approach if you’re trying to add helping into your online marketing strategy).

• Share your blog posts. Your blog is full of helpful, inspirational content right? So be sure to share those posts to show how much you care.
• Share your guest blog posts. If you’ve written a post and gotten it published in someone else’s blog or in a big publication, share the link. This both shows your expertise and how generous you are with your knowledge.
• Share your most popular blog post. And let us know that it’s the most popular and maybe even tell us why you think it’s become so popular? What’s so special about this post and how can it help us?
• Share content that you’ve been quoted or featured in. If you’ve been in the media at all, share the content that is sharing about you!
• Infographic. You can create an infographic on content that you’ve written or find infographics by others that are relevant to your audience.
• Post a link to your opt-in gift sign-up or newsletter/email list sign-up. Just be sure to state the benefits that are in store for signing up or getting that optin gift.
• Post a link to a FB group that may be helpful to your fans (eg: “Mothers in Austin, TX” FB group if you are a therapist helping mothers)
• Share a hashtag topic that has relevance to your audience. Example, here’s “depression” on twitter and “domestic violence awareness” on Facebook.

Photos

Even the social media platforms that started out as being text-based, like twitter, are now increasingly visual. Photos, gifs, and videos are doing very well on all platforms. So here are some creative ideas to get photos into your social media feed.

• Photo of your office space. Show us how cozy and comfortable your office is.
• Photo of a book you’re reading. Kindle screen totally acceptable as would be the book on a desktop.
• Photo from an event or conference. It does not have to include people… it could just be the sign on a banner outside or the event ticket in hand.
• Photo of yourself doing an activity. What are you up to that can help potential clients get an idea of what you care about. Are you doing a walk-a-thon for an charity? Are you going to your favorite bookstore to browse on weekends?
• Photo for good vibes. Share a photo that helps your social media followers feel the way you want them to feel when they are in contact with your practice. Comfortable? Post a picture of an inviting hammock. Warm? Sunshine. As if they are seen and heard? Friends sitting together.
• Post a throwback photo. If you’ve been in practice for a while, share throwback photos and screenshots to the old days. What was your first logo like? What about your first therapy space? Share about your journey.
• Post data visualized in a chart or graphic. What data is out there about your niche that you could turn into a line chart, pie chart, or graphic?

Share Products

Take it easy on these posts as they can make you look like you’re affiliate marketing or being salesy. Making sure you share the products from the place of, “hey, this is helpful to my clients and it might be helpful to you as well” is a good way to approach it.

• Recommend a book. Share a book with a few sentence review of how it may help people. Let us know the clear benefits and how it might help us.
• Recommend your favorite tea or healthy snack. Do you enjoy a particular peppermint tea source? Let everyone know.
• Recommend an app. There are so many apps out there right now for mental health, mindfulness, and more! What apps are useful to your or your clients?
• Recommend downloadable audio maybe a really good mindfulness meditation.
• Share a pillow (or something). Know of a really cool body bolster for a restorative yoga pose? Share the link of the pillow and an link to the pose. Or find other objects that can help your clients and tie the product to the healing practice. Maybe a meditation pillow, sandbox, aromatherapy kit, or coloring book.

Networking

Many people wrongly approach social media as a place to connect with only their potential clients. What they are missing is that social media is also an excellent way to build relationships with referral sources and other professionals. Here are some ideas of posts that can help you network.

• Tag or mention other professionals and share their stuff. A great way to build a relationship with potential referral sources.
• Recommend another business or healing practitioner. Do you know a great massage therapist in your area? What about a really awesome eating disorder specialist?
• Recommend another business to follow on social media. Show your friends some love and show your followers that you are supportive of your friends.
• Share someone else’s webinar or optin gift. You don’t have to be responsible for creating every last helpful thing for your audience. Luckily, there are others passionate about helping the same people you do. Network with these people and help your audience at the same time.
• Tag an industry leader in a share of their stuff. You can share a quote, a blog post, or another resource. Worst case scenario they don’t reply but you still share something awesome. And in the best case, it might get that conversation started!
• Participate in a twitter chat happening in your industry and share the hashtag or participate in the chat.
• Share an inspiring pinterest board. Pinterest is great for collecting and sharing links. If you aren’t on pinterest, you can still search for the boards of others and share.
• Post a helpful youtube video. The video could be yours or by someone else, the important part is that it has value to your audience.

Original Content

Social media is often thought of being different from blogging but is it really? Some like to think of social media profiles like micro-blogging. Blogging with small posts and content. Thinking of it this way can open up a whole new world! You can create original content for your social media.

• Share an insight. What type of amazing things do your clients uncover in therapy with you? Can you share an insight?
• Slides from a presentation. If you’ve done a presentation recently, you can upload the slides to something like slideshare (now part of Linkedin) and share the slides on social media.
• Answer a FAQ. Repurpose information in that amazing FAQ page you put together to write mini social media posts answering commonly asked questions.
• Share a video of yourself giving out helpful info. Video is powerful and social media would be a great place to use video marketing.
• Write a mini-series. For instance, every week, you can post a tip. This works particularly well if you number them! “Self care tip of the week #92: your self care may not look like someone else’s self care.”
• Share your approach to some of the latest industry news. You’re an expert! What insider research do you have access to? Let us know what’s going on and your unique take on it.
• Share a benefit of therapy. Tell us how people can grow, change, and transform their lives in therapy.

Promote Yourself

Only 10-5% of your social media should be direct self promotion. Direct self promotion is where the value of what you are sharing is through the purchase of the service itself and there is no value to someone reading the post or visiting the link otherwise.

The point of social media is to be generous, help, build trust, build relationships. That said, don’t throw yourself out of your social media completely. Make sure you actually do include your 5-10% to remind your audience about who you are, what’s going on in your practice, and how you can help.

• Post your website link. Where is your home on the internet? Where can people go to find out more about how you can help them?
• Post a link to a services page. What services do you offer and to whom?
• Latest news from your practice. Let your followers know if anything is exciting now or in the future. Example: “In 1 month, we’ll be adding a new practitioner to the practice.” or “Great news, starting next week, I will be available for sessions on Mondays”
• Post your about page. And for a group practice, rotate posting the about page for each practitioner.
• Post another social media profile. So if you’re posting to Facebook, ask people to join you over on twitter as well.

Creative Ideas

These ideas didn’t fit into one of the above categories but they are great for if you’d like to mix things up a bit.

• Tell a short, entertaining story. Some of the most shared content on the internet is simply entertaining.
• Quotes. Post a quote that speaks to your audience with compassion. What quote may help them?
• Challenge a commonly held beliefs. We learned about this from the most popular TED talks.
• Share a organization that you like to volunteer with or donate to. Tell us about a cause you care about and why.
• Share activism and advocacy links on what’s happening in your niche. Depending on your niche, this may or may not be a good idea. It might be more triggering than inspirational. So make sure it’s appropriate first.

Social Media Can Be So Rewarding

Posting consistently to social media can sometimes feel like a bit of a chore. Yet once you get some ideas flowing and start helping and engaging with your audience, the rewards are plentiful.

Not only are you connecting with clients and potential clients but also networking with colleagues and referral sources and just awesome, like-minded people. If you aim for authenticity, you can start connecting with and building your tribe.

What do you think? I would love to know if these social media post ideas are helpful to you! Send me a note through my contact page. I’d love to hear from you and know your thoughts.