If you’re like me, you’ve been busy crafting content plans for your brands’ social media presence this summer season.

Summer doesn’t call for a drastically different approach to writing content, but rather an opportunity to be timely while showing your fans that your brand is reactive to what’s going on outside itself.

Acknowledging that every brand is different—with varying audiences that have their own needs—there are general ways that you can make the most of your summer content. Here are a few ideas:

Engagement posts

The brands I manage like to draw reactions from our engagement posts—meaning we don’t like to just ask a question or have our community give their opinions and walk away saying: “Huh. That’s interesting Moving right along …”

Instead, if we ask what kind of spring vegetables our community likes to cook on a Tuesday, you can bet the next day we’re featuring a recipe that incorporates the top one or two answers that people tell us.

Something along the lines of: “Based on yesterday’s poll results, we realize that Brand X fans love ________. Here’s one of our favorite ________ recipes—enjoy!”

If your market research doesn’t already tell you what activities your audience enjoys during the summer, put that question out to them.

We’ve found that it doesn’t work to simply ask what people are doing. It’s always better to inspire them in some way. For example, tell them what your team is doing, then post a corresponding photo and ask what your community does.

Overall, we’re seeing that the more we can share our marketing teams with our audience, the better. Think about it: Who’s more passionate about your product than your team? Who better, then, to connect with your most passionate fans?

User-generated content

Summer is a great time for enjoying the outdoors. Obviously, some brands will be more of a logical outdoorsy fit. If your product is not a natural fit to enjoy during the summer months, it may be difficult to inspire user-generated content. One thing we’ll do with one of our brands that tends to mainly be purchased during fall and winter months is to send it “on vacation.” We’ll take photos of our products on the beach, enjoying the outdoors, Photoshopped wearing sunglasses—all while give updates about where it’s going and what it’s doing.

We’ll put that back to the community and ask them where we should take the product and encourage them to take their own photos. Ask yourself what your product would do in its down time and create content around that.

We often hear clients say, “Our product isn’t fun,” as an argument for playing it safe in the social space. They balk at content that isn’t serious. In these cases, the brands should consider whether social media is the best place to allocate marketing dollars. Most of the top-performing brands in social media have one thing in common: Their social voice is fun. Dour and corporate doesn’t inspire engagement.

Ultimately, a brand on social media should have more personality than a cable service phone operator. And summer—the season of road trips, vacations, sunbathing and softball—is the best time to embrace those lighthearted opportunities.

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