I often get questions from brands, PR professionals and social media managers about what content to share on social media and how to find just the right content for each social media channel. So, I thought it would be helpful to write a post offering some best practices and tools for how to curate social media content that reinforces your brand voice and keeps the content ideas flowing.
9 Hacks to Better Generate Social Media Content Ideas
Keep in mind that it’s essential to know your brand voice and goals for social media as a part of your overall marketing strategy before investing significant time in content development. What are your goals for engagement and lead generation? How will social media support those goals? Once you know the answers to these questions, use these nine tips and tools to get the content ideas flowing:
1. Use Feedly as a content aggregator.
Feedly is a tool that helps group website and blog content by topic and can be customized based on your needs. We use Feedly to browse content by competition, industry and topic. Read our post for how to get started with Feedly here.
2. Look at your competition.
I’m not saying copy your competition but don’t go in blind either. The goal with reviewing your competition’s social media profiles is to ensure that you’re not missing any content topics that would appeal to your target audiences and industries. Using our agency as an example, we would look at our key competitors to see how often and what sort of content they share on a daily basis. This can lead to some great ideas and provide a means of comparison.
3. Answer the question: What is your target audience reading, watching and listening to?
This is where you start. Once you determine the answers to this question, you can begin to add websites, news outlets, industry publications and blogs to your Feedly. This knowledge will also help relevant content stand out as you look for post ideas.
4. Use Pinterest to curate visuals.
I love Pinterest for may reasons, but one of my favorite ways to use Pinterest is to find inspirational quotes with accompanying images that are perfect for social media sharing and increasing engagement. Begin to use Pinterest public or secret boards to collect visually appealing content that fits with your brand voice and will resonate with your target audience.
5. Share branded #tips with or without visuals.
Sharing a quick tip that’s branded can go a long way on social media. Be sure to keep your tip smart, creative and concise with a compelling, branded visual to increase your odds of getting retweets and shares. Tip: look for a hashtag (like #biztip) that is trending in your industry or create your own hashtag (we use #BelleTip) which can serve as a stream of helpful tips from your brand.
6. Repurpose emails and other owned content into quotes and tips.
Think about how many questions you answer in a day or how many articles you read — that’s an abundance of information that you could repurpose within your social media channels. Share tips, best practices and quotes as you think of them and bucket them within Evernote for review or schedule them in Buffer. Don’t reinvent the wheel if you can avoid it.
7. Repurpose content across channels when it makes sense.
A simple way to find content for your social media channels is to repurpose content where it makes sense. Although you won’t want to share the same content every time on all channels (boring!) some content will lend itself to multiple channels. You can even schedule your content to share at different times across channels for more variety.
8. Retweet / repost content from followers.
One of the goals you should be working toward within all your social media channels is increased engagement. A great way to build your social media following and engage with your followers is to retweet or share their content. The bonus here is that you will have more variety in the content on your channels. Work toward retweeting content daily.
9. Use Post Planner and read blog posts from social media experts.
There are a multitude of blog posts about how to generate social media content ideas and what to post on social media, which you can find from a simple Google search. Here are 100 Killer Ideas for Your Social Media Content from Forbes to get your ideas flowing. Also, be sure to check out Post Planner for more content ideas.
How Often Should I Share Content on Each Channel?
Now that you have some tips for how to find content, it’s time to determine how often you will be sharing content within each channel. Read this post for advice that works for both B2B and B2C brands in regard to sharing content, tailored to each social media channel.
Note: The above hacks can be used to help you curate content for most of your social media channels. However, channels like Instagram require a much more tailored approach, with content focused exclusively on images and video.
There you have it! Hopefully these hacks have given you some great resources and ideas for future social media content. Have a specific question? Leave it in the comments below …
