Social media can be an effective tool for growing your business, and should be a key part of your business’s marketing plan. Social media provides an excellent way to stay in front of our target audiences, engage in conversation, and obtain business leads.
The challenge comes with the content. What should we say? How can we come up with ideas? What if we have writer’s block?
While there are many types of social media posts, generating original ideas specific to your business requires that you engage in an activity that alleviates writer’s block. It’s called brainstorming.
What is Brainstorming?
Brainstorming is a process for generating a high number of new ideas that relate to a certain topic. It best happens by designating a certain amount of time to thinking of as many ideas as possible, without editing or filtering them.
Steps to Creating Content for Your Social Media Posts
As you brainstorm content for your social media posts, follow these helpful steps:
Step #1: Analyze your past social media posts. Check out your analytics and evaluate the posts that have gotten the most views and engagement. What types of posts were they? Build on that theme.
Step #2: What types of content are your competitors posting? Take a look at your competition and see what’s working for them and what’s not. It will give you ideas to come up with original social media content ideas of your own.
Step #3: Determine what your audience likes to know about. Examine your target audience, their characteristics and their values. What types of questions do they ask you? What matters to them? Keep this in mind when thinking of ideas.
Step #4: Create categories. Try to think of categories for your social media posts, and develop content around those topics. Categories could include helpful information, asking a question, promoting a product or service, or offering a giveaway or discount.
Step #5: Find a place free from distractions and set a timer. Turn off interruptions, such as your phone, email and text alerts. Commit to a certain amount of time (15-20 minutes may be enough) to focus on generating social media content ideas.
Step #6: Brainstorm. Think of as may new ideas as you can and place them in the appropriate category. Your ideas won’t be perfect, and they don’t have to be. Just document as much as you can. You can go back after your designated time to filter and edit.
Step #7: Place your content ideas on an editorial calendar. By using a calendar, you can plan out your social media posts ahead of time. While post ideas will change and new ones will arise, you’ll at least have a plan to keep yourself organized.
Step #8: Stay consistent. Once you start posting to social media, don’t let long periods of time elapse before your next update. Your audience will come to expect and look forward to hearing from you, and will wonder what happened when you are not there. Be consistent and commit to spending a certain amount on social media during your workday.
With a little planning and direction, your social media posts can be engaging, informative and entertaining. They can bring more traffic to your website, and secure a long term relationship between you and your customers.
If you need help with your social media efforts or would like to learn more about how it can benefit your business, feel free to contact me or join my email list below.