How to generate good ideas to create content on Social Networks – Social BlaBla

Where do the ideas come from?

It’s a bit of a strange question, right? In ancient times, true goddesses, called “muses,” were believed to be responsible for our creative inspiration. Today, creatives and content marketers need more than that. After all, they can’t afford to wait for their muse of inspiration to arrive to do the work for them.

Generally, there are two different ways to generate content ideas:

• For your own count.
• With a group of people.

Let’s analyze each option a little more.

How to create ideas on your own

When generating content ideas on your own, there are four factors you should consider:

• What are the reading habits of your buyer personas?
• What are your competitors doing?
• What are people talking about on Quora?
• What can you learn from your search engine optimization efforts?

Let’s analyze each of these questions.

Understand reading habits

Put yourself in your prospects’ situation and empathize with them. What are your challenges and weaknesses? What do they read on the web and what do they get information about? Is there a specific blog or website that you visit frequently?

If you can, try interviewing some of your best customers by phone or email and find out what their reading habits are. What do they like or dislike about your content?

It’s easy to discover which contacts are most interested in your content through their contact records. Consider creating a smart list to identify:

• – Contacts who visited specific content on your website (perhaps your most popular pages).
• – Contacts who consumed a specific number of pages on your website (maybe more than 50).

Once you’ve identified a list of contacts, find out what they like about your content and what they’d like to learn more about.

Next, use a tool like Buzzsumo to see which content performs best on social media. Simply type a domain name and you’ll get a list of pages, along with their results organized by social media channel.

For example, let’s say you write content for a Boston real estate company. Writes “boston real estate” on Buzzsumo and see the top results. You’ll find posts about how much it costs to live near Boston subway stops, what rising real estate prices mean for the area, and how much you need to earn on average to afford a standard apartment. With a simple search, you can discover the most popular social media posts related to the Boston real estate market; You can also get lots of ideas on topics that will help you optimize your content marketing.

On the other hand, you can also go directly to the blog and search for the most popular posts.

Research your competitors

Another tactic you can use, especially if you’re unsure about your buyer personas’ reading habits, is to observe your competitors’ content marketing efforts. If you share a similar target audience, content that performs well on competing sites will likely also appeal to your prospects. See what they are producing and what is making a significant impact. Once again, use Buzzsumo to take a quick look at their websites and see what content is performing well.

Consult Quora

Sometimes you may not be able to figure out what your audience visits when they are online. In those cases, another approach to coming up with content generation ideas is to start with a set of keywords, such as “industry” or “profession.”

For example, let’s say your audience consists of business development representatives. Head over to Quora, a popular question and answer site where anyone can ask a question and get answers from the community. While anyone can participate, the moderators do a great job of limiting activity and keeping quality high.

After searching “business development representatives”, Quora displays a series of popular questions containing the keyword, such as: “What are some good and bad practices regarding compensation for business development representatives?”

Without even seeing the answers, this tactic provides valuable information about common problems and questions from people in that field.

Analyze your SEO efforts

There are a number of search engine optimization tools and techniques you can use to generate content ideas. One of them is Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tool). If this tool has been properly verified with your domain, you should be able to see what queries users typed into Google to find your website, as well as what topics you rank for, even if they’re not on the first page. This is extremely valuable information, since you get the keywords that users type.

Two other quick ways to take advantage of Google are the “autocomplete” and “related search” features.

With the “autocomplete” feature, Google suggests a query as you type in the search bar. These search predictions could reveal ideas about a topic you hadn’t thought of. Let’s imagine you are looking for content ideas on the topic “vacation”. Type “best vacation” and Google will automatically complete with “the best vacation with children” o “best vacations of my life”.

“Related searches” appear at the bottom of the search results page and offer additional suggestions. For example, suppose you write: “Is cat litter toxic?” Related Google searches might suggest: “What is the best brand of cat litter?” or “My cat takes the litter out of the box.”

As you can see, there are many ways to generate content ideas on your own, but how about taking advantage of other people’s creativity as well?

How to create ideas with other people

Valuable content ideas can come from any department in your company, not just the marketing team. A productive way to get content ideas from other people is to conduct structured brainstorming.

Brainstorm

To start, invite team members who don’t spend all day thinking about content; This is likely to give you new ideas from a different perspective.

There are many ways to shape and carry out brainstorming. To help you get started, here are some good practices that all brainstorming sessions have in common:

First, choose someone to act as a moderator and organize a clear agenda. This could include topics such as:

• What is the problem we are trying to solve?
• How long will the session last?
• Interaction rules

If there are no instructions, the brainstorming can quickly dissolve and be reduced to an unproductive group meeting. Make sure one person leads the meeting and everyone follows their instructions.

Next, create an atmosphere where people feel comfortable sharing their ideas. It can be awkward to ask coworkers to suggest random ideas, especially those who aren’t used to doing it regularly. People get inhibited easily, so it’s important that you do something to break the ice.

For example, pose a basic word association game. The first person says a word, for example, “content”; Then the second person mentions an association, such as “blog” or “infographic,” and so on, until the first word is repeated or a certain amount of time passes. This is a great way to bring out your creativity.

Next, take advantage of “information transfer.” A debrief consists of an uninterrupted period (usually no more than 2 or 3 minutes) in which you write down all the ideas that come to mind. What matters is the quantity, not the quality. Don’t think too much about your answers or wonder if they are good. Write them down as quickly as you can.

For example, if you write content for a manufacturer of HVAC products, you can suggest a transfer of information about all the topics that come to mind when one thinks of terms like heating, ventilation and air conditioning. Suggestions might include “tips for keeping your home cool in the summer” or “green ways to heat your garage.”

Keep in mind that this type of exercise is effective for experts as well as for people who know nothing about the topic in question.

You can also use sticky notes, whiteboards, and other visual aids to record ideas. Sticky notes are especially effective because they are easy to group by topic and you can use them to identify trends and common themes. Try to present everyone’s ideas to show that the process is democratic and transparent. It is important that the experience is positive for others, so that they want to do it again in the future.

And remember: “limitations lead to creativity.” Be sure to set strict time limits, both for the duration of the meeting (no more than an hour) and for information transfers. Sometimes you can let a participant continue explaining a really good idea after the time is up, but make sure they are only exceptions.

Finally, remember that the main objective of brainstorming is to generate new and unexpected reflections. Perhaps now is not the time to refine those ideas or criticize them. If what you get is a dozen ideas to expand and improve, that might be enough.

Via: Hubspot