What is one of the biggest struggles that I hear every single day from business owners???
Drum roll please…
Yup, you guessed it- coming up with ideas for their posts on social media!!
When we first start our business we can have all these ideas of what we are going to post, but then very quickly those can run out and we are left with that black screen and nothing being posted for weeks (or even longer- eek, don’t tell me that)
Coming up with content ideas can be the hardest part of your marketing and can become a huge stress when it comes to your social media.
Knowing that you aren’t showing up online and therefore not attracting your dream clients can be disappointing.
It shouldn’t be that way though and I’m going to show you how, with nine different places you can go to brainstorm fresh social media post ideas for your business that your audience is going to love.
1. Industry Sources
Firstly is industry sources. As a business owner, you generally will subscribe to various magazines or emails from big names in your industry or news sources that report on things relevant to what is going on in your industry. As a business, this can be a great way to stay up-to-date with everything that is relevant and current and then turn those topics into great content for your audience. If you are not subscribed to any emails for your industry then you can just type into Google, email newsletters for “industry type” and it should come up with a heap that are worth looking at. You can just subscribe to a few and then unsubscribe to the ones that don’t provide you value and keep reading the ones each morning that do.
2. Ask the public.com
Ask the public.com is an awesome platform that you can use on Google which gives you a range of topics that have been typed into Google about your topic. All you do is, go to ask the public.com and just type in the topic that you want to write about and it will come up with heaps of questions that people have searched for in Google. This can give you a lot of inspiration for your content.
3. Competitors
I always suggest being ahead of your competitors and ahead of the game! I also say to never copy anything they do! In fact, in my own business I have the mentality that if they are doing it, then I don’t want to do anything like it haha. But being aware of what your competitors are doing in this one area of your business, can be helpful to give you inspiration or ideas of topics of things to cover in your social media. All you need to do is go to your competitor’s website and have a look at the recent blog posts that they have been writing or go to their social media pages and have a look at their top-performing posts to get some inspiration.
4. Customers
Your competitors can be helpful in giving you content ideas but the real people who are going to be helpful are going to be your dream customers. Asking your dream customers what they want to learn from you and what they want to know more about can be really helpful with coming up with post ideas. You can do this by asking your customers via email, asking them on social media via stories, direct messaging them or even asking them in store if you have a brick and mortar store. You can also go the one step further and ask them about what the barriers are to them committing to purchase. If you can work out these barriers, then it helps you to address these points in your social media posts as well.
5. Internal Team
Don’t underestimate the amount of content ideas that your internal team might have for your business. A lot of business owners will go straight to external sources to find out content they should be posting for their business and forget to ask the people who work in the business day in day out and who are talking to their customers on a regular basis. The knowledge your internal team have can be extremely powerful with coming up with new and fresh ideas that you might not have thought of yet because you are so ingrained in your business.
6. Google search suggestions
This is a super simple one! You start typing in your topic into Google and you see what Google auto finishes for you. It’s that simple. Google shows the top questions that have been asked or top topics that have been typed into Google from your area and so this can give you some ideas for what you can write about based on what people have been typing into Google.
7. Look around your day to day life
This point is very underrated and is very much a learnt skill when it comes to any type of writing or even public speaking. That is, to just pay attention to things that happen in your day-to-day life. When you go to the supermarket, when you’re doing school drop off with the kids, when you’re driving on the roads, when you’re going to cafes, with friends, there’s a lot of things that happen in your daily life that can become metaphors or conversation starters in content. This is a habit creation process which means you have to force yourself to start doing it and then you’ll get better and better at noticing things around you that can become content. It’s a great point to start at just spending your day really looking for things that happened in your day and writing down anything in notes on your phone. Then when you go to write your posts, you can go back to look at the notes in your phone and use those random ideas as your post starters.
8. Forums: Quora, Yahoo, Reddit
Forums are a great place to come to find new social media post ideas. Forums are very organic and raw which is a great way for you to really get down to the nitty-gritty of what your dream audience might want to read. Obviously, forums are a location where people ask questions or find out answers to things they’re trying to learn about and so this can be a great spot for you to go and look at the questions that have been asking that have been asked about your industry or your topic.
9. Facebook Groups
Finally Facebook groups are great place to find out social media posts to write about because a lot of popular Facebook groups about your industry will have people asking ALOT of questions. So this means you can go into the Facebook group that is specifically about your industry and you can just look at what questions people asking in there. If you want to be extra awesome you can answer some of those questions so that you can get your brand out there more in those industry groups. But you can also use these questions to help create content for your business too.
So as you can see these are nine awesome places that you can go to come up with great ideas for your business for social media. I hope this has been helpful to you. Let me know if there any other places that I’ve missed that you have been using to come up with great content. I’m sure that this will help you to never run out of content ideas and always have great things to write about to attract your dream audience and sell more to grow your business.
Head over to my Instagram to DM me to let me know this has helped you! I love connecting with you and getting to know your business journey.