By Arjun Rajkumar in social media —

How to keep coming up with fresh social media content ideas

What does you daily content planning strategy looks like? When you have multiple clients, it can quickly get tiring coming up with fresh and new content ideas for each client. This is even more difficult when your clients expect more engagement on social - you need to create something that sparks conversations online.

In this blog we are going to look at the top ways to come up with more ideas for social media, and how you can manage this process better:

  1. Social media automation tools: A good social media automation tool will have tools to come up with content ideas, along with scheduling content for social media. For example. Buffer's AI tool you can generate ideas in just a click and repurpose your existing content dozens of times. Make use of the AI tools offered by these social median scheduling tools to get more creative ideas.
  2. ChatGPT: ChatGPT is creative, and can be used to get content ideas if you are stuck. You need to prompt it well, so do research ChatGPT prompts for content creation. Just remember to always verify the information it gives you as it is known for just making stuff up sometimes.
  3. Customer Groups: By customer groups, we mean places where your customers hang online - which could be Reddit or Facebook groups or some place similar. Reddit is a superb platform for content ideas. Almost every topic has a sub-reddit dedicated to it with thousands of users in it. For example, if you were looking for content ideas related to fitness - you could browse the fitness sub-reddit, see the most popular posts of all time, or the trending ones to get started with content. Start by finding the most popular sub-reddit for your customers and drill down from there. Facebook groups, is another great place for content ideas. Join facebook groups that are popular among your customers, and try to understand what questions they are asking, who the influencers are etc. Similar to Reddit and Facebook groups, are there other places where your customers hang online? If you can discover this, and then spend time watching them, you will never be short of content ideas for your industry.
  4. Social media platform: Social media platforms are a great way to understand what is popular and trending among your customers. For example, Pinterest, a visual search engine is a great place to get inspired and come up with new ideas. Especially if you are in the home decor, beauty, beauty or parenting space - there is tons of inspiration. You can start by searching for keywords related to your targeting customer, and then follow popular pins to get inspired by content created by other people. Similar to Pinterest, Instagram can be a creative space if you use it correctly. Start by finding and following hashtags and influencers, to get more ideas that are popular among your customers.
  5. Keyword research tools: Answer The Public, is a keyword research tool that can help you discover questions people are asking on Google on different topics. Basically, it crawls Youtube, Google and other autocomplete searches and provides questions on your topic, along with search volume and competition data. This is a great way to get parallel ideas based on your main topic. There are other paid tools like Ahref's Content explorer, that will help you discover the top-performing content in any niche. Google Adwords, has a free keyword planning tool, that will show you queries similar to your main topics.
  6. Competitors: Keeping an eye on the competition is a great way to know what is trending. Once a week, spend a few hours researching your competitors to understand what worked for them, what got the most views, what content got the most comments. Can you copy and modify their popular content to make it more personal to you? As your competitors are targeting the same customer profile and have done the research, studying competitors is a quick way to get a really good understanding of what works in your niche.

Daily content planning strategy:

While the above list is a good place to start looking for social media content ideas, you really need to have a plan, a schedule on when you will do the creative work for each client. Follow these tips to be more efficient:

  1. If you are just starting, you can dedicate one whole day for each client to plan out exactly what you need to do for them. Do not try to get content ideas for 3-6 months, as things change - instead try to schedule content for just the next week or two first. This allows you be to flexible if something time-sensitive comes up. As you get good at this, you can do this process much faster - and what initially took you a whole day, can be completed in a couple of hours. Once you are familiar with the style and which websites to visit for each client, you can build templates to speed up the process.
  2. Have a hub, a master of sheet of ideas/topics for each client. While browsing social media, you may come across things which are not useful right now, but could be used later at some point. Fill up your content ideas hub regularly, so that you always have money in the bank.

If you have not scheduled specific days for content creation for each client, it can quickly become hard to manage. Instead, have your clients on some sort of a batch rotation. As suggested above, you can start by doing a week or a month of content at a time.