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How to Find Social Media Posting Ideas

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how to find social media content

Social media is a great marketing tool to keep up with current and potential customers. However, just with most other digital marketing mediums (like your online advertising or blog), it needs to be updated regularly. One hurdle that many employees who are tasked with the social media content publishing calendar fail to realize is the sheer amount of content their accounts may need each week.

Luckily, there are several places online to find great applicable articles and engaging content that can be used as posting material on sites like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.

Google News & Alerts

Google is a great place to find fresh content to share. Set up Google Alerts to get an instant, daily, or weekly email of search engine or news results based on certain keywords. Additionally, you can search news.google.com for the most current event stories in your industry. Google Blogs can also be used in this aspect as well.

Message Boards & Forums

Use a message board or forum search engine like boardtracker.com, Omgili, or boardreader.com. Again using keywords relevant to your industry, you can find out what people are actually talking about online instead of relying on popular blogs or news sites to tell you.

Common Shared Holidays

One easy way to fill up a social media publishing calendar is to comment on fun or popular holidays that your target audience or demographic may be celebrating. This could include Groundhog’s Day, Labor Day, etc. Be sure to respect religions. Posting a fun image or trivia questions for holidays can be a fun and engaging way to interact with your social media community.

Other Employees or Community Members

Don’t let the burden of finding content always lay on your shoulders. Ask other coworkers or community members involved with your organization for posting ideas or questions. Many times, someone not involved in the day to day posting of social media content may think of something you hadn’t.

These are some of the places to find great content for your social media publishing calendar. Oftentimes, subscribing to blogs in your industry, creating your own blog posts to share online, and reading books and other materials about applicable issues and topics that are related to your business can also give you the content ideas you are needing.

When you do find a good idea to share, schedule out the social media on a service like Buffer or keep it in a spreadsheet. That way you have a list of ideas ready to go when you are feeling stuck.

What Are the Benefits of Scheduling Your Social Media?

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scheduling social media posts

There are many services available today that allow social media marketing managers to schedule tweets, Facebook posts, and more. Some of the free and paid services available include Buffer, Sendible, TweetDeck, and Hootsuite. Many of these services also have mobile apps that allow for monitoring, publishing, and maintenance while on the go or away from the office.

While total automation is never a good thing, there is a great balance between automating your RSS feed from your blog and manually scheduling your posts, as well as taking the time to re-tweet or respond to content or posts when necessary.

Finding great content or internal news or marketing pieces to share and then scheduling when they go out can always be a great way to make sure that your company’s social media constantly have a steady social media presence.

Many social media users (depending on the industry) are most active in the morning and right after lunch. However, depending on the industry your company is in, this may vary.  To find out when your Twitter followers are most active, check out Tweriod.com. Then, schedule your posts around the times that Tweriod mentions.

Besides allowing your company to have an active presence on social networks throughout the day, scheduling posts have other benefits. For social media marketers that will be out of the office or away in a meeting, they can schedule a few messages while they are gone. This also works for holidays when the office or company is closed. The social media profile can wish followers and fans a “Happy New Year” or it can remind them that the offices are closed for Memorial Day– whatever is applicable.

This convenience can help decrease the stress placed on those responsible for the social media marketing of the company. Planning ahead is always a good thing, as long at the content that is being scheduled will be timely when it is finally published.

No matter how or why a company is scheduling some of their social media posts, it is important to look through the click-through rates of posts (or the Facebook Insights data) to see what posts were successful and if there is a pattern that relates to time of day, the content itself, or both. Tracking these can help improve the effectiveness and engagement of a company’s social media presence.

How to Stay Connected With Customers Via Social Media While Out of the Office

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stay connected via social media while out of the office

In some company’s marketing departments, there are only one or two employees who may handle the social media aspect of a company’s online presence. Because of this, when those employees travel for work or go on vacation, there may be issues that arise from ensuring that the company presence online stays constant. However, there are some ways that social media coordinators or marketers can ensure that the corporate social media marketing and outreach isn’t compromised just because they aren’t in the office.

Scheduling

There are a variety of services that allow companies and individuals to schedule their social media posts to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These include LaterBro, HootSuite, TweetDeck, and Sendible. Costs and features may vary; some services offer a free account but have limited features. A social media marketer could schedule posts to run while they are out of the office, thus keeping the social media presence current and updated.

Smart phone Access

Scheduling social media posts may be part of the problem, but social media marketers will also need to monitor the accounts to answer any posts, questions, or comments. Usually smart phones like the iPhone or Android make this process fairly easy; the Twitter app can send a user an alert when someone follows or mentions their username in a tweet. The Facebook Pages app does the same. To stay connected to social media profiles, it is almost a necessity to have a smart phone so questions and comments can get answered in a timely manner.

Take It On the Road

Some social media marketers prefer to take their company’s social media presence live on the road with them. Companies live-tweet and share photos and updates from their conference, meeting, or other event that the company (or just a handful of its employees) have traveled to. This may make the users feel more connected with the company, but also takes a higher level of commitment and engagement from the employees’ side.

Transferring Duties

If the employee is on vacation or will be too busy with other duties, they may not want to be responsible for the social media community for their company. This is when it becomes necessary to cross-train other employees to handle social media while those who usually handle it are out of the office. This can take some of the stress and anxiety off of the departed employee’s shoulders while also giving other employees a chance to learn more about what goes into building and maintaining a social media presence and community.

 

Photo courtesy of vjeran2001 on stock.xchng

5 Mistakes Bloggers are Making With Social Media

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5 Mistakes Bloggers are Making With Social MediaEven though most people would regard bloggers as tech-savvy and the ones to whom they can bring their computer to when it no longer will save any more images to the desktop after the first 500. However, it is possible that bloggers are making the same mistakes many others do when it comes to social media.

Not Connecting at All

Not utilizing social media at all is most likely the worst thing a blogger can do when it comes to maintaining a presence online. Creating a social media account is free and fairly easy to do; what takes the most time and effort is keeping it maintained. Many bloggers may feel that social media takes up too much time– however, considering the missed potential when it comes to exposing their brand, it is worth the while to at least set it up.

Not Responding to Feedback

Once a social media profile is set up for a fairly active and/or highly trafficked blog, then it will mostly likely continue to grow at a fairly fast pace. This is when comments, questions, and responses to items posted as statuses on the page. Bloggers need to answer and respond to these on a timely basis, as nobody likes to be ignored, especially blog readers. Participating in the social media community for the blog can help increase loyalty and readership.

Not Sharing Their Content

One of the easiest things to automate via social media are blog post RSS feeds. Use a service like Twitterfeed.com to set this up, which allows for instant posting on someone’s Twitter or Facebook page. This can ensure that your posts are being shared automatically, without having to think about or remember it.

Not Allowing Others to Share Their Content

This is something that is a onetime set-up, but makes it easy to help blog readers share posts. For WordPress blogs, install social sharing plugins like Sharebar or Sociable.  For other types of blogs that have HTML capabilities, install an embeddable widget like AddToAny to appear at the end of posts.

Not Considering it as a Benefit

This goes back to the first mistake– taking social media for granted. Because blogging is an online writing platform, social media should be something that is easy to integrate into the overall blogging process. Most bloggers have nothing to lose when it comes to social media and should in fact add it as part of their blogging and online marketing strategy.

5 Free Workflow Productivity Tools That Help Your Social Media Strategy

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Having an effective social media strategy that is ran smoothly online, whether it is by a single individual or an online communication team, takes a lot more than knowing the passwords for the company’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts. There are other online productivity tools that can make your social media strategy much more effective, leading to less stress and better communication.

Asana
Asana is a free online project management system that was partly founded by one of the founders of Google. It is easy to use, has a beautiful interface, and runs very light. They do offer another level of account that is paid. This project management system can help delegate social media tasks and scheduling or to schedule out regular account maintenance tasks, such as changing passwords or creating new accounts.

Social Media Publishing Platforms

Social media scheduling and publishing platforms are a dime a dozen; be sure to read the reviews and figure out what is most important for you and your company before deciding which one to use. For instance, Sendible is a paid service, but it is web-based and also has a free iPhone app. HootSuite is free and also web-based, but you may experience adds or more marketing/sales emails. (Free services are usually also more buggy.) TweetDeck is a downloadable program that is free, but the program must be on the computer that is being used.

Google Alerts and Google Docs
Use Google Alerts to find things to share on the company’s social media accounts, as well as to get ideas on blog posts or emerging news and trends in your industry. It is also helpful to set up a Google Alert for the company’s name, so most mentions of the company in websites syndicated by Google News are caught.

Google Docs is great for sharing online, web-based spreadsheets and other documents to create publishing calendars, content ideas, or password storage. The documents can be shared online or be downloaded in their original or PDF form.

WorkFlowy
WorkFlowy is a great to-do list that is totally web-based. It isn’t flash-based, so it works great on iPhones and iPads, and it very easy to use. Once you create an account, you can sign into it from any web browser and look at your to-do list from anywhere that has internet access.

These are just some of the available online productivity tools. Using social media and other online tools regularly may expose you to more tools as you go along.

What are your favorite online productivity tools?