How to Find Content Ideas for Social Media
Being a social media manager can be a stressful job. Not only do you have to make sure that your social media profiles are making a meaningful contribution to a company’s success, but you also have a whole list of diverse tasks to manage. From content planning to building a community to coming up with great content ideas, social media managers need to be both excellent project managers and content creators. There are many different content optimization techniques you can use in order to help you increase your reach, generate more engagement, and boost growth. However, even if you follow all the best practices out there, the key ingredient of any post is creative and engagement content. This requires sources of inspiration to keep new and exciting content flowing.
Creating content that resonates with your target audience is important, we all know that. But the real question is how you can develop creative pipelines of content ideas that help you connect with your audience and grow your following. We want to discuss how to find inspiration with data-based techniques that can help you come up with new social media content ideas. The techniques that we will explain below can play a long-term role in helping you craft your overall social media content strategy by giving you a steady stream of content ideas.
How Can you Find Inspiration for your Social Media Content?
Before discussing how to find content ideas for social media, let’s go over a few broad points that are important to keep in mind when it comes to using data-based techniques. When discussing the process of coming up with content ideas for social media managers, you always need to keep your industry/field/content niche in mind. In other words, you need to look for customized social media content ideas that are tailored to your specific target audience. The key is having the ability to follow and filter for specific trends, topics, and developments that are focused on your content interests.
You can do this yourself by simply scrolling through feeds, following some popular content creators, and keeping up on the latest blogs that talk about social media. However, this is inefficient and, most likely, you will not be able to find trends as they are developing or get real in-depth insights on various topics that may inspire your own content. Having the right social media tool can not only save you time, but also be much more effective at helping you generate new ideas for your content. That is why, for this article, we are going to be using the “all-in-one” social media tool Fanpage Karma and its analytics and research features to show us how we can use data to help find inspiration for your content. We will also have a focus on how to find social media content ideas for businesses or creators working in specific fields or industries.
There are 5 techniques you can use as inspiration for new social media content ideas that are based on social media data analysis. Below, we will talk about the process of gaining social media content inspiration by highlighting the following techniques:
- Conduct a Tagging Analysis
- Follow Trending Posts and Topics
- Research Successful Content Creators
- Monitor Keywords and Hashtags
- Study the Performance of your Top Competitors
Technique #1: Follow Trending Posts and Topics
One of the most straightforward ways to find social media inspiration is simply by following trending posts and topics. However, you are most likely not a content creator or social media manager that is just trying to jump on any old trend. That means you need to look more closely at what type of topics or themes are trending, which in most cases means what are generating the most number of interactions or have the highest post interaction rates.
When attempting to research content ideas for social media, be sure to carefully set up your analysis. There are two ways to do this with a social media tool such as Fanpage Karma. The first is to use a social media research feature that helps you analyze millions of profiles and billions of their posts. The trick here would be to use filters in terms of searching for specific terms as well as a target country and/or language so that your results are narrowed down. This will then allow you to better research what posts are trending in terms of reactions and post interaction rates. In this case, we are looking at the top-performing posts for a 7-day period, focused on Instagram accounts in the US related to the topic of gardening. Your output would consist of a list that you can filter according to the interaction/reaction metric of your choice.
The other way you can go about this is by using a social media analytics feature. The difference here is that you are simply looking for trends that are coming from profiles that you are tracking. For instance, if you have 10 competitors you want to add to your analytics dashboard, you can then analyze their top posts according to a keyword and timeframe. The output would be similar to the table above and you can filter the results by searching for posts with the most reactions or the highest post interaction rates. You can then see what type of topics that they mention and see what the most successful posts are.
Technique #2: Research Successful Content Creators
When it comes to social media posts, inspiration may often come from the most successful creators in your field or content niche. In other words, coming up with social media marketing content ideas can be enhanced by looking at influencers or other creators who have a proven track record. There are two things that you need to do this effectively. The first is to find them, especially because you may not be familiar with every single creator that talks about your field or content interests. Second, is to be able to look deeper at the content and get inspired.
Similar to finding posts in the way we detailed above, with this technique you will want to first look for creators that are in your field or industry. This means using relevant keyword filters that denote the topics you are interested in, and then searching for influencers or creators that are active in a particular region or are speaking a certain language. Once you have found influencers and creators who have the highest number of followers and perform well in a number of metrics, you can take a closer look at their overall profiles and get inspired. As you see below, by using a social media research tool, we can easily create a manageable list of creators and influencers. In this case, we looked globally for those whose content relates to the topic of “fitness” on Instagram:
However, your social media research tool shouldn’t just allow you to find influencers or content creators, but also analyze their activity. Your tool should allow you to dig deeper into their content and to be able to quickly filter out the most successful content posts for you to look at. You can then examine these to see if the topics that they are posting may inspire the ideas for your own content strategy.
Technique #3: Monitor Relevant Keywords and Hashtags
Keywords and hashtags are another good way to find topics that are trending or that your target audience is interested in which would, hopefully, inspire some content ideas. The advantage of this technique as it relates to coming up with content ideas for businesses in the social media world is that you can relatively easily come up with lists of relevant topics simply by looking at keyword and hashtag word charts.
This technique involves more than simply looking at overall post trends, but rather looks more specific at the hashtags and keywords that are included in posts. Instead of examining a long list of top posts, looking only at keywords and hashtags can give you a good idea of key topics you can consider creating content around. Using a social media research tool that allows filter for specific industries or topics is important, since you don’t want simply general keywords and hashtags, but ones that are relevant for your content interests. The example below shows the output of using this technique when it comes to looking at trending keywords and hashtags on TikTok in the UK for the topic of cycling:
Technique #4: Study the Performance of your Top Competitors
Similar to looking at the top performers in your industry in terms of influencers or single creators, you can also analyze your competitors directly. This assumes that you have a list of competitors or other similar profiles ready and want to analyze them with a social media analytics tool. The big difference here compared to the second technique on our list is that you already have an idea of the competitor profiles you want to analyze and that you are looking at companies or brands and not individual creators or influences. This can be an especially good way to help find B2B social media content ideas, since you can focus on relatively niche fields or industries more effectively.
With this technique, you will want to run a benchmarking and competitor analysis to find out which competitors are most successful and who you should pay special attention to. You then could focus on their posts in a metric table format, since this can help you come up with content marketing ideas for social media in your field. As you see below, you can explore the top posts in a specific industry according to metrics that interest you. In this case, we are looking at select automobile manufacturers on Facebook:
Technique #5: Conduct a Tagging Analysis
Sometimes just looking at trends or studying the content of top creators may not give you the precise inspiration that you need. Inspiration for content ideas in the social media world can also come from examining successful features of existing content. For this reason, you may consider taking a closer look at certain parts of a post to see what your audience may find interesting or exciting. So, how do you actually do that? The answer is with a tagging analysis.
Using a tagging analysis can be an effective way to generate ideas for social media content. This is because a tagging analysis allows you to look at various characteristics of a post so you can better understand what makes specific posts engaging to an audience. This can help you start brainstorming new social media content ideas by giving you a better understanding of what your audience may want to see, which would then help you come up with ideas that reflect specific engaging characteristics. What makes this technique so powerful is that there are almost a limitless number of things you can look at.
For example, perhaps you want to start planning a post using an image and want to think about how many people you should include in it. With a tagging analysis, you can analyze your own posts or that of other similar profiles to see if a certain number of people generates more interactions. Let’s say that you want to investigate how many people should be featured in a post that includes an image. In this case, you want to see if you should include more than 3 or more people in it. A tagging analysis allows you to study the average post interaction rates for all posts in your data set that have more, or less, than 3 people, and then use the results to help create your content.
Another example could be to research whether posts that include certain pop culture references get a higher post interaction rate than those that don’t. A tagging analysis would allow you to assign a tag to every post with a certain reference, as well as tag to those that don’t. You can then calculate which posts have a higher post interaction rate and apply your results to your content plan.
These are just a few of many different studies you can do in order to give yourself a head start on your content brainstorming while using data available to you. We have written about how to use a tagging analysis and its advantages in more detail if you are interested in this topic. The important thing to know about this technique is that it can benefit your brainstorming process and helps you think about how to best connect with your audience.
Bonus Advice: Don’t Forget about Using Content Optimization Techniques
Creating a process that allows you to brainstorm and discover new social media content creation ideas is a great start. As you saw above, there are techniques you can use that can help generate inspiration for your social media content. However, it is just not about finding ideas, but also optimizing every part of your post to get the maximum amount of reach and boost engagement. This can help your topical and interesting content get seen by more people.
If you are using a social media tool for the techniques above, you should also make sure that your tool should allow you to find content optimization potentials. What are these? There is a lot to mention here, but some of the more popular relate to finding the best times to post, looking into what content formats are the most successful, and keyword research. Your tool should be able to help you with competitor analysis as well, so you can see what is working well for others in your industry or field.
Finding Your Social Media Content Inspiration
As seen above, there are a number of techniques you can use to find inspiration for new social media content ideas. Our main point is that you shouldn’t just go out looking for inspiration without a plan. Rather, you should use one, or several, of the techniques above in order to more efficiently and effectively discover innovative social media content creation ideas. This is all helped with a social media tool that provides you with strong analytics and research capabilities.
If you are searching for a social media tool that improves your overall social media performance, you are welcome to try Fanpage Karma’s free 14-day trial to find out more about what this tool can do. With industry-leading social media analytics and research features, this tool can help you discover new content ideas, analyze competitors, and find content optimization potentials. It also offers powerful monitoring, community management, and publishing capabilities. What is really notable about this tool is that it allows you to track and analyze an unlimited number of profiles, which can be a big advantage when you are serious about social media analytics.
There is also a free weekly webinar that walks you through how to get the most out of the tool.
