18 Easy, Multi-use Social Media Post Ideas for 90 Days Worth of Content.
“Content is King! “
Trite? Cliched? Perhaps, but still undeniably true. Content can be the engine that powers your brand, your marketing, your sales, your customer service, your internal culture. In a world where everyone is plugged in 30% of their waking life and search is the beginning of nearly every step of the customer journey, content is 100% The King.
That doesn't mean that the king has to be a tyrant, however. As with almost everything, the more you can implement simple, repeatable systems, the easier tasks will become. A simple truth about branding: really effective branding hinges on repeating a handful of ideas over and over and over. That same concept can be applied with your social media efforts as well. Here are 18 kinds of posts that you can reuse and recycle over and over to create content.
They aren't the usual "content ideas for your business" prompts you might be familiar with, and that's intentional. The whole point here is to take two unexpected, unrelated ideas, smash them together and see what happens. This process will be a little uncomfortable. A little messy. But it will be over quickly and you should have something unique by the time you’re done.
Because you don't want the same old boring kinds of content all of your competitors are producing. The whole point of your content is to attract and engage the people you want to become your customers. So we're going to generate content ideas that resonate with your customers. Bring them in for the useful information and entertainment. Let them find the solutions you provide for their problems while they're there.
Step 1:
Develop a list of 5-7 core ideas, concepts or beliefs that drive your customers' decisions around your products.
Step 2:
Take the following list, and see if you can come up with two or three ideas around each one for each of the post-types. For example, let's say your customers' core ideas/beliefs include:
Quality family time
A healthy lifestyle
Time is a scarce resource
An amazing experience is worth a premium price
You can't take it with you
Now let's take prompt number 8 below: post a picture of… something mundane and explain how it's important.
What are two or three experiences that embody quality family time, and what is the most mundane object you can think about that applies? Maybe there's a beat-up old chair that should probably go to the curb… but it's where you would hold your child and sing to them when they woke up with nightmares or comforted them when they were sick. Maybe you have a cheap old dime-store watch in a drawer, but it was the watch your great grandfather bought when he was in Europe in WWII, and he may be gone, but you remember sitting on his knee as a young child.
What are two or three ramifications of the idea that time is a scarce resource? What are mundane, everyday objects that take on new meaning when you look at them in this light? Run through this process fast. You're just coming up with ideas, good, bad or indifferent. You have to run through quantity to get to quality.
The Results
If you do this process with the entire list of 18 post types that follow, then you'll generate ideas for 180-378 possible posts you can write. That's 3-4 per day for the next 90 days. Of course, you don't have to post them all. You could post one per day and have a backlog of ideas in case you need them. Or you could take a handful of not-so-great ideas and try combining a few of them to see if anything interesting happens.
If you're writing about things that resonate with them in ways that your competition isn't, you're going to stand out. You are going to grab their attention. You are going to pique their curiosity and, hopefully, earn their trust. All the while, since they're on your site, it's going to be clear who you are and what you do. And the more they grow to like and enjoy your content, the more those feelings are going to transfer to your company and its products and services.
16 Post Types
1. Write a blog post about your favorite social media platform and why it's so great.
2. Share an article on the latest social media trends and how they affect you.
3. Create a list of funny or interesting tweets from influencers in your industry.
4. Share content that is relevant to your followers, such as the top posts of the week from thought leaders or what you're reading this month.
5. Take a look at your follower demographics and create content specifically for them.
6. Find out what's trending locally (or globally).
7. Find out who is blogging about your niche and see about collaborating.
8. Post a photo of your breakfast (or something else mundane) and explain why it's important.
9. Use a site like Flickr and choose a random, unrelated image. Write about it and make it work.
10. Ask people how their day is going so far.
11. Share photos of your office/workspace.
12. Tell the story of one of your best memories from childhood.
13. Share a quote that inspires you.
14. Share photos of your city/town and write about why you love it.
15. Share a list of your favorite books, movies, TV shows, etc.
16. Share a piece of advice that you've learned in life.
17. Interview someone in the industry for their insights on a topic of interest to your readers.
18. Ask your readers what they would like to learn more about, then answer their questions in a post (e-mail them if necessary).
It's no fun creating content in a vacuum. It's easier to be creative with rules in place than it is when a blank page is sitting in front of you. What this process does is it defines the sandbox you are playing in and introduces unexpected toys to play with. Creativity actually comes to life in unexpected ways when you are given parameters you have to abide by.
