Tips for Generating Content Ideas for Social Media

The best source for content ideas is right in front of you. In the last three months, I’ve 9x’d my LinkedIn posting frequency - from once a month, to twice a week. This directly led to closing several deals. 💥 A critical aspect of frequent posting is generating ideas for what to write about. This sometimes feels like the toughest part of writing. Well, good news! Getting your next juicy, timely, educational, non-salesy content idea is as easy as joining your sales or customer success team on their next calls or meetings. Yes, forget about reading “thought leadership” pieces and industry influencer LinkedIn posts to figure out your content strategy. Sure, I follow industry influencers and read many blogs, and you should too. But you should not use them as your primary source of content inspiration, or as your way of figuring out what your audience cares about. Why? Because fluff begets fluff, and exclusively relying on the industry echo chamber will result in fluffy, unoriginal, irrelevant content for your audience. Instead, understand what your audience cares most about by hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth, on calls with them. 🐴 You'll learn about their challenges, goals, recent surprises, upcoming experiments, frequent questions, and new tools they're using. All of these easily translate into rich fodder for your content. As an added bonus, you’ll hear their precise lingo and nomenclature. Nothing indicates a true insider more than using the right jargon. Example from last week: A prospect, pre-PMF enterprise cybersecurity startup, told us on a call about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on paid media campaigns. That inspired two LinkedIn posts - why spending money on paid ads at this stage is a huge waste, and what to do instead (links in comments). The essence of effective marketing lies in producing valuable, informative, educational, non-salesy content that addresses your audience’s concerns and what keeps them awake at night. 🌙 Participating in client and prospect calls is one of the best ways to uncover these insights. #B2BMarketing #ContentMarketing image: The Fluff Factory

This is the simple exercise I do to come up with new content ideas. I put myself in the shoes of the customer—both physically and digitally. First, I’ll be a customer physically. That can mean a lot of things depending on your brand: going to a store, building on the app, or using the product IRL. I’ll be very aware while going through different customer experiences. What are the emotions I feel? Are there any common experiences that feel funny or relatable? Any frustrations that other customers might “feel seen” by? Interacting with the brand as a customer in this way will almost always unlock new ideas. Next, I’ll be a customer digitally. This means looking up our brand on TikTok, Twitter, and other platforms to see how people talk about us online. Are there any themes to what people bring up? What kinds of TikToks about us go viral? Any products that EVERYONE seems to love and feel passionately about? Are there stories that could be used on social—like someone getting engaged wearing your brand or building something impressive using your technology? I’ll spend about an hour going down different digital customer paths. Acting like a customer will always make you a better marketer.

⏰ Short on time but need cool content ideas? Yesterday, my team and I did a quick exercise and came up with 20+ short-form video ideas in 5 minutes. And you can steal it if you want. Yesterday, I walked my team through an exercise to generate short-form video ideas. It's an idea anyone looking to create more content can use, and I can guarantee that within 10 minutes, you can have more ideas than you need, which can then be executed relatively quickly as well. Here are a few things you need to know: 1) With platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or even here on LinkedIn you have to keep in mind your audience and goals. For the former platforms, you may find that there needs to be more entertainment built into the messages, which may or may not get you there. 2) Next, someone still has to translate the concepts developed into recorded content. The good news is those platforms seem to favor authentic and off-the-cuff over high polish (e.g., you can use your phone and a few best practices to be successful. 3) Finally, with any platform - you have to think about what your customers, users, followers, and viewers need and want. Ultimately, for me, there is a strong desire to be helpful and to create content that helps my audience grow in their abilities and be more successful. So here's what we did: I asked each person in the meeting to pick an article for our blog. I didn't care if two people picked the same one. I didn't care if it focused on #camtasia or #snagit. Then, I gave them 5 minutes to do the following: A) Read the blog (or some of it) B) Write down ideas that are useful that could be turned into short-form content. C) At the end of the 5 minutes, everyone shared some ideas and recorded them on a project board. D) I asked everyone to take one of the ideas and go and make it by our next meeting. We didn't do all of the work needed to get to done. Some ideas still need a few bullet points so they can be talked about cohesively. Other ideas were still a bit broad or could be broken into multiple videos. We also didn't take the time to record right then and there. But in 5 minutes, 9 people easily generated 20+ ideas. Obviously, we're focusing on specific platforms, but I imagine you could do this to focus on solving customer problems, for #onboarding ideas, academy or community content, reducing support cases that are really #training and so much more. That's it. 5-minutes to generate a ton of ideas to solve problems, help customers (internal or external), and fill up the idea coffers.

Coming up with content ideas is the biggest hurdle I hear about, but it’s actually the easiest to solve. Try this method of capturing ideas and You might be surprised at how many ideas you have. First, why this works (and what you’re doing now doesn’t): The human brain likes shortcuts— Predefined processes for handling situations. Consider your home. Everything has a place. Your silverware has a drawer. Your towels have a cabinet. What would happen if they didn’t? Imagine that every time you had something to put away, you piled them in a corner of your living room. The pile just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Just imagining it creates stress. It builds overwhelm. Now, imagine trying to throw a party with that pile of stuff sitting in the corner. That’s what you’re doing with your ideas. Idea generation is one process. Implementing them is another. When you try to combine these, you get stuck. This is what most people do. They try to think of an idea while it needs to be produced. And everything grinds to a halt. One of the most productive shifts in content marketing is separating idea generation from content production. Every time I’ve built a system or workflow for content production, it's been a game changer. A good idea generation workflow needs to be: → One single place to hold all the ideas. → Accessible to you anytime, anywhere. → Easy to open and close — and document your idea — without disrupting what you’re doing. Start there. Create an ideas doc or task list. I’ve built these in Notion, Airtable, and Google Docs. Build whatever works for you. But whatever you choose, make sure there’s an app you can install on your phone to meet the "accessible anytime, anywhere" requirement. Don’t create sublists. Don’t have Post-it notes. Don’t create one list on your phone and one on your computer. You’re adding clutter, chaos, and stress. Over time, that one list will require organization. When you start to feel like you need categories or groups for the ideas, it’ll be time for more structure. But for now: Create one List. Remember, your Ideas List is always there, and it only takes seconds to write your ideas down. Start paying attention to the ideas that pop into your head. Then, write them down in your one single list. Every time. Repeat as the ideas come. I think you’ll be surprised at just how often that is. 🗨️ Comment below: How often do you think ideas come to you right now? Never? Every once in a while? Daily? Be sure to 👍 this post if you'd like me to share each of the next steps in the workflow with easy ways to get started.