Writing content for social media can be a challenge. If you are posting 5 times a week to your social channels as a minimum, you will need to create 20 bits of shiny new content per month.
Knowing what to write to engage your followers and keep them coming back to your pages is an art in itself.
So, in the spirit of being helpful for National Writing Day 2021, we thought we would share our top five tips to help inspire and plan great content for your social media.
1. Set aside time to plan each month.
A couple of hours at the end of each month gives you the chance to reflect on your monthly analytics and consider what content performed well, and importantly, what didn’t.
You can use one of the many free social media planning templates available online – such as this one from Hubspot to help plan your key dates for the month ahead.
2. Key Blog or Vlog themes
Whether you are happy to write 300 – 1000 words once or twice a month, or go ‘live’ or do a pre-recorded video; Blogs and Vlogs lend themselves to writing richer content about a topic which relates to your business.
You could be responding to trends or current affairs which affect you or your customers, or be providing advice and information – just as we are here.
The great thing is they can become part of your evergreen content plan, which means, so long as they are not time specific, you can reuse them in future too.
3. Collaborate and support
As a business, you will have key suppliers, customers, charities and peers that you will wish to support online.
Keep an eye on what is happening in their world e.g. any milestones, events, job vacancies, new team members, fundraisers etc. so you can support them by sharing their content on your social media.
You can also consider asking them to guest blog on your website. A great thing to do – as you get the benefit of not having to write the content, and you get the chance to support a local business or charity.
4. Awareness Days
These can really help with ‘writers block!’. I am writing this on National Writing Day, so I hope to make the most of the online energy that will be around this awareness day today.
As part of your monthly plan, check in advance what key dates are coming up which relate to your business, or a cause that you are passionate about.
This will help give you enough time to get creative and generate good content for those key days.
5. Social listening and trends
Twitter is particularly strong for monitoring key conversations and trends. Keep an eye on what is happening by going to the Explore tab, and seeing what the news of the day is, or what is trending.
You can save or follow hashtags which you want to monitor regularly for fresh content ideas on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
You can also follow content on Facebook and LinkedIn. Just use the separate page news feeds features to monitor industry content, or pages which interest you.
We hope our tips help inspire your content planning, and help with Writers Block!
Strong coffee and decent chocolate can also help.
