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Are you struggling to manage your YouTube content, keep up with regular video uploads and social media post scheduling? Then knowing how to schedule YouTube videos can be a game-changer strategy. It helps you maintain consistency, reach your audience at the optimal...
Dec 10, 2024
Any engaging social media post (or even a campaign, for that matter!) begins with an exciting content brainstorming session.
If you’re ready to create kickass content for your social media (especially if you’re in a niche space), this guide is here to help. Dive in to explore the top 12 content brainstorming techniques!
While the end goal of any brainstorming session is to come back with out-of-the-box ideas you can use, don’t shy away from just writing down the first ideas that come to your mind on a piece of paper and then refining them later down the line.
Some folks also call this method “rapid ideation.” The goal of this method is to come back with tons of creative ideas within a short time period of time, regardless of how unconventional or impractical they are.
For example, imagine you’re brainstorming metal building ideas for your client’s social media page. The first few ideas you could come up with include “Top 5 Creative Uses for Metal Barns,” “Design Tips for Custom Steel Workshops,” or customer spotlights that showcase personalized metal building projects.
You can combine informative and visually appealing posts, like before-and-after photos or 3D renderings of custom builds, allowing your brand to appeal to practical and creative-minded followers.
These content strategies not only highlight the versatility of metal buildings, but also create a community of enthusiasts interested in sustainable building solutions. This, helps boost engagement and brand awareness.
If you’re in a crunch, you can play around with keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to look up common keywords in your industry/niche and find new content ideas with the help of long-tail keywords.
In a similar vein, here are a few more things you can consider:
Keeping a pulse on what your (direct and indirect) competitors are doing on social media is another way you find fresh topics to cover and new content formats to experiment with.
Competitor analysis is not only great for discovering new ideas for social media, but it’s also an excellent way to learn from your competitors about the way they conduct their businesses and offer incentives to their customers so you can replicate the same for your business, too.
For example, while many enterprise businesses and commercial entities have store credit cards (such as Walmart, Best Buy, and Costco), you can replicate the same for your small business by launching startup business credit cards with no credit.
These credit cards enable startups to invest in creative tools and resources that enhance the content creation process. Entrepreneurs can use these funds to purchase graphic design software, high-quality cameras, or social media management tools that elevate the quality of their posts.
A swipe file (or a backlog folder) is something many social media marketers and copywriters create so that they can once again go back to it for inspiration.
You can copy their approach and start by creating a backlog folder for inspiration about the way other (similar) accounts cover topics on social media, the way they present their content, the formats they use, etc.
Another way to create social media content for a niche industry/audience is to directly ask your audience what they’d like to see from you. For example, here’s a reference of a LinkedIn user using this content brainstorming technique:
This logic could apply not only to topics, but also the way your topics are presented.
For instance, SoFi’s Instagram content effectively targets new entrepreneurs, such as women seeking guidance on where to get a first-time business loan.
In a recent post, SoFi highlights financial resources for women entrepreneurs, offering the practical offer of securing $10K credits. This approach positions SoFi as a supportive partner, adds genuine value to its audience, and creates an engaged community around real-life financial journeys.
Mind mapping is a popular brainstorming technique that starts with a central idea and then asks you to build new ideas or concepts around it.
For example, a topic like “Brainstorming” can be fleshed out in different ways, such as types of brainstorming techniques, benefits of brainstorming, the science behind brainstorming, etc — they’re all different ideas, but they all come back to a central concept.
Think of a mind map as branches and leaves to a tree or a pillar that has subpillars — something concrete that can be fleshed out later.
Another thing you can do to work on new social media ideas is to create a focus group of people who you can always go back to. For example, these folks can be:
For example, Glossier, a skin and makeup brand, has created a Slack group with its most loyal customers. Whenever it wants to present a product to the masses, it first uses the opinion of these loyal customers and then refines the product to perfection.
You can do something similar but with social media ideas for your niche market, too.
Pro Tip: You can also test out new ideas by sponsoring your social media posts with a limited budget (so they reach a limited audience and act as a beta test) or leverage industry-specific groups on LinkedIn and Slack to get the opinion of your peers.
There are already plenty of fantastic, amazing ideas out in the world. Instead of looking at new topics so that they can perform better than them in terms of virality, why not add to those existing ideas?
For example, in marketing roundup pages, if one brand has already covered an iconic campaign, another brand chooses to write a case study about what factors made the campaign iconic, and a different brand focuses on what they would do differently if they undertook the same campaign under their wing.
This allows you to add new layers to topics that have worked well in the past, and you get to become a part of the discussion instead of competing with it. (If you can’t beat them, join them, eh?)
In the new age of Gen AI and ChatGPT, you can rely on these tools to undertake research and brainstorming. You can provide them with a prompt and an angle and then tweak the ideas you get from the tool.
Another thing you can consider doing is doing a historical analysis of your own social media data and finding out what worked in the past (this could be topics that resonated with your audience, tone/approaches that worked well for you, or content formats that performed remarkably).
Once you have that data with you, you can refine and repurpose the content. It might also happen that many users may haven’t seen your post the first time around, so you can just repost them entirely as is!
P.S.: Feel free to analyze historical data of not only your social media posts, but also your blog posts, as there would be a big overlap between both audiences and the type of content they liked.
Brainstorming tools and templates can do wonders for you. Since the frameworks are already predesigned, it becomes easier to work on new creative ideas since there’s a structured approach.
For example, here are some popular brainstorming templates you can refer to:
Raviraj Hegde, the SVP of Growth at Donorbox, shares an exciting way he brainstorms (this technique is also popularly referred to as “moment-based brainstorming”),
He says, “I start with writing a list of specific moments that my target audience experiences every day. For example, if I’m working with a SaaS organization, I’d think of moments like “when the software crashes in the middle of a sale” or “when the renewal notification pops up unexpectedly” as these are real life pain-points for my audience and each point has relevant, solution-driven content material.
Each piece of content taps into small but powerful emotions like relief, frustration, or curiosity. Targeting those subtle emotions allows me to create stories that my audience can relate to on a personal level. This mapping enables me to develop hooks that no longer only “promote” but often subconsciously connect with each other.”
Once you’re done with the hard part of actually zooming in and deciding on an idea, the next step of the creative process is to create and plan the content in your editorial calendar.
At this step, we can help you. Planable will not only assist you with content creation and planning your social media posts, but you can also use our tool to collaborate with your team members, create approval workflows, track your progress, and do lots more!
To become strategic with your social media efforts and start using our features for free, register with Planable!
Jeremy is co-founder & CEO at uSERP, a digital PR and SEO agency working with brands like Monday, ActiveCampaign, Hotjar, and more. He also buys and builds SaaS companies like Wordable.io and writes for publications like Entrepreneur and Search Engine Journal.
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