Hughes blog post: Stuck in a social media rut? Try a content brainstorm

It’s not easy for a social media business page manager to come up with interesting content that generates great engagement day-in, day-out. A content brainstorm can be a great way to reinvigorate your business page with a fresh collection of compelling content ideas for the year ahead, and to get you out of the ‘same-old, same-old’ posts.

What is a content brainstorm?

A social media content brainstorm is a team thinktank to unearth topics that genuinely interest, inspire, help or motivate your brand’s current or aspirational online audience, while aligning with your brand positioning and values.

A brainstorm can give social media page managers a whole host of great story, image and video ideas to get you out of a posting rut and back to posting content that generates meaningful engagement.

A social media brainstorm can draw on analytics of your existing presence, customer feedback and questions, everyday customer interaction, competitor analysis, seasonal and trending happenings and some good old brain gymnastics.

Of course, as social media algorithms evolve it is becoming harder for businesses to grow an organic following through well-thought-out, meaningful content alone. For this reason, we will continue to see more businesses tap into the highly-advanced advertising platforms available on social media for direct promotion.

How can a content brainstorm help your social media planning?

A content brainstorm can form the foundation of a social media calendar that helps social media page managers to:

• Plan content ideas ahead of time: There’s nothing worse than getting to Friday and realising you haven’t posted anything all week – and have nothing to post. A brainstorm or ‘mind-mapping’ exercise can create a steady flow of content ideas for the year ahead so you’re never short of ideas each week.

• Create compelling content that gets ‘likes’: Compelling content interests, helps, inspires or engages an audience in some way. For cut-through in social media, content must stand out, be interesting, stop people in their tracks and be relevant to the reader – it’s not easy when you’re ‘in a rut’ or coming up with social media posts as a last-minute thought.

• Post with purpose: A good social media strategy will help a business align social media posts with business goals, but the next step is to make the post relevant to the reader – because there’s no point writing it if no-one wants to read it. So, in planning content in advance we have the time to ask ourselves, ‘what does the reader get out of this post?’, ‘what problem does it solve or solution does it offer?’, ‘what sympathy or feeling does it evoke?’, ‘what compelling content do I offer that my competitors don’t?’.

Grabbing some textas and butchers paper to facilitate a content brainstorm workshop is one of my favourite things as a Digital and Social Media Consultant – you never know what knock-out ideas will come out of a team thinktank!

A content brainstorm session will arm social media managers with the tools to post compelling content that is aligned with the company brand but gets good engagement – and steers them clear of the ‘social media content rut’.

For more online content inspiration, check out our blog on how to ‘beat the blog burnout’. To find out more about content brainstorm workshops for your business, contact Hughes PR on central@hughespr.com.au or phone 08 8412 4100.

- Haley Tamblyn