Figuring out what to talk about is a big and often tough issue for businesses when creating social media content. You have to be consistent, engaging, and exciting and that’s a lot of work for any creative.
It’s not easy to consistently shell out content that’s above par. Most times, businesses start out fierce but the idea bank soon runs dry and they start struggling, and this shows. So, in this article, I’m going to show you some genius methods you can use to make sure that you never run out of things to talk about.
1. The Keyword Method
The first method is the Keyword method. This method involves using online tools to tell you what people are searching for so that you can then create topics about them. I’ve got three tools that I use.
- SEMrush: This is a paid tool. It has a tool called the Keyword Magic Tool. A good starting point is to type in a topic. So, for me, I might put in video marketing, and click search. I generally leave the U.S. as the search region, because it gives me a lot more options.
If you’ve got a product or service that’s specific to Australia or New Zealand, if it’s talking about superannuation or investments, and things like that, you might want to be specific to the country, but otherwise, I recommend just going with the U.S.
When I click search, it generates keywords that people look for online, but an added advantage of SEMrush is that it gives a very extensive list of questions.
So, it takes what people search online, and then filters those keywords by questions. Questions are very good for content creators because it gives us the opportunity to create content around answering these questions.
What I generally do is go through a list and look at the questions which I think fit what I want to talk about and would be a good question to answer. I might look at how to make short marketing videos, which is something people are looking for online, and I’ll mark that down.
Pro Tip: If you want to create content and repurpose it into a blog or article for SEO, I would recommend keeping an eye on keyword difficulty. Keyword difficulty is telling you how difficult that keyword is going to be to appear on the first page of a search result. For instance, if we look at how to create a marketing video, out of 100, we’ll probably get a score of 80. You should steer clear of anything thing with a score above 50 because it’s going to be too hard rank on the first page of search results.
2. TubeBuddy: After I click search on SEMrush and get the list, I’ll use another tool to refine that list. It’s a Chrome extension called TubeBuddy, and it’s for YouTube. It’s also a paid tool, but they have a free plan.
What TubeBuddy does is tell me if that is a keyword worth targeting on YouTube. So, if I click on the option and go through the keyword explorer, it will tell me whether that’s a good or a bad keyword to target. YouTube is the second most used search engine behind Google, so if you want to grow, then focusing on keywords and things that people are looking for online is the best way to do it.
TubeBuddy gives keyword scores which tells you how much people search for that topic and you can click on results which will show you the videos that come up in the search results for that keyword. You can also find out if a keyword is worth it by looking at the number of views the videos get. This helps you gauge how popular the keyword is.
2. The Subtopic Method
The next method is the Subtopic method and this one’s simple. Basically, you have an overarching topic; then you break that overarching topic into subtopics.
For instance, you could take video marketing, an extensive topic, as your overarching topic then break it down into subtopics.
Your subtopics can be “What You Need for Video Marketing,” “All You Need to Know About Video Marketing,” “Video Marketing Hacks,” “How to Setup a Video Marketing Business,” “How to Create Content,” “How to Promote Your Video Content on Social Media” etc. So, from that one overarching topic, I’m able to break that down into varying subtopics.
3. The Shotgun Method
The third method I use is the Shotgun method. This is my favourite method and one I use probably the most. What you do in this method is make a list of questions using steps from the keyword method.
After you’ve got the questions, you then look at different ways you could answer them. For example, you can look at ten questions people ask about your niche and try to come up with different ways to answer those ten questions.
I have a template that I use for this method to help me determine how to answer the questions. The answer could be a how-to, it could be a guide, it could be a checklist, it could be a case study, it could be good books that your audience can read that may answer their questions. You’re taking one question, and answering it in multiple ways.
The best thing about this is that you can do this at the start of the year, and make it your content guide for the whole year. With this method, you can write out ten questions that answer each question five different ways. You’re going to end up with a year’s worth of content, posting one video a week. That’s an efficient way to come up with topics to talk about, and, as I mentioned earlier, it’s my favourite method.
Conclusion
So, there you have it, some methods you can use to make sure that you never run out of things to say on social media. You can pick one strategy or even use all three of them, so your content has more diversity.
These methods will also work for written content and all other types of content. If you’d like a copy of the topics template, leave a comment below, and I’ll send it directly.