The Social 360 Podcast With Chad Egeland

Episode 15 - Generating New Ideas For Your Content

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Description

This week on the show I touch on the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter, some Twitter etiquette, the new book The Unofficial Guide To Hootsuite by Mike Allton. The main topic of discussion on this week’s show has to deal with generating ideas for your content creation and I share 8 ways to help you do just that.


Forgot To Mention

Last week on the show I shared with you my list of resources for helping you find more success in social media and I forgot to mention a couple of really great resources.


It’s Reading Rainbow

LeVar Burton of Star Trek and Reading Rainbow fame launched a Kickstarter this past week to help revive Reading Rainbow. They achieved their goal of a million dollars in less than 24 hours. It’s a great cause that I’m glad to see funded and one my family will be taking part in.

Xbox Shut Off Prank

Found this great Xbox prank that as a gamer I really got a good laugh from and I wanted to share it with you.

Twitter Etiquette

I have been seeing these two examples of Twitter no-no’s lately and both I though had disappeared but are apparently making a comeback.

  1. Auto DM’s – Try not to send out an automatic DM trying to sell to people you just connected with. It looks cheap, sounds tacky and we don’t have a relationship so why are you trying the hard sell on me? It’s the equivalent of email spam and it cheapens your brand.
  2. Follow/Unfollow/Follow – I have noticed this tactic again recently where a user follows you, then unfollows and then follows again. This allows them to ping you with a notification that alerts you to new followers in hopes that you follow back. If I am going to follow a new user it’s because of the value they provide not because they pinged me 10 times in a row.

8 Ways To Generate Content Ideas

Content is king! But how do we go about creating interesting, informative, valuable and entertaining content on a consistent basis? How do we generate new ideas to help us create the content that will serve our audience the best?

That is the topic of today’s podcast, finding, discovering and generating new ideas to help you create new content.

  1. Quora – Input a search term such as Podcasting or Dog Grooming into Quora and a list of questions people have asked will appear. You can then use these questions as a list of topic ideas for you to create content around as it makes sense if people are asking about this information on Quora your audience may wish to read about it on your own blog.
  2. Your Peers – Take a look around at what your peers are currently doing with their content and get inspired by their work to create your own content. Did something get said that you disagree with? Create content around that. Do you agree with an article but one point isn’t expanded on enough? Take that point and create the content you wish would have been included. The point is that the peers in your industry can be a valuable source of content discover and idea generation that you can and should turn to.
  3. UberSuggest – One of my favourite tools for compiling a list of ideas quickly is Ubersuggest. This is an easy to use search tool where you input a search term and UberSuggest returns a list of keywords related to your initial search term. Looking though the list of suggestions for the search term dog grooming gives me an idea for pricing, equipment needed and how to’s all ideas you can create content around (if that’s your business)
  4. Social – Social networks can be a great source of idea generation. Twitter and Pinterest are both great discovery services and when using the search features can put you on a path that helps you discover many more content ideas.
  5. Your Analytics – If you have an already established website you  can turn to your analytics to discover what your most popular content is and create new content based around that and discover what users to your site are searching for to then create or update content based on their searches.
  6. Your Community – If you’re stuck for content ideas and are active in social media or have an established blog community what better way to generate ideas for content than to turn to those who want to hear from you? Your community invests time in consuming your content, sharing it and commenting on it so use them to help you discover what it is they want to see from you? Ask the question on your blog or social channels and ask them what it is they want to see and then create content based on that.
  7. Blog Topic Generator From Hubspot – This is in no way a perfect or even close to perfect tool but if you’re stuck for ideas it is possible to generate a few titles from this tool. You simply include up to 3 nouns to describe your business and it spits out a few random blog titles for you. While many are unusable as they sound like pure jibberish you can find a few gems or spark a few new ideas that can lead you to creating topics to write about.
  8. Brainstorming – Sit down with a pencil and paper and jot down as many ideas as you can to describe any and all ideas related to your blog topic that you can. Nothing is wrong here, this exercise is intended to help you bypass a mental roadblock and generate a mass quantity of ideas that have potential to turn into something special later on. When you’re done this exercise go back over everything you have written down and select what has potential or looks promising and start picking off ideas for topics then take a look at everything else and see if you can’t rework some of the ideas into topics that you can use instead of just discarding them. Hubspot has an excellent article on creating a years worth of topics in an hour that is useful for describing this process in more detail.

Resource Of The Week

Mike Allton of The Social Media Hat recently released a new book that can help you to understand Hootsuite best practices and teach you how to best utilize this social media management tool effectively and efficiently.


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Questions, comments, suggestions about this show or social media in general? Send me an email to chad@socialthreesixty.com and I will either answer it on the show, in an email or both.

The post Episode 15 – Generating New Ideas For Your Content appeared first on Social 360.