10 Tips to Start Making Amazing Content Right Now

by Member of TrueSocialMetrics team ~ 8 min

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Think you always need to wait for your personal muse to make great content? But what if this lady isn’t coming for several days? Here are some tips to get rid of this affliction and start creating amazing stuff right now!

1. Curated content

Don’t feel guilty for curating content. It’s not a robbery! You’re not stealing anything, you’re just sharing useful info with your followers. Here’s what you can do to save tons of time:

• Create a follow list on Twitter: gather lots of useful content sources in one place to find info faster;
• Add pinterest boards to save all the great stuff you find;
• Add links to important articles to your Pocket, Google Spaces or Evernote account.

Finding your soulmate brands/companies that create content on the same topics will be very helpful.

2. Research your Competitors’ content

Oh, no. You don’t have to hire a skilled detective to find out what your rivals are up to. Just use our Competitors reports! Make sure you select the right strategy and topics for your community. See what kind of posts work for other companies, and what content you should avoid.

3. Analyze trending topics and hashtags

In 2012, Steven Marx, a Twitter newbie, casually created the hashtag #NBCFail and became wildly popular. Yep, it was his disappointment about NBC coverage of the 2012 Olympics in London that made him a star! There are plenty of tools that can help you mine great topic ideas from today's trending hashtags. Here are just some of them:

• Hashtagify Suppose you already have your main hashtag. But what about additional ones? Hashtagify will help you link your hashtag to a group of other words. And it also has amazing visualization. It’s a kind of magic! It also shows you in a single glance what you should hashtag.

• RiteTag This tool is your personal trainer that will help you resist the pull of your competitors and choose the right hashtags for you. The moment you sign in with your Twitter account, RiteTag starts analyzing your hashtags and their effectiveness. Improve your marketing reach with this great instrument!

• TweetBinder This tool can create a number of amazing stories for you to tell. You enter a word and the tool brings back all the chats and conversations based on the hashtag.

4. Analyze what worked for you in the past

Reshare your top posts several times on all your social platforms. The old proverb says that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. But that’s not true for your top content. What touched your fans once, might work again.

So why is re-sharing your content is such a good idea?

• New followers haven’t seen your post yet;
• Old followers might not have seen your post due to different time-zones;
• The lifetime of a tweet is approximately 18 minutes: if a tweet got lost previous time, make sure it won't next time.

Your social media followers simply don’t see and read each post. Sharing the content more than once is a good way to show your updates to more people. But make sure you reframe your content when posting it again. Show different parts of the article to appeal to a wider audience. Here’s how Moz is doing it on different platforms:

Twitter post:

Facebook post:

To find your top content just open the Best Posts Report on your TrueSocialMetrics account. Discover which types of content and topics perform the best and make your followers tick. To be sure, in the last century, editors-in-chief at newspapers and magazine would give their souls for such magic!

Now you have the knowledge to appeal to a wider audience.

5. Comments are a marketer’s best friend

What do they say on marketing webinars? «Read your followers thoughts!» Your target audience is sharing their thoughts with the world, you should listen. Just sneak onto your competitor’s site or social account and take a look at their followers' comments. What concerns do they have, what would they like to learn more about, or solve? A perfect inspiration for your next blog post.

6. Use Content Segmentation

How do you hit the target with your next post and get your audience engaged? Simply by finding the best topics to write about! Find out which posts are the most interesting to your fans by using Content Segmentation.

So how does it work? Imagine that I post a lot about cookies in Twitter. Because I like cookies. But are my followers happy with my cookie-tweets as much as I am? I’ll create a segment to separate all the posts with ‘cookie’ keyword and see how much engagement did they get compared to my other tweets.

Let’s see how my tweets with 5 different hashtags work for my Twitter audience. I will create 5 content segments to separate the tweets that cointain one of these 5 hashtags: #TrueBooks, #TrueQuotes, #TrueStats, #TrueFun, #NowYouKnow.

Books recommendations (#TrueBooks) get the most likes per tweet, and humor (#TrueFun) is the most shareable topic. While interesting facts (#NowYouKnow) and stats (#TrueStats) doesn't work really well. So why should you keep posting about topics your followers hate if you can use Segmentation to separate the weeds from the wheat?

7. Think of content groups

Now that you know what types of content you need, structure it to make your brainstorming more targeted. Divide posts into groups based on possible future engagement and benefit for your brand. Here’s how your content may look like after competent grouping:

1. Promotional content (3%);
2. Blog posts (20%);
3. Other people’s content (15%);
4. Inspirational quotes (10%);
5. Product updates (7%) etc.

Remember that your strategy is not the Ten Commandments: you can change it any time depending on the stats.

8. Add a “human face” to your social content

You may know that some users think that your company is just a number of articles on the Internet. How can you prove that you’re not just another faceless corporation? Let people know what’s going on behind the scenes; share images from your company life, stories about your employees, founders and customers. Let people like and trust you. Loyalty to a brand is born on a personal level: nobody wants to make friends with a shampoo, but rather with the people who created it.

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9. Repurpose content

Produce more content just by repurposing it. Make the information transformable. Got an amazing webinar on your YouTube page? Transform it into a presentation or a blog post! Some people perceive visual content better than textual. That’s your chance to embrace a wider audience.

10. Co-create content

Work with your partners to co-create content. What’s so special about this method? Well, you can improve your content amplification by leveraging the audiences of both parties. Unite the “clans”, grow your society, be awesome!

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Now go get your muse a well-deserved vacation! You are armed with ideas and ready to rock on your own.