Easy Social Media Content Creation

Bea Halstead - August 10, 2012

Social Media Marketing strategy includes a few best practices to employ in order for businesses to conduct themselves successfully.   The most important of which is engaging the network of fans that are interested in following your presence with content they will want to interact with.  Although the endorsement of your brand is apparent when a user follows you, there is also and understood conversation that will occur surrounding the overall interests in the industry you conduct business in.   Because your fans are interested in topics beyond just your propriety content, it is important to find ways to integrate external content like industry news, history, trending topics, and overall knowledge of the trade to leverage and encourage potential conversations and fan growth.   Becoming a source for your fans to rely on for additional content provides more opportunity for you to exposure your brand as a thought leader.  Some simple tools exist that can aid in creating this type of social media content.   Outlined below are a few tools that any marketer can use to get a daily resource for industry topics and trends from both businesses and individuals to share with their own network.

Google Alerts – This free tool is not new to many marketers, but probably isn’t used as often as it should be.  We recommend setting up a daily alert with your company name, to monitor reputation management.  You will want to set up alerts for industry keywords to be able to generate content based on these searches, which provide fresh content from various sources.  You may also consider creating alerts for you top competitors, to keep an eye on what self-promotional marketing efforts they are publishing online.

Storify – This small social network allows a user to search for a topic/keyword and then aggregate multiple sources into a single story.  We recommend trying out this tool because the search feature targets social media networks.  You start with a keyword search within Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Flicker, or Google to see results for Tweets, Images, Videos, Links, and Posts.  This content can be repurposed either in a single article or as individual posts to your network of choice.

Bottlenose – This new site describes itself as a “public discovery portal”.  It will allow a visitor to conduct a search that will stream in trending conversations from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and more by offering a live stream of photos, videos, and posts.   We recommend setting up a free account to have access to the built in Dashboard and Sonar features when linking your social media accounts and rss feeds to the tool.   This also includes a publishing feature, where you can post updates directly from the site to different accounts you have connected it to.

Tools like these are free and easy to use to target trends and create content that can be good to share with your growing social community.   Know what the audience is interested in with each network you participate in, so you will understand what content will be best suited toward starting conversations with them.  Make sure to add your own voice to these industry trends by asking questions and providing insight into the external content you are sharing.  If you are not sure about what content you should generate to share with your target audience, then contact us for a social media strategy that will enhance you company’s online presence.