Finding great social media tools for content generation can be like adding more hours to your day. Here’s a nice thought: It’s Monday morning and you sit down with your laptop, coffee, and get to work pumping out some real winners to post for the week ahead. It sounds great, but we all know it’s not that simple. Staying consistent with your social media content can be difficult, time consuming, and draining at times. Regularly coming up with ideas that don’t feel forced isn’t easy.
We’re here to help. Here’s are some simple tools and strategies that help you easily find more content ideas that engage your audience in a natural way.
A 3-tool combo to help you easily find social media content ideas and get them out into the world.
1. Forekast and Forekast+
“The Crowdsourced Calendar of the Internet” — Easily see the best upcoming events.
Tapping into current or trending events is a powerful tool for getting engagement. There are two simple reasons for this: people tend to enjoy talking about things that are happening right now, and popular events are likely to end up trending on social media. If you’re creating marketing and social media content around these conversations, your chances for getting engagement and exposure beyond your own audience increases dramatically.
The problem is that searching for and staying on top of what’s upcoming in order to plan content around it is time-consuming and most of the time you still end up missing a lot of good stuff.
This is where Forekast comes in. You can easily see popular upcoming events that the internet community is already excited about and therefore have a good chance of getting buzz on social media when they come around. Forekast+ makes this even more effortless by syncing the top events right to your personal calendar along with a newsletter that briefs you on the top upcoming events of each week.
2. Unsplash
“The internet’s source of freely-usable images.” — Free stock photos
When creating a post around a current event that will likely be trending, using a good image goes a long way. The increased engagement on social media posts with a good image is pretty well documented. If you know people will actively be searching for your hashtags, it’s worth standing out.
There are a lot of free stock photo websites out there but Unsplash is our favorite. It has a huge catalog of high-quality images and is very easy to navigate. If you’re looking for a more robust option, Shutterstock is of course a great one but it’s not free.
On a semi-related note, if memes fit your brand’s style, they are one of the best ways to get viral engagement. In addition to Unsplash, there are a lot of great tools out there for easily creating memes to accompany your post. Imgflip is one of the tools we like.
3. Buffer
The world’s best social media publishing platform.
A good publishing platform for scheduling your posts is a must. One of the advantages of knowing about events that haven’t happened yet is that you can have content ready and can get in on the conversation before the trend is over. How many times have you opened Twitter to see trending topics that are on their final leg? The topic is usually full of interesting, witty posts that were able to gain traction early on. Scheduling your post around the time the conversation is likely to get hot gives you a big advantage. Buffer is our favorite publishing tool, but there’s a lot of good options out there so you’ll certainly find one that fits your needs.
Put together, these three tools provide a really simple but effective way to generate a steady stream of social media content. And when it comes to making something a consistent, sustainable part of your routine, simple is good.
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