Brainstorm 20+ Social Media Content Ideas for Your Business in Less Than an Hour
By: Cori Widen, Product Marketing Lead at Boosted by Lightricks
Are you struggling to come up with a host of content ideas to revamp your social media? A lot of business owners might think that generating content is a time-consuming process, but you can easily brainstorm 20 or more new social media content ideas in an hour or less with the right brainstorming strategy!
If you want to generate a lot of ideas in a short amount of time, it’s important to ensure you are getting inspired and brainstorming in a strategic way. It’s a great tactic to block out a dedicated amount of time for each task and group similar tasks together. To help you brainstorm more efficiently, we’ve broken up the content generation process into two parts.
The first part is focused on researching and gathering inspiration. When you are in this mode, you shouldn’t break your focus by trying to also brainstorm. Instead, it’s better to gather as much inspiration as possible for a variety of content buckets. Then, after you’ve spent some time getting inspired, you can shift your focus to actually brainstorming specific ideas based on all of your research. It’s much easier to brainstorm a lot of content ideas quickly once you’ve gathered tons of inspiration and you’re in the creative, idea-generating work mode!
PART 1: GATHER INSPIRATION
We recommend spending the first 30 minutes or so focusing on gathering inspiration, saving re-shareable content, reviewing your competitors and making a few quick notes of business questions or updates. Check out the table below for set time blocks to dedicate to finding inspiration.
| 5 Mins | Find Quotes | Who doesn’t love seeing a good motivational quote as they’re scrolling through social media? Take 5 minutes or less to browse the web and find inspirational quotes that will speak to your audience. Copy & paste them into a doc to help you brainstorm social media content later. Be sure to also jot down the proper credit for the original author. |
| 10 Mins | Check Hashtags | Next, look up trending posts under hashtags that are relevant to your business and save some of those posts. See which type of posts are doing the best under those hashtags or if there’s any content that you would like to repost. Checking out social posts under key hashtags is a great spot to get inspired for new content ideas, understand what type of content performs well and find quality content to repost. |
| 10 Mins | Review Competition | In 10 minutes or less, check up on a few of your competitors to see what social media content they’ve been posting recently. This is something you should be doing on a regular basis so you shouldn’t need a ton of time to do this. Check out both bigger brands as well as small businesses and save the content that resonates with you or that received a lot of engagement. |
| 5 Mins | Brand Questions | Next, it’s time to focus on answering some questions about your business! You’re the expert on your brand, so in 5 minutes or less, jot down several commonly asked questions from your customers. Also, jot down anything else you’d like to tell your followers about your business, whether it’s an exciting update, a new product, a change to your shipping policies, etc. |
PART 2: START BRAINSTORMING
Once you’ve spent some time gathering inspiring content from a variety of sources, it’s time to start brainstorming specific content ideas to help generate 20 (or more!) unique social media ideas to refresh your bank of content as you plan out your social media for the next few weeks.
| 5 Mins | Select Quotes | Open up the document where you saved all of the inspirational quotes that you liked and select several that you want to share with your followers. And if you are feeling extra creative, jot down some ideas for new original quotes that are inspired by some of the motivational quotes you’ve saved. |
| 5 Mins | Save Reposts | Next, take a look at the posts that you’d like to potentially repost. Select and save the ones you’d like to repost in the near future. It’s a good idea to save either links to these posts in a document or create a collection on Instagram to easily repost this content. Not only is reposting content from other brands or influencers a really easy way to generate new content for social media quickly, but it also encourages engagement from the people you are reposting. |
| 15 Mins | Content List | Now it’s time to plan the bulk of your new and original content that you plan on creating. Check out the posts you’ve saved from big brands or other small businesses that you’d like to try to replicate, with your own unique twist of course! Make a specific list of content that you can create based on these posts. For example, product photography ideas including props you may need, new video content that you’d like to create, etc. Making a list of exactly what content you plan to create will make it easy for you to quickly create new content later on. |
| 10 Mins | Answer FAQs | This final step should be the easiest… planning content about your own brand! Look at your list of FAQs and jot down a few ideas for posts based on answering these. Telling your customers more about your products and answering some of their common questions along the way doesn’t need to be boring! You could create a video explaining a cool feature or service you offer or you could share a customer review that answers the questions. Also, be sure to brainstorm some content ideas that share more with your customers about any exciting upcoming events up – it’s great to build excitement and keep customers coming back to check out your social media. |
We know it can feel like an overwhelming project to brainstorm and generate tons of content ideas for social media, but when you break it down into smaller time chunks dedicated to certain tasks and block off your time based on the type of work you are doing, you’ll find it so much easier and faster to generate new content for your social media calendar. Let us know if you use this time block plan and brainstorming guide to help you create 20 (or more!) social media content ideas in an hour or less!
Cori Widen is the Product Marketing Lead at Boosted by Lightricks. She has been leading product marketing campaigns and doing qualitative market research in the tech industry for 10 years.
