Creating Your Own Content: Keeping Your Social Channels Fresh With One Initial Idea

Thinking up ideas for six months’ worth of content induces a mental paralysis in even the most creative minds.

The only solution is to tell yourself two things:

1. It’s not cheating to get ideas from helpful articles and online resources. It doesn’t diminish your value as a marketer. In fact it makes you a “smartketer”, a word I may or may not have just made up.
2. You can and indeed should repurpose existing content to yield the best return for your initial efforts.

To help you see how flexible your content can be, we’ve come up with a step-by-step guide to developing several content pieces from one initial idea.

You can switch up the stages. For example, we have kicked off with a video as our first content piece, but you can start with a blog post or a client presentation and branch out from there.

Find someone in your company with useful insight for your customers. Choose someone with an engaging personality who your audience will warm to. Then prepare a list of questions to ask them on camera. Send them the questions beforehand so they can prepare a thoughtful response. Let’s say, for instance, you’re marketing for a hair salon. Get one of your principle stylists to talk about the latest trends in updos or colours.

Write a blog post to go with the video.

You only have to write around three hundred words introducing the video and a few key points and then you have a whole new piece of content for your website.

This is perfect for people who prefer to read than to watch videos.

Cut out interesting snippets from your video with useful advice or a funny moment and share the 30-second video on Facebook and Instagram. This will generate more engagement as people are less likely to watch a whole video in one go, but their curiosity might just be piqued, in which case, link them to the entire video on your website blog post.

Again, lifting the most useful nuggets, design some beautiful graphics in Canva to stand out in your newsfeed and share them across channels. Choose lines that resonate or offer value to your followers. Once again, link back to your website to drive traffic to your long-form content. Even if they don’t follow through, they will love seeing your words as they are scrolling on their phone.

Any interesting facts or stats to come out of your interview? Turn them into an infographic, which is any piece of information presented visually, using icons and miniature graphics to help people digest knowledge more easily than reading a wall of text. The best part is they are highly shareable, so if viral content is what you’re after, behold the infographic.

And because an infographic is usually long form, with 20 or more facts, you can use the Snip tool on your PC or screen grab parts of the giant image to post on your social media channels.

If you’re appealing to professionals or B2B clients, a SlideShare on LinkedIn will give your top tips the gravitas they deserve. It’s essentially a PowerPoint presentation uploaded to SlideShare.net, where you can change and update your settings. This can then be shown to your Linked In followers. Not only that, you can even embed it into a blog post or a permanent page on your site for a more permanent home.

Now that you’ve got a raft of content, with very little research, you can start promoting it to your list. Design an email newsletter with links to different blogs, videos and social media posts in Mailchimp or similar.

So it’s been a long video, right? How much information did you absorb? Most likely, your followers retained a very small portion of the knowledge overall. So why not test them with an interactive quiz? This could be specifically about your video or it could be to do with the general theme. Back to our salon example, you could create a quiz that tells people what their hair colour should be for 2019 or what style best suits their face shape.

After they’ve completed the quiz, invite them to receive more content from you by showing an option to sign up for your newsletter and marketing. And of course, enable social share buttons so that each participant can get their friends to have a go.

Having worked so hard on all your content, don’t let it all disappear into obscurity. Add clips of your video content to Instagram Stories and then save them as Highlights so visitors can then catch up on your archive of fantastic content.