Have you ever felt like you are out of ideas when creating new content? Or wondering if the ideas you have will have the impact you want?
Ultimately with your content, you want people to find you and help them in some way. The best way to ensure you can do this is to research and specifically research in the exact language they use.
Here are three ways to easily do research and get unlimited ideas for your social media content. Read on below for how to use each most effectively.
Source #1: Google Search & Autocomplete
There is so much incredible data at your fingertips for free with Google search. Here is how to use it for research:
First: Type in your topic, let’s say as an example I am a kids book reseller. So I type “books” into the search bar.
Second: Now instead of clicking through to the results click back into the navigation bar and you will see a few things: on the left are related search terms (we will get back to this) and on the right you will see a people also ask with search phrases like “what is the #1 best-selling book” as well as a people also search for section.
Note, book as a term is broad so for more impactful topics you should dig deeper into some longer tail keywords which will have more impact.
Fourth: Now you are going to look at the list in the search bar and pick one that is the most relevant. There is a book for kids so we will dig down a layer into that search term. Now click on that term and go back to the search terms that populate in the search bar. These are all topics and questions you could address in your social media content. You can also go as deep as you wish and repeat to find topics.
Source #2 – Pinterest
Another search engine that is rich for finding ideas is Pinterest. You can conduct research in the searchbar using the process outlined above, but Pinterest will also return highlighted categories of interest below search. When you click on one of these it adds it to your original search term where you can continue to get specific and explore ideas you might now have thought of otherwise.
While on Pinterest you should check out Pinterest Trends for ideas as well. Their future trend prediction through Pinterest Predicts is highly accurate and you can see what is currently trending. They do a beautiful job outlining and explaining the trends they forecast. You can use this to your advantage by incorporating these upcoming trends in your content and being ahead of the curve.
Source #3 – Answer The Public
This site is a massive resource to get content ideas. Simply go answerthepublic.com and type in your search term. Note as a free user you can be limited per day so choose your search terms wisely or subscribe. Another tip is to make sure you have the country you want selected. Once you type in your search term you’ll get a dataset presented in a few ways. First is a visualization wheel where you can see what is asked and for each type of question they are ranked by frequency. They are broken down into questions (why / why books are better than movies), prepositions (can / books can change your life), comparisons (versus / books versus movies) and then an alphabetical list. Based on how you like to consume data you can choose the datasets or the visual option. This site is a goldmine of ideas. You can create hundreds of pieces of content from this one site.
In Summary
These are just a few methods to learn how the people you want to reach are searching for and speaking about your product/service. If you use any of these or something else I’d love to hear about your experiece.
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