Social media marketers know that curating, creating and posting social content can take a lot of time. In fact, many freelancers and agencies stay away from offering social media services because it’s so time-consuming. However, this is a field that is growing exponentially, and you don’t want to miss out just because of the time crunch. We have some ideas to find great content for your social media calendar that won’t take tons of time and effort, but first let’s talk about your social media strategy.

What Sort of Content Should You Be Looking For?

Ultimately, the point of your content for social media is to gain likes and followers, promote shares and likes, and convert your social audience into actual customers. The way you do that is by sharing content people want to see. But how do you know that? What sort of content do people share? The Consumer Insights Group at The New York Times says that people share for a number of reasons:

So, you need to find content for social media that fall into one of those categories, that is well-written and visually stimulating, and you need to post it to the right audience, at the right time, where they want to see it.

But that brings us to the big question. Where do you find content ideas for social media? Here are some good tips.

Content Search Tools

There are a number of tools out there that provide great content for your social media calendar. Some aggregate headlines, others have search features that let you search for content ideas by industry or keyword. The downside? Some of them aren’t free. In fact, the best ones aren’t. And, you can go down a rabbit hole easily checking any or all of them for content – there’s no guarantee that something will pop up that’s relevant for your page. They are worth a look, and even if they’re paid tools, you can get a free trial with most of them. Here’s a quick list:

BuzzSumo

Renoun.io

EpicBeat Epictions

Social Mention

Blekko

Some social media marketers swear by these tool when finding content for social media, and we won’t tell you that they aren’t a good place to look. Just put a timeline on your usage – otherwise you could end up spending a lot of time browsing through content that might not apply to the social accounts you’re supporting.

Set Google Alerts, or Don’t

Google Alerts used to be a pretty awesome tool. You’d tell Google to email you when certain keywords showed up in news stories and new content published on the Internet. It doesn’t work so well anymore, but you can still get a few content ideas for social delivered right to your mailbox. Some of the emails you get? Well, they won’t be so helpful. There are several other tools that might work better for you. Social Mention, listed above, is a social media monitoring tool, which is great because you are looking for content for social channels, so you can see what is being posted where. Go ahead and set up Google Alerts for the biggest topics related to the industry you’re posting content about and you’ll have easy access to at least a few content ideas per day.

Search Social Channels

Yeah, it sounds too easy, doesn’t it? Twitter has an awesome advanced search feature that lets you search by keyword, to eliminate certain words, to search from certain users, and to even filter by positive or negative tweets. You can also search by hashtags, or search trending topics right from your dashboard. Facebook search is also helpful, and Facebook provides a list of trending topics on the right side of your news feed. Pinterest, Instagram, Vine and other social channels are also great ways to find out what people are talking about now, and to find evergreen content that gets shared over and over again. Some tools, like AgoraPulse, build in monitoring for you.

Use a Pre-Populated Content Calendar

One of the best methods of finding high-quality content in social media land is to use a tool that provides post ideas for every day of the week. Buffer makes suggestions, and plenty of companies, like Forbes, share their editorial calendars pretty often and you can borrow ideas from them. Or, you can use a tool like PromoRepublic that offers a full calendar of content ideas with already-designed templates that you can modify by changing the text or adding your logo. With our tool, you get fresh ideas every month based on trends, holidays, celebrity birthdays and more.

Talk about saving time! Finding great content ideas for social media is a talent that will take you far in your marketing career. And, the more time you save, the more clients you can provide SMM services to. Win!