There’s no doubt that blogging is beneficial for your business. It helps you rank better in search engines, it establishes your expertise, and it can help you attract your ideal clients and customers. However, generating content ideas on an ongoing basis can be a lot of work, and it’s not unusual for business owners to wonder what they should be creating content about. The good news is that through social listening, you can use your buzzing social media page to come up with ideas for articles and other content. What is social listening, and how can you use these tools to come up with ideas your audience loves? And how can you implement this practice into your business routine and stay tuned in? In this article, we’ll answer these questions so you can get started using social media to generate content ideas. What is social listening? Social listening is the practice of monitoring conversations on social media and elsewhere online to better understand what your potential customers are saying about your brand and industry. It involves keeping track of your brand mentions, keywords, hashtags, and more. The practice is predominantly used to identify customers’ pain points, gather feedback, and provide a direct response to complaints and questions. In addition to learning more about your potential customers and generating content that would appeal to them, tuning can also help you convert them into actual customers. What are the best social listening tools? You can use tools like Hootsuite, AgoraPulse, Mention, Reputology, and others to follow certain keywords and hashtags, and to stay on top of your brand mentions. They allow you to get an overview of what your followers and fans are talking about, see how your brand is mentioned, and understand what others in your industry are talking about. How do I use these tools to come up with content ideas? There are several ways to use social listening tools to generate content ideas for your blog that your audience is sure to love. 1. Monitor industry keywords Use the tools to monitor keywords that are usually associated with your industry. You can then see what your followers are sharing and talking about and use that knowledge to fuel your content strategy. 2. Perform competitive analysis In a similar fashion, you can monitor your competitors’ social media accounts to see what type of content they’re creating. This can help spark ideas for your content while also providing you with an opportunity to identify and cover gaps in their content to position yourself as the industry expert. 3. Listen to follower feedback Lastly, you can monitor comments, questions, and replies that you get on your social media content and profiles. Use those comments and questions to create blog posts that address followers’ concerns and help them understand how your services and products can solve their problems and needs. Consistency is king Now that you know how you can use social media listening to your advantage, it’s important to make it a part of your routine. Here are two ways that will help make it a habit. Set up a weekly reminder to log into your social media listening tool of choice and review the results. Use Google Alerts to email you a daily or weekly digest of industry keywords and your brand mentions. Social media puts a world of content ideas at your fingertips; you just need the right tools and habits to tap into them. With the tips in this article, you’ll generate content ideas that your audience will love.

Brenda Barron
WordPress.com

Social Listening to Get Great Content Idea
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