Need more ideas to fill the gaps in your social media posting calendar?
Looking for tools to help?
In this article, you’ll discover six tools and websites that will help keep your social media content interesting, timely, and relevant.
6 Tools for Social Media Content Inspiration by Justin Kerby on Social Media Examiner.
#1: Discover Unofficial Holidays and Popular Events With Forekast
Forekast is one of the best places to discover what’s happening and which popular events are coming up. Events are added to the website and then upvoted by the community, allowing the hottest events to rise to the top of the page.
As you scroll through Forekast, you get an overview of the major happenings and trending events coming up in the days, weeks, and months ahead. It can provide tons of inspiration and keep you up to date on trending conferences in your industry, holidays like National Pet Day, sporting events, product releases, and just about everything in between.
You can even add events to your calendar so you don’t forget important upcoming dates for interacting with your audience in real time.
Make it a practice to check in once a week and take a look at the newly added and trending events. Your social media creation efforts will thank you for it and you’ll keep your content as relevant as possible.
Tip: For the “do it for me” types, you might want to sign up for the newsletter The Weekly Forekast. Every Monday morning, you’ll receive a roundup of the most popular events for the coming week.
#2: Find Trending and Interesting GIFs With Today on the Internet
Long gone are the days of text posts on social media. Photos, GIFs, and videos likely make up a large part of your social media marketing efforts. This is where Today on the Internet can help inspire your creativity.
The site ranks the top trending GIFs, photos, and videos on the web, and the best part is that it updates every 24 hours with fresh content so you can always be on top of your game.
The Photos section is a great place to inspire your own social media marketing efforts as well. While the GIF section only highlights the top 10 trending GIFs, the Photos section lets you scroll endlessly. If there’s an event trending on any particular day, you’re all but guaranteed to find some interesting photos of the event on Today on the Internet.
Some of the photos you’ll find on the website can make great additions to your swipe file, which we’ll talk about a little later.
#3: Identify New Content Sources With Almighty Press
While many social media marketers rely on services like Feedly to bring them news from selected sources, sometimes going out in search of content can provide better results. Scouring the Internet for social media inspiration can prove challenging, which is why a tool like Almighty Press is so valuable.
This tool works wonders for your content discovery efforts. After you sign up for the free 14-day trial, click Content at the top of the page and perform a search for any relevant keywords. You can also focus your search by adding specific websites or phrases you’d like to see displayed in your results.
For this example, we’ve searched for the keyword “startup” on any article from Forbes. Adjust the time filter to see results from any time from the last hour to any specific date range.
You can also adjust the engagements filter. This will alter your results to only show content with the corresponding social shares you set within the filter.
For our illustration, we’ve left the engagement filter open ended, and set the time filter to the last 24 hours. Here are some example results:
From here, you can head to Forbes to read the articles, curate your own post that syncs with your WordPress or Medium blog (including a featured image and personalized writeup), or share the article directly to Buffer or your social media channels.
Even if you’re not using Almighty Press as a scheduler or for publishing articles directly to your blog, it offers a deep set of search features that make it worth the price tag. Almighty Press offers a 14-day free trial, before charging $27/month for use of the service.
#4: Stay Current With Events via Twitter’s Business Blog
You won’t want to miss out on any trending events on Twitter because those events will likely be trending all around the web. Thankfully, Twitter’s Business Blog publishes a calendar roughly 1 week before the end of every month to keep you ahead of the game.
With the calendar, you get a great overview of trending events coming up and expected tweet impressions for each event. This can provide inspiration when setting up your monthly social media schedule, allowing you to capitalize on the biggest expected events of the month on Twitter.
You can download the full Twitter Marketing Calendar for the year directly from the blog. However, they typically add new events every month, so it’s best to check back every month for any new additions.
#5: Capture Inspiration in a Swipe File With Evernote and Marker.io
One of the best places for social media marketers to draw inspiration is from their peers. The problem is when you see something you love on another business’s page, you might not be in need of any social content at that time so you just keep on scrolling.
That’s why creating a “swipe file” is so important. It’s a place where you can store all of your favorite social media content that others have created. Then when you’re in need of some inspiration, you can review the great things others have done to get your own creative juices flowing.
Of course, stealing from others isn’t the objective here. The idea is to borrow parts of great social posts from others and create something that’s unique to your brand.
There are a variety of tools you can use to clip and store social media ideas you like into a swipe file. A great free combination is Marker.io and Evernote. Marker.io is a screenshot tool that allows you to clip images and mark them up. Add text, arrows, and even emojis to your images so you remember what caught your eye about the piece in the first place. Then save the images to Evernote.
While the combination of Marker.io and Evernote is great (and free with their basic plans), you can use any combination of screenshot tools and cloud storage applications to create your own personal swipe file. You can store files locally or in the cloud using a number of services including Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud.
Use the combination of tools you’re most comfortable with and commit to creating your own swipe file for inspiration.
Conclusion
When you create social media content daily for your brand or your clients, it makes sense to gather as much creative inspiration as possible. Use these six tools to further stimulate your social media creation efforts and stay on top of any trending events coming up.