How Social Media Can Help Create Your Next Blog Post

Social media has taken over our daily lives, and over one billion people access Facebook alone on a monthly basis. While various platforms help us connect with others wherever, whenever, they can also be a serious killer of getting work done. From post to post, video to funny photo, an hour skimming through streams can feel like just a matter of minutes.

Blogging and social media both go hand in hand, and thanks to the explosion of major platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Google+, we are able to reach people in a way that more easily facilitates content consumption. In other words, social networks are like RSS readers, minus the whole dying part.

Over the years, I’ve came up with new ideas for many blog posts just by floating around the social web, and, uhhh, maybe wasting a few minutes hours here and there. However, that’s okay, long as you get stuff done, right? Right?

Question Your Friends, Followers

No, don’t start getting all up in their business, but spend more time interacting than just sharing. Yes or no questions don’t hurt, but asking open ended questions will help drive more discussion. What’s great about open ended questions is they can’t be answered with a simple yes or no, and often start with “what” or “how.” For example, “What should people know before buying a house?” is far more effective than, “Did you have a bad experience buying a house?”

Conversations lead to thoughts, thoughts lead to ideas, and those ideas could lead to your next great post (Tweet This). You never know exactly where conversations will go, and when you will find inspiration. When you surround yourself on social media with great, like minded people, you are able to instantly tap into many wonderful minds.

The value of asking questions is highly underrated, especially when asked effectively.

Participate In Twitter Chats

Twitter really helped expand the concept of simple, real-time communication, and out of it came the idea called the hashtag. Hashtags are a great way to group information, and follow specific information. Because of this, hashtags have lead way to Twitter chats or what many call “tweet chats.”

Every week, hundreds of “tweet chats” take place, all the way from the topic of country music, to interior design. There really is a discussion out there for everyone, and here is a great list to check out. Instead of you spending countless hours looking for people around a specific niche, you can see, time and date permitting, a slew of individuals who are ready to get yapping about specific subjects!

As mentioned before, these conversations can help lead you to your next blog post, which also gets us into the final tip.

Create A Narrative With Storify

So you’ve had some interesting conversations that have lead to your next post idea, and you’d like a good way to bring it all together. Of course, you can include people’s responses by embedding individual Facebook posts and tweets, or just taking screenshots.

Or, you could use a great tool called Storify which allows you to easily, and beautifully group social media posts together. Storify makes it very simple to create a narrative, and you can embed full stories on your blog. Not only can you share tweets, photos or YouTube videos for example, but also link articles from across the web.

This is just one of many ways to elevate your blog posts, and help you create that next great article thanks to social media.

Photo credit: mkhmarketing