How To Generate More Creative Social Media Posts
Creating original, engaging and creative social media content is challenging. Online marketing is a field that is always on and ever changing. “Creativity on demand is hard!” I can hear you say. Is there any way fight the “blank page” creative block?
I was giving a workshop at a training event and one of the segments was dedicated to knowledge exchange between participants. I sneaked into the session for Communication Managers, being interested in the issues they’re facing in their daily work. One question to the moderator got me sitting at the edge of my seat: “How do you come up with ideas for social media posts? I struggle a lot with it and find it hard to come up with something fresh”. The moderator said they usually just wait for the good idea to come, which is tricky because sometimes it comes and sometimes… it doesn’t.
Does it mean we have to be on the mercy of random sparks of genius? Does it mean there’s no other way to connect the dots? I think there are many great exercises to boost our potential to come up with great ideas and today I want to share with you one of them.
Head, Heart, Hand Content Types
The Head, Heart and Hand model has its origin in the transformative education theories and has been used to enrich learning experiences so they can expand one’s perception, interest or motivation. While this concept is usually used commercially in leadership or change management, I find it simple and effective enough to help digital marketers in generating social media post ideas. In this model, we can divide our content based on three categories.
Head Content - Think
This type of content appeals to people’s logic. You can recognise it by headlines like “How I grew my Facebook audience to 100k followers in 1 year” or “What will be the visual trends for 2020”. Sharing knowledge, information and ideas is not only a value in itself, but it can also help establish your brand as the expert in the field and create more trust between you and your audience.
Types of content: expert opinion, data, infographics, webinars, blog articles, e-books, tips and tricks, case studies, updates etc.
Heart Content - Feel
Probably one the hardest category of types of content we can create, because it answers to something that can be unpredictable - human emotions. By creating heart content, we initiate connection with our audience and answer to people’s need of belonging. It can be motivating, inspiring, touching, funny, or awww-making. Good approach in finding what could work is it to put ourselves in our customers/followers shoes and think what would spark our emotions.
Types of content: inspiration quotes, personal stories, behind the scenes photos, memes, testimonials, viral videos etc
Hand Content - Do
Inspiring people’s action through online content can feel really rewarding. This type of content will most likely try to answer the question “How to do it?” or will include a call-to-action like “Leave a comment if…”. It is most successful when it covers a specific need of the user like providing step-by-step instructions to solve a problem.
Types of content: discount or promotion, tutorials, DIY projects, instructions, worksheets, contests, questions, polls etc.
How to Apply It?
Example of a mind-map with labels.
The way I use the Head, Heart and Hand Model in my content planning is pretty straight-forward. I take one topic to promote and try to generate as many keywords, associations or concrete ideas as possible and apply the Head, Heart or Hand labels. This serves two purposes: it boots my creativity to look at one topic from 3 different perspectives and it makes sure I diversify what type of content to publish.
The process can be summarised in 3 simple steps:
Mind-map
It’s good to write down the one topic we’re focusing on in the middle of a piece of paper (or in the middle of the workspace, if we’re doing it online) and write down keywords, associations, ideas or even drawings that represent the topic. Organise your connections as you go, creating a tree-like structure creating hierarchy between “main” and “minor” ideas.
Apply Head, Heart, Hand labels
Assign the label by drawing them or drawing a sign that represents them next to each idea. Visualisation is important to check the balance of our ideas (how many “hearts”? how many “heads”?) and potentially to inspire new connections. Lacking ideas in one of the labels? This is your chance to look at the problem from a different perspective!
Refine and Implement
It’s possible that the great ideas will not come immediately. If that’s the case, leave your mind map and come back to it after a few hours or days. To really challenge yourself and boost your creativity you can also set a minimum number of ideas you have to come up with before you can be done. At this stage no idea is silly and can potentially spark something awesome when you least expect it.
When you feel you’re done, it’s time to choose the right social media channels, transfer your ideas to a publication calendar and start publishing them!
Who is this method for?
This model might be an overkill for most of the everyday activities, but when we’re faced with a big project or a complicated issue it can really come in handy. I can also see it beneficial if you’re lacking the time to produce a lot of various original content for your social media and you want to utilise what you already have, but in different content types. I believe creativity is not something innate and can be trained and encouraged through different tools, like the method above. Let me know if it works for you!
What are your trusted ways to generate ideas for social media content? Do you trust your intuition or is your process more structured? Let me know!