In order to maintain an active social profile, you need to have something to share with your audience on a consistent basis. However, you don’t want to over-promote your own content, so it’s best to use different sources to mix up your social media updates.
If are struggling to find content to share on your social media accounts, here are 8 different ways you can easily find content for your social media updates.
1. RSS Feeds
One of my go-to sources of finding content to share on social media is RSS feeds. RSS often stands for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary.”
It’s just a standardized web feed format for blogs, news, video and more. These feeds are instantly updated when new content is added.
Almost all blogs have an RSS feed. It’s typically found at URLs like https://bulk.ly/feed and will look like this:
Ugh, what does all that mean?
Luckily, there are services and tools called RSS Readers that allow you to add feed URLs to them. These services, then display the data in an easy to read format. The RSS Reader I use is Feedly.
Simply add the RSS feed of sites you wish to source content from and your Feedly account will pull in all the posts from your feeds into one place.
Once you have a good 20-40 feed URLs loaded up into your RSS Reader, you can quickly skim the posts from your favorite sites. After you find something worth sharing, you can schedule it with your favorite social scheduling tool.
2. BuzzSumo
A great alternative to RSS Readers is to use Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo has an awesome content search feature that allows you to search by a keyword phrase to return the top shared content for that phrase.
The first thing you will need to do is enter your keyword phrase. Next, select the date range – typically, I like to use the past week in order to get the newest content. Finally, you have the option to select a certain content type.
Once your results are returned, you can sort the results based on the number of shares for a particular network.
For example, if I was looking for something to share on Twitter, I would sort to show the content with the most social shares knowing that these pieces of content seem to resonate well with Twitter.
Buzzsumo is free, but shows limited results. However, if you have an AHREFS account this same functionality (Content Explorer) is available there as part of your subscription.
You can easily spend 5 minutes or so running a handful of searches to find fresh, relevant content to share on your favorite social media channels.
3. Medium
If you are not too familiar with Medium, it is a website that describes themselves as “a community of readers and writers offering unique perspectives on ideas large and small.”
I like to describe it as a gold-mine for well written perspectives on many topics.
One such topic is social media.
When you search on Medium, you will be shown the “Top” posts by default. This gives you results that are generating the most views/buzz.
You can click on the “Latest” link to see the most recently added posts.
Skimming through the results on either link will give you some great options to share with your audience. But don’t just rely on the top and latest posts. To the right of your search results you will see related tags generated for your search. Be sure to try clicking on a few of the more relevant tags in order to find additional content.
Medium does contain a mix of posts that are exclusively published on their platform as well as posts that are republished from other blogs.
If you want to be sure to mix up your links in your social media updates, be sure to click through to the original post from Medium when you can. Then be sure to use that URL in your social media update so not all of your updates link to Medium’s website.
4. Quotes
Whether you are a fan of using quotes or not for social media updates, there’s no denying that they generate engagement.
The easiest thing to do is find a site that serves up various quotes. From there you can find one that catches your eye and is relevant to your audience.
With quotes you have a few options.
- Use the quote text as your social media update
Or take a few minutes and use a tool like Canva to:
- Create an eye catching image showcasing the quote
If you are really pressed for time (or just lazy – ahem, I mean efficient)…
- You can “borrow” images that someone else has already created
No matter which route you go, did you know that tweets with images generate 35% more retweets?
I don’t know about you, but it makes sense to spend a few minutes creating an image to share.
5. Slideshare
Bet you didn’t think of using Slideshare to find your next social media update?
On Slideshare, you can find a presentation for just about anything.
If you can’t, then there is probably a good opportunity to create one to fill the gap.
To easily find a presentation to share on your social media accounts search for your topic. Depending on your results you may want to change the date range to show the most recent.
Depending on your audience it could make sense to look at Slideshare’s homepage for top, featured, or trending presentations.
One cool thing about sharing a Slideshare presentation on Twitter is that the presentation gets embedded inside of Twitter. This means that your followers can click through the slides directly on Twitter.
6. YouTube
I’m sure you all know that YouTube is the second largest search engine which makes it a perfect place to source some content to share on your social accounts. So jump on over to YouTube and run a few searches for your desired topics.
On the results page, you will probably need to change the date to show more recent videos. You don’t want to get caught sharing out of date and inaccurate content on your social accounts.
Ideally you will want to watch the videos before sharing to make sure it’s worth sharing. It’s better to waste some of your own time on a crappy video instead of potentially hundreds or thousands of your followers wasting theirs.
Similar to how Slideshare works on Twitter, YouTube videos get embedded directly within Twitter.
7. Infographics
There’s definitely no shortage of killer infographics worth sharing on your social media accounts. These infographics not only mix up what you would typically be sharing on your accounts, but since they are images you will be increasing the engagement on your accounts by using them.
When you need to quickly find an infographic or two to share, you will want to look for sites that aggregate or curate new infographics everyday.
A few sites to look at are:
Of course, you will want to try to find an infographic that your audience can relate to if possible. However, don’t be discouraged from sharing an off-the-wall infographic to stir up some engagement.
8. Social Search
Why waste time trying to figure out what to post when someone has already done the work for you?
Perhaps the easiest, no-nonsense tactic to find something to share on your social media accounts is to see what others are sharing successfully. For example, you can use Twitter search to do this.
Simply go to Twitter search and run a search for the topic you are interested in.
To get the most active content, you can stay on the “top” tweets page. If you aren’t having luck there, click on over to the “live” tab.
In either case, you will want to look for tweets that are generating lots of retweets and likes. Sure, you could just retweet from the search results, but we’re going to need to update other accounts besides Twitter.
What you will need to do is click on the URL listed in the tweet and use that URL and blog title to share in your updates for each of your social accounts. In the end, it will look like you came across the content and weren’t piggy-backing on someone else’s hard work. Don’t worry I won’t tell anyone, your secret is safe with me.
Scheduling Your Social Media Updates
After you have found a nice collection of items to share, all that is left is adding them to your favorite social media scheduling software. I typically use Buffer, but there are other options to choose from as well.
Add the content to your queue and set the times and days you wish for them to be posted.
Depending on how many posts you publish per day for each social media account, using the methods above you can find quite a bit of content to share in 30 minutes or less.
What are your favorite ways to find content to share on your social media accounts? Let me know in the comments below.