Ask any social media manager out there what their number one challenge is, and I assure you about 90% will say “coming up with content.”
Think about it: for one of my clients alone, I generate 7 Facebook posts per week, 21 tweets, and 3 Instagrams. I also do a monthly newsletter. That’s a lot of content to come up with. Specifically, 360 Facebook posts, 1080 Tweets, and 156 Instagram images per year.
It doesn’t sound like a lot when you say you post every day, but coming up with that much original content on a monthly basis is challenging.
Of course I have systems in place. I use Hootsuite’s RSS reader to subscribe to blogs that publish content I know my readers will like, and I curate that content. That’s relatively simple to do for Twitter, a bit more complicated for Facebook (but still doable), but not really possible for Instagram.
Instagram needs to be original content if possible. I don’t like downloading and using other people’s images for legal reasons, and sometimes it’s hard to find the original source to give credit.
So I use graphics generation tools like Canva, Adobe Spark, and Pablo by Buffer quite a bit.
But I’ve just discovered a new graphics tool that has made my life as a social media manager so much easier. It’s called Promo Republic, and I use it as a Hootsuite add-on.
You log into it via the “publish” tab on Hootsuite, and once you’re there, you’ll find a ton of content ideas. They are creating new content every day, but there’s a library full of stuff as well. You just search for key words based on your business or topic, and you’ll find a ton of content. There are specific content ideas for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (complete with hashtags), as well as more general stuff. There are contest ideas–all of which can be branded with your logo.
I get people sending me new tools and asking me to review them all the time. Most of them are not worth the time of day. But this tool has really made my life easier. I’m not stuck with coming up with ideas, and then taking half and hour or so each to execute them (in the case of building an Instagram graphic). I just scroll through, find stuff I like, and schedule it through Hootsuite. It’s been a huge time-saver.
Promo Republic is a freemium app, which means you can use it for free up to a certain point. The pro version of the app is $10/month.
They also have a great little Facebook Page assessment tool that you might want to try out.
