Rebecca Bredholt leads the Vocus Marketing Consultants, our team of experts who help Vocus customers grow their businesses.
A lot of the business owners we talk to break into a cold sweat when faced with the blank page.
Whether they need to create a 400 word blog post or a 140-character Tweet, they’d rather face an appointment at the DMV than be responsible for coming up with original content. The fear of creating original posts to share on social media is not limited to business-to-business marketing, and many business-to-consumer marketers also leave it as the last item on their “to do” list.
When we ask entrepreneurs how their social media posts are going, you can literally hear the vowel sounds reverberating: “Oooh, yeaaa, that.”
Maybe it’s because they are all thinking about the endless possibilities of things they could tweet, post, or publish. When we explain that they don’t have to pull from the entire universe of ideas, they seem relieved.
“Well then what do I talk about?” they ask.
We love this question. The answer to “content block” has two parts. Our reply: “What did you do a) today (this limits you to 24 hours of ideas) that b) your target audience would find interesting, humorous or entertaining?”
That’s it. The hardest part for these business owners is to realize their two-hour meeting about logistics could be interesting.
One client was telling us about how much weight one of their shipping containers could hold. He explained the answer in tons of water. This sounded impressive, but when we searched “how much an elephant weighs”, we discovered that one of his 20-foot shipping containers could hold a full grown male elephant. Now that’s a funny tweet.
Another client sells hot dogs at a small venue in Virginia. They had reached panic levels with social media posting.
We couldn’t help but ask about their other menu item: sausage. Yes, here comes the joke about how nobody wants to know how the sausage gets made. Oh to the contrary! Food blogs, Instagram accounts and Tweets from chefs have never been so popular. They should really tell us about where their locally sourced food comes from; they should take us along on the journey. Farm to table has never been so entertaining.
In summary, when faced with the blinking cursor, business owners and marketers should fear not.That meeting, office tour, or client call taught them something. They just need to think about their target audience and then share it.
If it’s really in the moment, post it to Twitter. If there’s a clever photo, try Facebook or Instagram. And if there’s a real business lesson in there, share it on LinkedIn, where so many other business owners probably felt like they were sitting through the same logistics meeting.
Need more help creating content? Join our Content Unleashed webinar with Rohit Bhargava here!