Time is money. And finding good content takes time. So how do you maximize your productivity by finding great content without spending a lot of time?
The good news is there’s a lot of shortcuts!
1. Follow Topics in Google News
Google News serves up the latest interesting news about any kind of topic you can think of, so it’s the perfect place to grab shareable content.
Google News brings all of the relevant stories to your fingertips when you are composing a message to your social channels.
Just type in a keyword or phrase that relates to content you want to find and you’ll have a stream of articles right at your fingertips. You can also follow the topics to create a personalized feed of stories to tweet and share.
Covering news on your social media profiles is a great way to get noticed. In marketing this tactic is referred to as newsjacking. This strategy can be truly effective to help your brand become part of the dialogue by adding your perspective on the issue via social media.
With social media, newsjacking has become so much more simple as there’s no longer the need to work through the media to participate in the conversation. Where you would have had to compete with other companies to hopefully be an expert source or commentator, you can now simply publish your own response. Your content can have an instant impact on connecting with your target audience as the news is happening.
It can be dangerous for your company’s reputation though. To avoid your organization being a newsjacking fail (or worse yet, disaster), as a team, you will want to get very clear on what areas are suitable for newsjacking. You may choose to focus only on pop culture or positive current events versus controversial or tragic news items.
2. Set up Your Feedly Account
Feedly is an AI-driven aggregator that curates content based on your subscriptions, preferences, and settings.
Feedly AI is also integrated into its “Newsletters” section to filter out any noise and surface the most valuable content for you.
Feedly comes with lots of more features allowing you to save articles for later reading (and sharing), add notes, and hide stories you are not interested in.
As an alternative, Colorlib lists some plugins allowing you to create custom aggregated feeds to monitor right within your WordPress site.
3. Keep an Eye on X Trends
If there’s one thing that remains true about Twitter X is that it keeps you well-informed about trending topics on a daily basis.
Do you want to find trending content that you can write about and share through your own channels? X Trends is the way to go.
4. Monitor Hashtag Search for Retweets
Some of the best content has already been created, and that’s ok. Regularly search Twitter for hashtags related to your industry and even search phrases. You’ll have no shortage of content to be able to retweet to share with your audience.
Plus, you get extra karma points with the person who originated the content, since they’ll see that you retweeted it and they are a lot more likely to start retweeting and sharing your content. BrandMentions offers a freemium hashtag tracker which is quite efficient.
5. Monitor TikTok Trends
TikTok has been the first to break any trend lately. It isn’t good for any business but in some categories, it is an invaluable tool to spot what is trending.
TikTok helpfully offers a trend tracker that you can filter by category. Open it any time you need to find some popular topics to create content about.
6. Use Buzzsumo to Track Reddit
Reddit is where all the interesting conversations are happening these days. You can also scan through the conversations to find some cool quotes for your social media updates.
I have been looking for a tool to monitor Reddit effectively and ended up using Buzzsumo Alerts which can be set up to monitor just about anything, including Reddit. To set an alert up:
- Create a domain filter: reddit.com – This will force the tool to only monitor Reddit
- Type your keywords (use OR operator for the tool to alert you when any of those keywords are mentioned in a Reddit threat)
Here’s an example of Reddit monitoring for keywords “chatGPT” OR “openai”
7. Use Your Own Content
Nothing should be used for one purpose. I’m sure most of you send out some kind of email newsletter once a week, and you probably upload images into it.
This is a perfect example of having 2 ways to use the content beyond just emailing it. The first is in the newsletter itself. You can share that across your social channels to get additional eyeballs.
You can take each image that you used in your newsletter, and share it in its own right on your social channels. Visual content gets more clicks than text, so you get the added bonus of additional retweets and shares by doing this. WP Beginner explains how to set up a newsletter.
To save time, repurposing your content into social media updates, use ChatGPT prompts:
- Create an engaging Instagram caption for me to promote my article [TEXT].
- This is my article [TEXT]. Create a value-adding tweet for me to promote it on social media. Use list format, and add relevant emoji for each list item.
- Turn my article [TEXT] into a Twitter thread
- Create an engaging Facebook and LinkedIn post that would provoke a discussion based on my article [TEXT]
For multi-channel content marketing, make sure to use digital business card solutions like Linktree or Beacons.ai. Linklab describes how those tools work and which one to choose based on your business and goals.
Great Content Can Come From A Variety of Places
Whether you’re using a search function like Google News, syndicating blog articles with an RSS feed, using social channels like TikTok or Twitter to find relevant topics, and repurposing content on a daily basis, you’ll be saving time and finding great content to share in the blink of an eye.
Take a stab at the different ways mentioned above and start maximizing your productivity so you’ll have time for other elements to focus on in the workplace:
- Use Google News to find newsworthy topics to share on social media. Following topics creates a personalized news feed for easy content discovery.
- Use aggregators like Feedly to curate content tailored to your interests. The AI integration helps surface valuable content and filter out noise.
- Monitor trending hashtags and topics on Twitter to find shareable content. Retweeting and engaging boosts your reach and fosters connections.
- TikTok’s trending topic tracker helps spot emerging trends, especially for certain niches (where your target audience includes younger generations). Create content about popular topics.
- Repurpose your own content across channels. Turn newsletters, blog posts and images into social updates. Use ChatGPT for prompts to rewrite content.
About the Author
Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com as well as the founder of ViralContentBee.com. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for more than a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon.
