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Social Media Brainstorming: How to Unlock Ideation for Brand Growth
Brainstorming is a powerful concept. It represents diverse, creative minds coming together to generate new ideas. However, businesses often underestimate its value.
Social media brainstorming may be overlooked because it's typically managed internally by already busy team members. This oversight can result in missed opportunities for innovative social media strategies that effectively resonate with the target audience.
Sure, you have new tools and technologies at your disposal, but how does the real magic happen? The answer is quite simple: through social media brainstorming. This process uncovers valuable knowledge and insights for effective social media strategies.
As such, today, we'll be exploring the concept of social media brainstorming, its importance and various techniques. This will help you create fresh content and reshape your online presence. So, let’s get right into it with the 101.
What is social media brainstorming?
Social media brainstorming is a collaborative and creative process conducted by your brand's specialized in-house professionals. This team-driven approach generates ideas, strategies and solutions tailored to your brand's social media campaigns, content and engagement.
It combines traditional brainstorming techniques, such as mind mapping and rapid ideation, with social media platforms' unique aspects and requirements, focusing on internal team collaboration to promote innovative thinking. However, consider involving relevant social media users’ insights to inform the ideas that your in-house professionals come up with to enhance the process.
Goals of social media brainstorming
Brands know that if they meet the needs and preferences of their audience, they can turn them into customers and recurring customers, too. With the goals of fostering social media growth and engaging with target audiences, these are the common objectives that ought to drive social media brainstorming strategies:
1. Creating interesting content that engages the audience
You can spark more meaningful interactions with your followers by exploring newer, trending content formats (like reels, shorts or memes) and interactive elements (like polls). This engagement boosts visibility and also increases the likelihood of content being shared, thereby expanding reach and impact.
2. Fostering creativity and collaboration within the internal team
Social media brainstorming energizes your internal team by fostering a culture of creativity and collaboration. This approach encourages team members to share diverse ideas and perspectives, leading to innovative solutions and a more cohesive team. Such collaborations can translate into more effective and creative social media marketing strategies.
3. Planning a content calendar
Strategic content calendar planning is vital to maintain a consistent and impactful online presence. Through brainstorming, your team can plan and schedule social media posts in a way that aligns with your brand’s goals, audience preferences and key marketing dates. This organized approach ensures a balanced variety of content and helps maintain a regular posting schedule that keeps the audience engaged.
4. Finding new ways to repurpose and distribute content
Brainstorming sessions can also focus on discovering new ways to repurpose existing content across various platforms. For example, you can translate an e-book in a detailed YouTube video or make reels that highlight the key takeaways of a webinar. This strategy maximizes the value of content and enhances reach across different audience segments. By repurposing and redistributing content, brands can reinforce their message and ensure it resonates across all social media channels and demographics.
5. Collecting customer insights
Brands engage in social media brainstorming to understand audience preferences. It could be about product features, design elements or their opinions on industry trends and brand initiatives. This information can help you tailor your offerings and marketing strategies to meet customer needs better and enhance satisfaction. Take Starbucks, for example. It often uses X polls to gauge its audience's preferences. And to make sure that it gets deeper insights, its replies adopt a more personal tone similar to a barista's interaction with customers.
6. Generating relevant content ideas
We know how challenging it sometimes gets to generate fresh social media ideas. But why not directly ask the audience? Brands often tap into their audiences' diverse perspectives and creativity to create fresh, appealing content. This brings in a range of content that resonates with customers. Lego, for instance, often invites ideas for new sets from its fans — some of which have been turned into actual products — showing a direct correlation between social media audience brainstorming to product development.
Now that you understand the motivation behind social media brainstorming, lets understand its techniques.
10 effective techniques for social media brainstorming
Brainstorming for your company's social media shouldn't be a challenging process or fade participants' motivation. Here are a few techniques you may follow to brainstorm for social media:
1. Conduct figuring storming sessions
Figuring storming involves brainstorming from someone else's perspective, like a CEO or a celebrity. It's a unique way to gain new insights and overcome repetitive thinking. This technique is useful for bringing fresh perspectives to the table, particularly in repetitive projects.
Tip to ace this technique: Conduct interactive sessions in-house or through surveys on your social media platforms, inviting followers to step into roles and share their viewpoints. This approach brings a variety of perspectives, enriching your social media content strategy.
2. Plan starbursting exercises
Starbursting focuses on generating questions rather than direct solutions. It uses the 5W1H approach (who, what, where, when, why and how) to explore every aspect of a project or problem. This method helps thoroughly understand the topic and ensures no critical elements are overlooked in the planning process.
Tip to ace this technique: Roll out a question template in your company and also post it on your social channels. Encourage participants to respond with their insights. Collect and analyze these responses to better understand your audience's needs and preferences and incorporate it into your internal team’s line of questioning.
3. Create mood-boarding moments
In the mood-boarding technique, you create a visual collage encompassing themes, images and keywords related to your brand. This collage is a tangible and visual way to stimulate creative ideas and concepts for social media content.
It's particularly useful for a new product launch, where a mood board could include potential color schemes, lifestyle images, relevant hashtags and inspirational quotes, all aligning with the product's branding.
Tip to ace this technique: Use platforms like Pinterest or Instagram to share mood boards. Engage with contributions and consider incorporating these ideas into your internal brainstorming and social media strategy.
4. Evaluate top-performing posts for audience insights
Another effective way to go about social media brainstorming is to look at older content that landed well with audiences. It helps you ascertain what you got right and how you went about the idea’s execution for a social media win. By understanding this, you can figure out what resonates with your audience, incorporate common elements and replicate the tone, style or subject matter into future content for continued success.
Tip to ace this technique: Review your brand's top-performing posts as a group. Use a social media analytics platform to check top-performing content across platforms and understand what resonates with your audience. This input can inform your future content creation.
5. Review competitors
When you study your competitor's social media content, analyze their strategies for insights into what is successful in your industry. This will help you identify gaps in your strategy and innovation opportunities. For instance, if a competitor's interactive Q&A sessions on Instagram drive high engagement, consider how your business can implement a similar approach in its own unique way.
Tip to ace this technique: Encourage your team to collect insights about competitors' content that they find appealing. Use this feedback to identify gaps in your strategy and innovation.
You may also use professional competitive benchmarking software for such exercises. These platforms can help you analyze which content performs well for your competitors and identify the social media trends they are leveraging. The latest of such software uses AI-powered listening tools to track your competitors across multiple social channels and social profiles.
Note 💡: Social media brainstorming shouldn't be limited to collaborating only within your team. We are looking for ideas, right? So why not involve your brand’s followers, ask them directly to know what clicks and use that info to inform your internal brainstorming? Let's look at a few techniques that use audience insights to aid brainstorming.
6. Leverage user-generated content (UGC)
Invite your audience to create content based on a specific theme or challenge. This will help you to creatively engage with your social media brand community and generate diverse ideas and perspectives through the insights that they provide. User-generated content (UGC) challenges can range from photo contests to storytelling and can significantly boost engagement and brand loyalty.
Tip to ace this technique: Use a unique, branded hashtag for your UGC challenge to make it easy to find and share entries. Highlight and reward the best submissions to motivate the audience to participate. Consider Dove’s #DetoxYourFeed campaign as an example.
This campaign tackled the complex issue of beauty stereotypes in social media, an area ripe for discussion but challenging to address.
The campaign's success lies in its ability to prompt users to share personal experiences, fostering a sense of community and collective empowerment. This approach demonstrates the power of social media brainstorming in creating campaigns that resonate on a deeper level with the audience — going beyond conventional advertising to initiate meaningful conversations.
What do we learn from this campaign?
When brainstorming for your next campaign, consider how you can tap into societal issues and the personal experiences of your audience. Look for ways to foster deeper engagement and not just superficial interactions. Encouraging user-generated content can be powerful in informing your team’s brainstorming, building community and promoting a cause.
7. Deploy interactive polls and surveys
Use polls and surveys on social media platforms, like Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, to engage with your audience and then brainstorm internally with the findings. These tools allow you to gauge your customer preferences, opinions and ideas in real time. Polls can cover new product features, campaign themes or service improvements, offering a direct line to customer feedback and engagement.
Tip to ace this technique: Craft your polls to be fun and engaging and possibly tie them to rewards or to-be-released exclusive content. This encourages more participation, giving you a broader range of insights.
8. Host live Q&A sessions
Live Q&A sessions, especially on platforms like Facebook Live, YouTube Live or Instagram Live, offer an interactive way to brainstorm with your audience. It's an opportunity for real-time engagement, where followers can ask you questions, suggest ideas or give feedback directly to your brand's representatives.
Tip to ace this technique: Promote your live sessions beforehand and prepare some topics or questions to spark conversations. Keep the tone informal and welcoming to encourage audience participation.
9. Crowdsource new ideas through story features
Utilize the “Stories" feature on platforms like Instagram or Snapchat to ask your followers to send ideas or vote on options via direct messages or quick reaction features. This method helps collect quick feedback so your team can brainstorm content ideas quickly.
Tip to ace this technique: Make your story visually appealing and engaging. Use stickers, polls and question features creatively to encourage audience interaction.
10. Keep an inspiration folder
Create a shared space where your in-house professionals and social media community can contribute to an "Inspiration Folder." This could be a collaborative album or board where team members and followers can post content that inspires them. It should collect and organize various creative materials that spark inspiration, such as images, articles, social media posts, thought leadership pieces or any other content that resonates or elicits fresh ideas. This will be a solid resource for times when creativity runs low, providing a treasure trove of thoughts to jumpstart the brainstorming process.
Tip to ace this technique: Regularly invite your in-house team and social media followers to contribute to this shared inspiration folder. This can be facilitated through regular prompts or creative challenges, making the process engaging and dynamic.
How to create fresh content by brainstorming ideas for social media
Now that you have figured out how to come up with fresh ideas for social media content, here are the ways to bring those ideas to life.
1. Utilize your consumer and brand insights
Your brand can use an AI-powered consumer and brand intelligence marketing platform that provides timely audience insights, such as popular hashtags and trending phrases specific to your industry. These platforms use real-time social listening and monitoring to analyze customer conversations, gauge sentiment and clearly understand your audience's desires. With this data, your internal brainstorming will be more current and efficient.
Using this technology not only ensures a steady stream of actionable findings and fresh content ideas but also gives you a first-mover advantage over competitors, keeping your content relevant and engaging. It's something you can do on your own but with AI tools, it becomes much easier and more effective.
Must Read: 9 Best AI Tools for Social Media Content Creation (+ Examples)
2. Repurpose other content types on social media
Utilize an AI-powered marketing platform to breathe new life into older content while supporting techniques like mood boarding and figuring storming. These platforms help transform your existing content, such as blog posts, long-form articles and whitepapers, into digestible summaries with quick insights and actionable recommendations.
This strategy drives more social media traffic by presenting highly relevant content to your audience and linking to the original, full versions. It also ensures a continuous stream of fresh ideas, effectively enhancing your content creation pipeline.
You can also repurpose existing content by implementing mood-boarding and brainstorming techniques. How? By diving deep into visual inspiration, exploring different perspectives and experimenting with creative elements.
Learn More: How to optimize social media content with generative AI the right way
3. Use generative AI for campaign ideas
By integrating AI with creative human input, you optimize outcomes as you’re complementing the human-driven findings of a starbursting exercise with an AI-led 5W1H analysis as well. This way, you can systematically examine the various aspects of each idea, including the target audience (who), content (what), platforms (where), timing (when), objectives (why) and execution methods (how). This comprehensive human-AI analysis helps uncover deeper insights and better brainstorming opportunities, leading to more effective and innovative campaign strategies.
Such enhancements provide a more integrated view of how AI and strategic brainstorming methods can dynamically improve social media content creation and campaign planning.
On that note, GenAI-powered content marketing platforms can accelerate your planning and brainstorming processes by analyzing extensive amounts of online data. Although they can't replace the human touch, with the right prompts, these platforms can produce numerous innovative campaign ideas. They also offer insights on effective campaign execution, ensuring better ROI.
Must Read: AI in social media: 10 ways to use AI in social media strategy
Final thoughts
For those who have read this far, the question may arise: why engage in social media brainstorming when new AI tools are readily available? While these emerging technologies are truly impressive, they should supplement your own creative ideas. AI can generate ideas based on existing internet data. For truly original content, it’s essential for social media experts to brainstorm among themselves while leveraging AI’s magic.
Engaging in team brainstorming not only yields unique ideas but also fosters unity among team members. Collaborating on ideas, executing them together and then witnessing your team succeed can significantly strengthen your organization (internally) and social media presence (externally). That's where Sprinklr Social comes in. It's a platform designed for social media teams who appreciate the power of collaboration and wish to enhance it with AI’s time-saving capabilities.
Its comprehensive content ideation and listening capabilities, extensive channel coverage, enterprise-grade configurability and industry-leading AI go a long way in clearing out that storm in the brain for effective social media strategies. From content scheduling to automation to AI generation, everything's packed in this platform.
If you’re keen to see if it meets your requirements, book a free demo. Want to check it out for yourself?
Frequently Asked Questions
Social media brainstorming is a strategic process that’s used to generate innovative and engaging content ideas that are informed by social media user data. This approach is essential to creating a dynamic and impactful online presence. It helps brands stay relevant with trending topics, fosters audience engagement and drives brand awareness in a highly competitive digital landscape.
Social media brainstorming differs from traditional social media strategies' emphasis on collaborative and creative thinking. Unlike conventional methods that may rely more on data-driven tactics or established marketing formulas, social media brainstorming prioritizes innovative, out-of-the-box thinking. It encourages businesses to explore unconventional ideas, experiment with new content formats and respond rapidly to emerging trends, thus fostering more dynamic and personalized engagement with audiences.
Businesses can integrate social media brainstorming into their marketing efforts by allocating regular brainstorming sessions to idea generation through collaboration with social media users. This can be incorporated into the marketing calendar, ensuring that time is set aside for the team to innovate. Integrating insights from market research, customer feedback and data analytics into the brainstorming sessions can align your creative efforts with business objectives. Encouraging diverse participation across different departments can also enrich the brainstorming process with varied perspectives.
To brainstorm effectively for social media content, define clear objectives and understand your target audience. Encourage open communication and a judgment-free environment where all team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas. Utilize techniques like mind mapping, rapid ideation or the 5W1H approach to stimulate creativity. Leverage social listening tools to understand current trends and audience interests. Regularly review and adapt your brainstorming approach based on past performance and feedback to enhance the effectiveness of your content strategy.