What is a Post Inspiration List?

No matter your industry and no matter which social platforms you’re using for your organization, the day will come when you sign in on your business account, stare at the empty post box and realize you have no fresh inspiration for what you should post. This is when you should pull out your unique post inspiration list. And what if you don’t have one? What if you’re not sure what that is? It’s time to learn. Take just one day away from posting on your social media and instead, put that time into developing your first post inspiration list.

Just as it sounds, a post inspiration list is created when you sit down and come up with a list (preferably at least 20 items long) of post ideas and inspirations. To be clear, these should not be single posts such as “Our muffins are delivered fresh-baked every morning,” but rather a more general inspiration from which many posts can come, such as, “List or link to one of our local producers and talk about their methods and which of our foods or ingredients they supply.” See how the first example is a single post while the second could be used over and over to generate quite a bit of content over time?

Taking time to create your organization’s list can also lead to some great thematic and serial posts that become weekly favorites for your followers. It’s a great way to get your fans to come to your page instead of just browsing their newsfeed. And you know what happens when your fans come to your page to find content, the social platform starts streaming more of your content directly to them in the future.

Five good inspirations from a list for a bakery/cafe might include:

• “Mixing Bowl Mondays” – a weekly baking technique or tip posted every Monday
• Posts and links to stories about our community service projects
• Photos of the weekly special
• Food and drink pairing posts
• “Farm-to-table Fridays” – posts on Fridays about our fresh local ingredients

Out of the list above, all work well for a bakery/cafe, but notice too, that “Posts and links to stories about our community service projects” would likely be a great item on almost any company’s inspiration list. You can also imagine how “photos of the weekly special” would be relevant across a number of different industries and nearly universal when tweaked according to your company’s specific trade. Post inspiration lists will serve you well on the one-off days you just can’t seem to think of anything new to post, but will also serve you very well if you make the transition to scheduling your posts ahead of time and need to sit down for an hour to “post” for an entire week.

Why not call together several of the inspired members of your staff and spend 20 minutes bouncing ideas off each other? You’ll probably find that coming up with at least 15 ideas out of the group won’t be too difficult. Working solo? Not really the creative type yourself? Come to one of our Social Media for Small Business seminars where one of the resources you walk away with is your organizations new unique post inspiration list.

As for us here at Mustard Seed Social, we always look forward to inspiring you.