Listen Up Busy Marketers - How to Turn Your Online Activity into Content

• Your social adventures are relevant to your target audience
• They will position you as a thought leader in your industry
• They serve your brand message
• They can help you expand your visibility and social reach
• They are in line with your overall content marketing strategy

With these significant criteria in mind, super-busy and socially hyper active marketers can never run out of content ideas. Don’t you love that thought?

I vividly recall a wonderful concept that Jay Bear calls “Opportunity Economy”. As the name implies, it means thinking of creative ways to turn any social situation (even negative ones!) into an opportunity for your business.

There are 2 proven ways to apply this revolutionary concept to turn socialization into “content opportunity”.

1. Answer Private Questions Publicly!

If your customer/prospect emailed you a really good question, you may feel tempted to take the easy route of answering them via email reply. Why not blog about it instead?

When you answer a question in a blog post, make sure to credit the sender by thanking him/her for taking the time to raise a very intelligent question that inspired you to write a blog post to share valuable insights with your readers.

Then, again make a public notification to them via Twitter @mention. Here’ s an example of good Thank-you tweet:

@AskerTwitterName Thanks, Your great question inspired a great blog post .

Think of all the visibility and credibility rewards you will reap by answering private questions publicly versus sending an email reply!

Needless to say, this tip is not limited to emails; you can apply it with people who give you interesting questions/insights in networking events or any offline social setting.

So far.. so good! How about online socialization?

2. Turn Your Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Q&A/Blog Interactions to Content…

There are so many ways to turn your social media conversations into great content. Here are just few examples.

How Can You Turn Facebook Questions Into Content?

In a previous article, I detailed why I am in love with Facebook questions! They have the micro-blogging, commenting and surveying capacities beautifully bundled together. On top of that, unlike anonymous surveys, Facebook questions allow you to find out who answered what!

So, if you raised an interesting Facebook question that generated a good buzz, you can blog about it and detail all of the above.

On the one hand, participants will appreciate the visibility you give them. On the other hand, blogging about the question can be particularly useful if the majority voted in favor of your brand message.

For example, let’s say you have created a social media automation tool that saves people lots of time and you raised a question on what people find most challenging about social media. If most of the participants agreed that time is a major issue, then blogging about this question will serve your product a great deal; the same way you would use third party stats to back up your value proposition.

As a nice variation to this idea, you can create a monthly blog post of the top 10 Facebook questions you created and/or participated in.

Twitter Twitter Twitter!

Twitter is loaded with awesome features that you can easily blog about. For instance, last year I blogged about excellent business blogging tips I learned from a Twitter chat and featured the participants tweets.

Moreover, In 2010, we hosted a Twitter interview and blogged about it.

You may even blog about an interesting conversation you had with one Twitter friend, why you chose specific people for #FollowFriday and the list goes on and on and on…

Oh yeah, with Twitter the fun never ends!

How Can LinkedIn/Q&A Sites/Your Blog Inspire Great Content

You can turn your social activity in all these places into great content in so many ways:

• Blog about a question you raised and feature peoples’ answers
• Create a list blog post on some of the questions you answered on LinkedIn and/or Q&A sites based on certain topic or time frame
• Add a Q&A category in your blog where people can raise questions in the comments so that you answer them in subsequent blog posts
• Write a blog post about your absolute favorite blog comments and what makes them so special