There are times when we all run out of content ideas.

I’ve been in this situation many times myself — feeling unsure about what content to create and share.

However, after much trial and error, I’ve managed to find a few solutions to help keep a constant stream of content ideas flowing. These strategies help me uncover the types of social media content that our audience loves to engage with and share.

And in this post, you’ll learn about six ways to discover the content your audience craves.

Let’s dive in.

How to Discover and Create Content That Your Audience Craves
How to Discover and Create Content That Your Audience Craves

1. Use your analytics

One of the best ways to find out what your audience likes (or what works for you) is to use your analytics.

Your social media analytics can tell you what’s working and what’s not.

What you’ll want to do is to study your top-performing posts and re-create them. Here’s how to find your top posts with the native analytics in Facebook, Instagram, and more.

Facebook

One way to find your top-performing Facebook posts is to go to your Page Insights > Posts and manually look for posts with high reach or engagement.

Facebook Insights top posts
Facebook Insights top posts

A shortcut is to use the Pages to Watch feature in the “Overview” tab. When you click on your own Page, Facebook will show you your top posts for the week.

Instagram

To get the analytics for Instagram, you’ll need to have a business account. (Here’s how to convert to a business account if you wish to.)

In your business account, tap on the analytics icon on your profile. Then, tap on “See more” under the “Posts” section. Here, you’ll see your top posts sorted by impressions. You can also sort it by engagement, reach, and more, and adjust the time period.

Instagram Insights top posts
Instagram Insights top posts

You can also find your top posts on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest using the respective native analytics.

Buffer customers

If you are using our Pro or Business plan, you can easily find this information in your Buffer dashboard. Go to your Analytics tab and then Posts report. Then, click on “Most Popular” to see your most-engaged posts.

Buffer analytics top posts

You can also sort your top posts by Likes, clicks, comments, and more. If you are on the new Business plan, you can also use the Overview report to find your top posts.

Once you’ve found your top posts, try to find a pattern among them. Here are some questions you could ask yourself:

  • Is there a common topic among them?
  • Is the content from a particular source — your blog or other publications?
  • Does a particular content type — text, image, or video — perform consistently better?
  • Did people leave any interesting comments on those posts?

2. Ask your audience

The second strategy is to ask your audience.

You could simply post a question or a poll on your social media profiles. For example, “What content do you want to see us sharing?”

If you would like open-ended replies, posting a question will be great. If you have a rough sense of what your audience might be interested in, you could create a poll and list a few options. For example, a while back, we created a Twitter poll to ask our followers what sort of content they would like to see more of from us.

Buffer Poll: What sort of content would you like to see more of from the Buffer Blog?

A few people also replied the tweet to give us more suggestions.

Twitter poll replies
Twitter poll replies

As Facebook and Instagram (Stories) only allow two options for polls, my favorite way around it is to do a manual emoji poll.

Facebook emoji poll

Alternatively, you could email your blog subscribers and ask them what they would like to see from you. For example, at the end of 2017, we reached out to our blog subscribers with a survey. In the survey, we asked them what topics they enjoy the most and what topics they would like to see more from us.

Blog survey
Blog survey

From the answer, we learned about what to create for the blog and also what to share on our social media.

3. Learn from your industry peers

The third strategy is to learn from your industry peers.

Look at the top pages in your industry and see…