Look Into Bottlenose

Bottlenose provides live social intelligence for you by analyzing activity across all of the major social networks. It allows you to “surf the stream” and discover what’s trending in social media in real time. Bottlenose displays trending content in various formats. Using Bottlenose allows you to create content that is engaging with what’s trending in social media in real time.

Write a Blog Post From Customer Questions

Your customers come to you with questions because they see you as a knowledgeable resource. It’s very likely there are others out there who have the same questions. The questions you receive (in person, and via phone and email) are a great starting point for a blog post.

TweetChats

TweetChats are regularly scheduled events where people from all over the world get together to have a conversation over Twitter about a certain topic. Basically, it’s an updated version of chat rooms, conducted over Twitter.

Read Blogs in Your Industry for Ideas

Not advocating ripping off other people’s ideas nor copying material from another site, instead, use these ideas and add your own commentary on the subject. Take the topic and discuss whether you agree or disagree and why.

Quora Questions

Quora is an amazing Q&A site that features questions with answers containing facts, opinions and humorous stories that are voted on by Quora members. Further, Quora’s content license allows the following: “you can reuse all new content on Quora by publishing it anywhere on the web, as long as you link back to the original content on Quora.”  Quora search will suggest several topics available based on your search.

Examine Topsy

Another social search tool, Topsy, allows you to search across various social channels. Topsy provides a sleek interface and provides you great control to filter your results. Use Topsy Search to find social media content for your topic. Topsy search results can be filtered and you can create recurring alerts for yourself.

Comment on Popular Blogs

The most popular blogs in your specific areas of expertise probably get hundreds of comments per post. Because of the volume, the authors don’t have time to respond directly to all of these comments and questions. This is a golden opportunity for you. First, reply directly in the comment thread and provide a helpful response to the commenter’s question. Second, take the question from the comment and your answer and create a blog post with that content. Use the comments you leave on industry blogs as a starting point for your own blog content.