Creating and maintaining a successful blog isn’t as easy at it looks. Take the Buffer Blog as an example, one of the most widely recognised social media marketing blogs out there. Its co-founder Leo Widrich claims to have written 350 articles in a nine-month period, hitting three or four articles per day before they found and established a successful audience. Groove HQ, another SaaS tool famous for their blogging efforts, report how their startup nearly died before they found their blogging niche.

The answer for Groove was to stop producing articles on questions they liked and start producing blogposts that answered questions their audiences were already asking. 

This strategy can work for almost anyone: find the questions your audience need answering and then use this as the fuel for your content marketing efforts. There are a ton of ways to do this, from speaking to your customers to searching on forum sites such as Reddit and Quora.

But you want to know a quick way that’s accessible to everyone right now? Twitter.

The truth is, we all turn to Twitter in times of frustration or when we have questions that need to be answered quickly. It’s a great ideas bank for generating blogpost ideas and using keywords to measure the success of the articles you write, by how often your target audience are searching for them.

For example, if your business specialises in marketing this is already a fairly saturated market for content. How do you know what marketing articles or topics your audience are really interested in reading? Rather than assuming, why not use Twitter to find out.

Using Twitter Search to Find Questions your Audience are Asking

Here’s where a simple Twitter search comes in handy.

For example, if you enter marketing recommend ? you’ll find tweets like this:

Find marketing blog topics using Twitter

From this you could write a blogpost on:

  • Top 10 Online Social Media Marketing Courses
  • How To Source a Social Media Online Course
  • 5 Things To Look For From a Social Media Online Course

Another search might be marketing help ? which would turn up insightful questions such as:

Marketing blogpost topics

If your company has email marketing expertise, you could write an article on:

  • Everything You Need To Get Started on Email Marketing
  • 5 Common Questions on Email Marketing
  • Email Marketing for Small Businesses: What You Need To Know

The more searches you make, the more you’ll uncover patterns and trends which lend themselves to your industry. When you begin to spot patterns you have validation that your topic idea is a good one and that people will read it once written. You’ve also already curated the perfect list of contacts who you can reach out to once written, with their tweets showing that your article will add value and not just become noise.

Choosing the Appropriate Twitter Search Keywords

The same approach can be applied to any industry; electronics, SaaS, public figures, beauty, fashion. All you need is the right combination of keywords and you open a portal to the true questions your audience are asking.

The key with Twitter advanced search is to think of the questions your audience may ask and use a small selection of keywords to narrow in on the appropriate results.

The search query marketing ? would create far too wide a pool of results. These will be generic articles and will rarely show user questions. Phrases and keywords taken from speech will help you to cut out the curated content and generic link sharing. Words such as ‘help’, ‘please’, ‘recommend’, ‘can anyone’ and so on are much more likely to turn up personal questions where users are looking for answers.

The balance is using enough search terms to make your Twitter search valuable, but not too many that you risk forfeiting any results at all.

A great guide to go by is keyword + speech phrase + question mark operator. For example: beauty recommend ?

Recommend Twitter Search phrase

Perhaps you help small retailers build ecommerce sites, specialising in platforms such as Shopify and Wix. In this instance, you could search shopify can anyone ?

Ecommerce Twitter search results

From this simple search you could create a series of blogposts or support articles that answer real user questions. If a potential customer is turning to Twitter to ask for help, you can assume they’ve already looked for the answer online and have been unsuccessful. If no one else is answering the topics your audience need support with, then why shouldn’t you?

Using Twitter Search to Find Niche Blogging Areas

Of course all of the above topics are great, but to really stand out you may need to target long-tail keywords around super specific topic areas. If everyone is writing on SEO already, you need to find the exact pain points within deeper levels of SEO and help answer them. ‘How to do SEO’ must have been written a thousand times over but ‘How to audit and improve back links for your school’s website SEO’ is incredibly niche and will prove popular within a group of targeted, relevant users.

Using the same approach as discussed already you can easily target long-tail terms. The more keywords you add to your Twitter search, the more specific the topics you’ll uncover. Searching for questions around the keyword photography would be great for blog ideas but searching photography camera can anyone ? will narrow in on questions related to cameras. Add a brand name such as photography canon camera can anyone ? and you get even more specific, allowing you to show off your expertise in a niche area.

Twitter search long-tail blog terms

Saving Your Twitter Searches

Finding the right Twitter searches to uncover promising blog topics can be a case of trial and error. So once you’ve found them you’ll want to keep track. One of the easiest ways to do this is by saving them in Twilert! Our tool takes your keyword combinations, saves them and keeps searching Twitter for matching tweets, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. As soon as a tweet matches your search – bingo! You get an email digest to add to the ideas bank, or to tweet a relevant article to.

Sign up for your free trial at www.twilert.com and begin tracking your next successful blog topics today.