With the hundreds, if not thousands, of blog posts that are written each hour, how can you ensure that yours is going to be relevant, topical and interesting?

The beauty of social media is that all the information you need, to come up with an idea for a post, is at your fingertips. With a bit of research it’s relatively easy to find trending topics in your industry and, if you’re quick enough, hopefully capitalise on some quality traffic as well as being helpful to the community as a whole.

Step 1: Choose a Social Network

There are many social networks out there, from the popular ones such as Facebook or Twitter, to the Niche sites such as Tip’d for the financial minded, or Dzone for the technical amongst us. It’s important to choose a network that suits your industry. I work in search and social media so my first port of call is going to be (insert groan here for over-talked about social network of the year) Twitter.

Step 2: Investigate Trending Topics

Twitter gives out their API  so there are a number of second party sites you can use to monitor trending topics, but to keep things simple I’m just going to use Twitter’s search site.

A quick look here and we see a list of last week’s trending topics (I’ve chosen last weeks as they give a better range of relevant topics to choose from. If there were no relevant topics you could look elsewhere for ideas):

Looking at these trending topics I’ll ask myself if there are any that relate to search that I can potentially write about?

There’s the obvious “Social Media” but that may be a bit broad. “Twilight” has nothing to do with search and I wasn’t a massive fan of the movie, so I think I’ll leave that one alone as well. A quick look into what the “Internet March” is reveals a competition called “Internet March Mahem e-Tournament”. It’s basically a tournament to find the ultimate web celebrity or site and people on Twitter can vote by posting the following Tweet with the name of whoever they’re voting for:

There’s potential there for a story, but I’ll just check if there’s anything else.

“#sesny” is a search conference happening in the States, so again there’s potential there. Following this hashtag could reveal some interesting topics or ideas and a post could stem from there. This could take time though, so that’s an idea that I’ll put on the back burner depending on how my morning pans out.

The only other topic on there that has potential that I can see is the “Fail Whale” – the dreaded whale that pops up on Twitter when it’s overcapacity. Given that Twitter is becoming increasingly popular at present, with conversations increasingly occurring around it on the TV and radio, there’s potential here for a post on how Twitter will handle the escalating usage of its service. What measures should Twitter put in place and the impact the increasing appearance of the Fail Whale could have on its climbing popularity. Possible heading – “Is Twitter Doomed to Become an Epic Fail (Whale)”.

Step 3: Research, Write and Post

From here you do any necessary research into the topic. There’s a lot of information on how Facebook and Twitter usage has increased around on the Internet which would be interesting to source, and it could also be tied into the talks that are occurring about Google allegedly trying to acquire Twitter.

This is just one avenue to determine trending topics and conversations and ensure your blog post is relevant and on topic. There are obviously hundreds of other social networks with handy tag clouds and trending topics lists, all of which can be used depending on your industry and who your audience is.

P.S.

The main factor to remember when writing the blog post is that it’s interesting and adds value to the reader. Ensure the topic you choose to write about is one that you enjoy yourself. There’s nothing more painful than reading an unenthusiastic and dry blog post that adds no value.

Follow me on Twitter: @kate_reuvers