Over the last two years, I’ve had the good fortune to work with more than 20 organizations in helping them either develop their social media strategy, help them get smarter about online marketing, or assist them in developing social content.

That last one’s the most difficult. As I’ve discovered, it’s not so easy to come up with content that piques customers’ discerning interests day after day. You can theorize all you want—when you’re on the hook to get it done, it’s hard. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you.

There is a method to this madness—at least when it comes to brainstorming and identifying those topics and issues that your customers care about.

Because Thursday is Social Media Day, I want to share a list of approaches that I’ve taken to help brainstorm and generate social content with my clients and partners.

1. Scan Twitter hashtags and search terms within your industry regularly. See what issues are bubbling to the top and write about those.

2. Scan Twitter lists within your industry. Find out what these key influencers and folks are talking about, and consider weighing in with on those topics. Don’t forget to feature their tweets prominently in your post.

3. Develop a list of 10 to 20 key blogs in your industry, put them in a blog reader, and sift through them once a week. Find out what these people are discussing, and offer a contrarian viewpoint. Again, make sure you link back to the original post to which you refer.

4. Scan LinkedIn Answers for common questions that are popping up on the platform. Better yet, take one of those questions that’s generating a decent amount of responses, and build a blog post around it using the question and answers in your post (with links back to anyone who might have a blog).

5. Search Quora for questions that are emerging in your industry. Take a look at the answers to see if you agree. If not, build a post around your answer.

6. Aggregate and curate. Review the blogs you follow. Find five to 10 posts on one key topic, and create your own post, with links to the original articles.

7. Review session topics at upcoming industry events and conferences. You might also monitor Twitter and other social networks for people who are talking about these sessions after the event. That will give you a pretty good indication about which topics are hotter than others.

8. Read articles in industry publications and news sites. See if there’s any big-picture issues you could comment on in a blog post or video post. You’re looking for a topic you feel strongly about—something you can opine about.

Others to add?

A version of this story first appeared on Arik Hanson’s blog Communications Conversations.

(Image via)