📝🖱️How to come up with post ideas in your notes

If you’re trying to grow an audience or presence on something like Twitter or LinkedIn, you need to be active. But even when you block off time, sitting down to come up with post ideas feels forced and artificial.

I’ll go over a couple of methods that will make it easy to come up with social media post ideas, whether it’s for you or your business.

Both of these methods hinge upon the idea that you need to collect ideas as they come to you. This is much more efficient than trying to sit down and come up with them. The problem is that we are bad at remembering things, so the fantastic post idea might leave our minds even a few minutes after it enters it.

At the end I'll also go over some tips that make writing posts substantially easier.

Method 1: use a pinned note

My preferred way of saving ideas is to have them in pinned notes. Right now I'm trying to get in the habit of posting on LinkedIn every day. So I created a note titled "LinkedIn Posts" and pinned it to my left hand sidebar.

Now whenever I have an idea, I just go into the note and add it to the list. When I'm ready to schedule my LinkedIn post for the week, I have a list for me ready to go.

Sometimes I'll start by putting the idea in my daily note and then we'll move it to the pinned note later on. This works especially well when I'm recording ideas via voice notes.

Method 2: use a tag

In some ways this method is simpler because everything stays in your daily note. You don't have to organize it and do a separate dedicated note.

When you have an idea, in your daily note just write something like this:

When you're ready to schedule your posts, just click on that tag and you will have a list of post ideas you've collected.

The downside is that it's a bit harder to sift through the notes that contain the tag. I like to have a clean list within my dedicated note that I can write and redraft posts in.

💡 Some tips

1. Capture an idea AS SOON AS YOU HAVE IT!

This is very important. No matter how simple or brilliant the idea is, don't assume you'll remember it. An hour or even five minutes later. Capture it as quickly as you can. Usually the fastest way to do this is just to record a quick voice note.

2. Capture the essence of the idea, not the full post

If you pressure yourself to immediately draft out the fully polished post, you'll find that you subconsciously stop collecting ideas as quickly or as many of them. Scribble some notes down that just capture the idea of the post. You can do the writing later.

3. Use AI to edit

One of the nice things about drafting posts in your notes is you can use AI to format and edit them. At the very least have it fix the spelling and grammar for you. It can also improve your arguments, find examples for you or even find counter arguments you hadn't thought of.

If you use a consistent format or tone of voice for your posts, you can even save a custom prompt that will write them for you.

4. Save other posts and media to share

Don't just save the text idea. If you see an interesting article, a news event, or even someone else's post that you want to share, save that as well. You can add links and graphics into both of the above methods.