Go through customer questions, reviews and sales conversations and pull out pillar topics and post ideas.
Customers hand a business a steady supply of post ideas, and most of it is lost without anyone noticing. A parent wants to know if the cake can handle a car ride to Jurong. A client checks whether revisions come with the package. A shopper asks if a blouse is available in a longer length. Each one gets a single private reply in a chat, and nobody looks at it again.
Treat each of those questions as a post waiting to be made. The wording came from the buyer, so you don't have to guess how buyers talk, and other people with the same doubt are scrolling past your page right now. Whatever someone asks before buying is what the next buyer also wants to know. If a post starts with the question phrased the customer's way, the person who has been wondering about it sees their own question on the screen.
Learners from the Content and copywriting course already made a voice-of-customer file, a collection of customers' own words, in lesson 1.4, "Build your voice-of-customer file". No source of social content in a business is richer, so open it first if you have one.
Then go to your customer chats, on WhatsApp or wherever you take orders, and scroll back three months. Write down each question exactly as it was typed. Resist polishing it into marketing language, since the unpolished wording is what a buyer would search for and recognise.
Mei Ling sells cakes and takes her orders through chats. Going back through them, she found one question turning up again and again in slightly different forms: "how many days in advance do I need to order". She made a video answering it. "Will it melt if the party is outdoors" turned into a second video. "Can you do a cake that looks like a specific cartoon character" became a short explainer covering which designs she can and cannot copy, and her reasons.
Your own inbox is the obvious place. Reviews, the comments under competitors' posts, and group chats or community pages are three more, and few businesses bother with them.
Read your reviews wherever they sit: Google Maps, Shopee, Carousell or the platform you sell on. They tell you what pleased people and what let them down. Where customers praise something, show more of it. Three-star reviews deserve a close read, because they often reveal the worries people had before buying.
Competitors' comment sections cost nothing to read and show what the buyers you share with them want to know. If people keep asking a rival bakery whether it delivers to the west, your own buyers are wondering the same thing.
A Facebook group for your estate, a parents' group and similar pages show problems people discuss before they have decided to buy anything at all. Leave names and other personal details out of whatever you note down from them.
Some of your strongest material is behind the scenes: the process, the mistakes, the tools and the everyday details of how you work, which you take for granted and viewers have never seen. Most owners assume the finished product is the most interesting thing they could post, and viewers frequently don't agree. A finished cake is pleasant to look at, but people stay to the end of a clip where a cake gets stacked, levelled and piped, with one small disaster along the way.
Priya runs a tuition centre. She could film herself marking a worksheet and explain what each red pen note means, which no parent has seen from the inside. Farah sells modest workwear from a studio in Geylang. She could show why she adds length to the sleeves on a pattern, or what happens when a fabric shrinks in its first wash.
Give mistakes their own place on your list. The cake that collapsed in the oven in lesson 1.1 worked as content because viewers saw an actual problem and an actual fix. People trust a business that is honest about its process more than one that only posts the flawless result.
Your opinions count as well. In any field there is standard advice the owner partly disagrees with. A baker might find that the fashion for very tall cakes makes them awkward to cut and serve at a party. A tuition teacher might believe drilling past papers too early does more harm than good. A financial adviser might think people look at their investments far too often. Saying what you think and walking through your reasons gives viewers something competitors aren't offering, and lets them see how you think. Stick to opinions your own experience can support, and be polite about anyone who sees it differently. Opinion posts are meant to be useful and recognisable, and starting arguments pulls against both aims.
When your notes reach roughly twenty questions and comments, lay them all out together and look for ones that repeat. A cake seller might end up with one pile about timing and booking, one about what can be made (eggless, gluten-free, a particular design), and one of stories about parties and children.
A pile that keeps getting bigger as you add items is a pillar candidate, a group of related questions or comments that could become a content pillar. Expect uneven piles, some crowded and some holding a single item, which is normal at this point. Choosing which piles become pillars comes later, in lesson 2.4, "Write your pillars and twenty post ideas". For now your only job is collecting.
Your activity: gather twenty real questions or comments from your messages, reviews or competitors' posts, keep each one in its original wording, and sort them into the themes they fall into.
Collect twenty real customer questions or comments from your messages, reviews or competitor posts. Group them into themes.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).