Creating Original Content and Finding Inspiration

It’s Time to Be Different.

This is always a large topic at our creative agency, Kworq: How can we differentiate ourselves from other creative agencies? What type of content can we create for ourselves that sets us apart from our competition? Creating content for ourselves is much different than working with a client. When we work with a client we are able to look at their brand from a new angle. We are able to clearly focus on the goals we want to accomplish, what story we want to tell, how to tell that story, and ultimately craft a unique experience for that brand and their audience. When it comes to creating content for ourselves – it’s inherently different. Our audience is brands. Brands across a variety of industries, products, and specialties. So how can we create content that doesn’t turn them away and ultimately brings in new business?

The Answer: Research, Trial and Error, and Always Trying New Things.

So here we are. We are approaching our social differently. Thinking of our content differently.

First, we started thinking about the content we consume at our office. Slacking each other things we thought were funny, types of videos that work best on certain social platforms, and evaluating our current social posts and videos.  Then we talked. We talked about what frustrated us about the current content landscape. What type of content were we getting too much of, what intrigued us, and what we thought would be fun. Then we began creating.

We began creating with a focus on being different. Being different means not covering the topics everyone else is covering – or it means covering those topics differently. It means thinking of what excites, intrigues, and brings joy to our audience. It meant not thinking of how we could cover the news differently, but what could we cover or focus on that others we’re not. Thinking this way has not only helped us grow our Instagram following from 200 – 7,000 followers in the recent months, but has also lead us to have a better understanding of the social landscape and how we can approach future projects with clients.

If you learn anything from this blog post it should be that while many others are flourishing in the content space, there is still room for others as long as they’re willing take chances.

So what are some fun things we are doing to be different and grow our social following?

Aligning with Bizarre Holidays.

Everyday is some strange holiday and that intrigued us. If that intrigued us, we figured that might intrigue others too. And it has. We’ve aligned with this trend in a multitude of ways –  posting illustrations on Instagram, videos to Facebook, and created Instagram Stories that align with those days.

The illustrations on Instagram have performed very well, but our shining moment came when we posted two videos on aligning with these bizarre holidays on Facebook.

Embrace Your Geekness Day

Junk Food Day

Without doing anything different than creating content that we thought would be fun and interesting, we garnered over 900% more video views than any of our previous videos shared on Facebook. This was a staggering difference and extremely insightful for us.

We Our Finding Our Voice. and in Doing So, We Are Posting Videos of Ourselves.

Recently the Mannequin Challenge has been all the rage. The mannequin challenge are videos of people standing very still like mannequins. Not everyone in the office knew of the trend when we first started discussing it. This sparked our interest in those who didn’t know about it – leading us to create our first: In The Office Video for Instagram. Giving our followers a different take on the trend and a view into who we are as a company culture in a very “The Office” type style.

By shifting our focus from doing an actual mannequin challenge, we now have set ourselves up to continue exploring the personalities in our office and finding unique ways to relate those videos to what is going on in the world around us.

Creating a Conversation between Our Instagram Posts and Our Instagram Stories.

Ya. That’s right. We recently did a post on How to Use Instagram Stories for Business. In this post we covered different tactics you can use for  your Instagram Stories, but we did not mention using Instagram Stories as a way to connect your posts to your stories.

Yesterday was “Clean Out Your Refrigerator day” so we posted this illustration on our Instagram:

We then followed up this post with a video to our Instagram Story:

Posting this video to our story was a way of connecting our post to the culture in our office. We see more engagement when we connect our stories to our posts as it is a way to continue the story and share more with our audience.

So What Can Be Learned from All of This?

That content inspiration can come from anywhere. Analyzing the current content landscape is important, but it is also important to ask yourself: would you be engaged by the content you’re sharing? To be original you simply cannot be like the rest.  So while following best practices across social platforms is important, you should not let that hinder your creativity and originality.

We’re doing some weird stuff. And we are really enjoying it. Think like your audience and you will find a way to connect with them.

We would love to hear how your brand, company, or you personally are approaching content! Send us an email at hello@kworq.com to share your story or stop by our website to find out more about our Creative Agency based in NYC.