Social media content: How to never run out

I often discuss the numerous benefits of consistently producing and posting valuable, original and engaging content on your website and your social media profiles, but it’s worth covering them again. From a technical point of view, posting lots of new content will mean that the search engines crawl and index your website more often, and crawl frequency has always been an important metric because it indicates that your website is trying to offer users value through updated content. More importantly however, consistently updating your social profiles or websites with fresh content allows more opportunity to engage with their users, and in turn build reputation and raise brand awareness. However, one thing that I don’t often cover is how social media marketers or online brands can ensure that they always have content ready. In this blog, I’d like to write about several strategies that online brands can use to ensure they can easily manage and maintain their social media profiles.

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1. Create an editorial calendar

Perhaps the first thing that a business needs to decide for their editorial calendar is how far ahead they want to plan. Smaller businesses may wish to produce a detailed month-to-month calendar, but other businesses with quarterly marketing plans may wish to produce a three-month calendar. Larger businesses may wish to produce an annual calendar if they are looking for a ‘bigger picture’ strategy.

Elements of the calendar:

• Date – This is fairly self-explanatory. I have listed the date, then underneath I have expanded that to include morning, afternoon and evening. It may be enough to simply include the date, but I have spoken before about how timing can dramatically alter how effective a social media post is in spreading. It may even be worth including an extra column to include a retweet depending on how detailed you want your social media campaign to be.
• Type of Content – I have split this into several categories including opinion pieces, industry news, company news, tutorials, visual media, tips & tricks, contests, company blog and 3rd party articles. You don’t have to use these types of content, but this column should be filled with the type of content you are planning to share on your social media profiles.
• Source Link – In this column, you would include a link to the source of the content you have written. If the content is hosted on your original website, then you would link to that and if you are sharing a 3rd party article, then you should also link to that.
• Facebook – These columns are constructed out of the various social media channels that a company might want to use during their campaign. I have only used Facebook as an example, but for larger scale campaigns LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus and other social networks might also be included. The boxes in this column would be filled with copy you are also sharing when you make the post.
• Creative Assets – This column is included so the person creating the social post know if they need to include any kind of creative asset, such as an image or a graph. It might be that someone has created a brilliant infographic, and this column will serve as a reminder that the post needs to focus on the content of the infographic.

2. Don’t just share ‘What’s Hot’ content –

If you operate in a particularly competitive industry, the chances are that if there is a piece of highly significant industry news, it will be covered by hundreds of other social media outlets. If you also cover this breaking news, the post that you share is unlikely to standout in the plethora of similar posts. While it is necessary to cover these events in some cases, it is also worth posting content that you have written in the past that is still significant and linkworthy. This is more likely to stand out in the various social feeds, and it also means that people are more likely to interact with it.

3. How to find linkworthy content ideas –

Consistently coming up with unique and valuable content ideas is perhaps the most difficult aspect of updating your social media profiles. However, there are a few basic strategies you can use that might help you overcome any writer’s block you might be experiencing. The best tactic I find is to read other industry related blogs, and find out what they are covering. It’s important when doing this that you don’t simply repeat what others have already said, but be inventive, and come up with your own angle and arguments. Tools such as Google Trends can also be leveraged to target topics that are currently getting a lot of coverage, but again, it is down to the author’s imagination about how they integrate these topics into their content. These are just a few tactics that businesses can use to maintain and manage their social media profiles more efficiently, but there are many others that experienced social media marketers can use depending on the scale of the campaign they are managing. If you wish to speak to any of Click Consult’s social media marketing, feel free to comment or contact us via our website.