Social Media Content: Quality > Quantity

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It’s well known that driving traffic, leads and revenue can simply boil down to the social media content your brand deploys to the digital world. But, only if it’s good content.

And, as with most things in life, quality trumps quantity and more isn’t always better.

Posting social media content simply for the sake of posting will likely be a waste of energy and can actually do more harm than good, especially to your search engine optimization (SEO) results. Google favors content that’s rich in quality and penalizes any information that doesn’t add value or is replicated across the digital world.

To ensure the quality of your social media content on your brand channels, take action with these 6 easy steps:

Step 1: Align Social Media Content with your Brand’s Purpose and Overall Business Objectives

All of your content should ladder up to your brands overall objective. Before outlining what should make up your content, your brand needs to be clear about your overarching business goals. Is it selling a product, driving awareness or encouraging sign-ups? Knowing these things will help you hone in on the right strategies and tactics, choose the right channels to reach your audience, disseminate your information and garner the desired user action. It will also help your brand keep sight of the bigger picture and not get caught up with tactical executions and ideas.

Step 2: Establish Starts, Stops and Keeps

Before getting started, it always helps to step back and take an assessment of what’s working, what’s not working and why from each channel. This will help your community manager know what content resonates with each audience, which dictates exactly what and how they will deploy information on each channel.

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This chart is for illustrative purposes only

Step 3: Determine What your Content Pillars Are

Content pillars, content buckets or conversation columns – whatever you want to call them – will serve as the foundation for all of your content marketing efforts. These content pillars are larger buckets of information on a specific topic or theme that can be broken down into many different assets.

For example: If “INSPIRATION” is one of your brands content pillars, content focused on motivating your audience can be broken down into many different forms for blog posts, Instagram visuals, Pinterest pins, Twitter polls, Facebook carousel ads, video and gifs, influencer sharing, and so much more.

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This chart is for illustrative purposes only

Bottom line: Content pillars should always, I repeat always, mirror what your brand stands for and what your audience values.

Step 4: Outline your Editorial Calendar

An easy way to make these content pillars come to life is a detailed editorial calendar or a monthly timeline that maps out all content for each channel. This also gives the community manager some organization and peace of mind when planning ahead and executing a community’s content.

When fleshing out this content, following best practices for content creation is a must. For example: linking to other posts within your content, preferably back to valuable information on your brand’s websites or other authoritative sites with quality content, will significantly improve your SEO rankings.

Step 5: Implement a Healthy Content Cadence

Cadence in social media refers to how frequently a brand posts. Implementing a posting rhythm is important to show your followers that you are indeed present and want to connect with them. A balanced cadence encourages higher engagement, stronger connection and brand loyalty. On the flipside, it’s important not to bombard your audience too much as a consumer can get sick of a brand name or product pushing — the exact opposite of what we are going for.

There isn’t any law in social media that outlines the right cadence formula. It depends more so on the channel you’re using and the audience you’re reaching. There are a couple rules of thumb that you can lean on: 1-2 blog posts per week, 5 – 7 tweets per day, 3 – 5 Instagram posts per week; but the best way to find your groove is to do trial and error and review your social analytics to confirm your optimal frequency. You’ll know your ideal cadence when engagement is maximized and drop-offs are minimized.

Here’s a cheat sheet we’ve used for a client in the past. You can mirror this and tweak as necessary for your brand’s channel strategy.

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Step 6: Prioritize your Channels

We’re not trying to blast the exact same content in the exact same format on every single social channel. I know that “share” button or syndicate options on Facebook are a tease, but don’t let them tempt you. Content should absolutely be optimized for each, individual channel. Posts on Instagram don’t necessarily work on Twitter and your news fiends who get their fix on Twitter may not value your professionally-shot, beautiful photography shared from Instagram.

That’s where channel prioritization comes into play. It’s important to pin point your brands primary, secondary and tertiary channels so you know where to put your time, effort, money and resources. How do you determine which channels should be your primary mediums, you ask?

It’s all about your people:

  • Who is your audience?
  • Where do they live in the world of social media?
  • How do they like to consume their information?Carrie 6

 

Remember, it’s not enough to just create quality, engaging content. Social media is always evolving and your audience is too. Being consistent with content production and measuring content effectiveness is just as important to keeping your brand relevant and visible to your audience.

So, let’s review.

If you implement the following steps to create content that’s valuable to your audience, you’ll see much more return from your valued fans:

  1. Outline your brand’s main objective(s).
  2. Assess your channels to see what’s working and what isn’t working.
  3. Implement content pillars that reflect your brands main focus areas.
  4. Outline a monthly editorial calendar that maps out content for each channel that ladders up to the main content pillars and overall business objectives.
  5. Determine an efficient cadence to deploy brand content on each channel.
  6. Prioritize your channels to maximize dollars and resources.

Having trouble implementing a strong content strategy for your brand? Contact us today to chat!



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