Now that you have found (or created) content to share with your target audience, you need to develop a system for delivering that content. Consistency is important to get the results you want, so take steps early on to get a system in place that will help you organize and schedule content for your social media program. Here are a few tips:
Organize
Can your content be grouped into different categories? For example: we share content that gives our readers news and tips on different social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. So we organize the content we create (or find) into platform-specific categories.
If you share great content from other online sources, you may want to keep track of the article/web links (especially with “evergreen” content that you can share again at a later date). We use Evernote to organize the links for interesting content we find online. With the type of content we share, we create notebooks on Evernote for “Facebook Tips”, “Twitter Tips”, etc that save the links in our categories. Then when we want to share the links later today (or next week or next month) we have a handy list of sources for “Twitter Tips”.
Schedule
As part of your content strategy, decide how often you will share content. **If you are just starting your social media program, begin with 1 -2 platforms** Each social media platform is different but as a general rule of thumb we recommend:
Blog: at least once per week
Facebook Page: 1 -2 posts per day
Twitter: 6 – 12 tweets per day
LinkedIn: 2 status updates per day; group interactions – at least once per week
YouTube: at least 1 video per week
Once you’ve determined the frequency of your updates, create a content calendar (weekly, monthly…whatever best suits your business). Set up your blog posting schedule and decide how many posts a week you will create. Choosing specific days to post to your blog each week will create consistency both for your readers and you. If you are sharing content from other sources, then decide how many articles, links, quotes, etc you will be sharing each week.
If you are just starting out on 1 – 2 social media platforms, you should be able to post/update directly on each platform and remain on top of things. When you expand your social media program and try to consistently maintain additional platforms, you may want to use a dashboard-type program to help you automate certain activities or monitor everything from one place. There are many different options that allow you to schedule posts, reply to followers and monitor activity on each platform: a few are – TweetDeck, Hootsuite, Sendible, Buffer, SocialOomph. Research each tool and take advantage of free trial offers to test them out to find out which one works best for you.
Analyze Engagement
As you start creating or sharing content in your social media program, you will learn which types of content offer the best engagement with your audience.
You can use Facebook Insights on your Fan Page or Google Analytics to view the number of visitors, number of impressions and more. Whatever analytics tools you use, just remember that the point of collecting those statistics is to help you make adjustments in your content strategy. For example, if your audience responds better to your blog posts than content from other sources, then you may want to start creating more blog posts.
Consistently delivering valuable content to your audience is crucial to your social media program’s success. By using the tips mentioned here to organize and schedule content for your social media program, you will develop a system and stay consistent.
About Terry League