One of the main components in your overall social media marketing plan is your content strategy. What are you going to post on your social sites? Do you have a plan in place or do you “wing it”? Visiting your Facebook page once a week and talking about your fabulous product is not a smart content strategy, and will probably not give you the reach and results you want.
So get serious about creating a content strategy for your small business and then consistently update your sites. The following 6 tips will help:
1: Share Value instead of Pushing Products
People don’t want to be bombarded with overly promotional posts. Think about what you click on most when using Facebook – is it all of the Ads? Or would you rather click on posts that offer value?
A simple formula for a balance in your content is the 80-20 rule-of-thumb:
80% of the content you post (which can be yours and other people’s) is helpful, educational or inspirational.
20% of your content is promotional – where you are talking about your products/service, your business or sales/offers.
2: Keep up with Current Trends in Your Industry
Become a trusted resource for information that helps your target audience in some way (or inspires them).
Monitor the online world for topics, keywords, questions, and/or brand mentions that your ideal client would pay attention to.
Set up tools like Google Alerts or TalkWalker Alerts with keywords that apply to your industry.
Follow industry leaders/influencers on Twitter (add them to a Private List for stealth-mode monitoring) to see what topics they are talking about and sharing with their community.
Or simply ask your current customers or community what they want to see more of on your social media sites or blog.
3: Schedule (lots of) Time for Content Creation
Creating new content is a time-consuming process, and if you can’t outsource some of the work, then you’ve got to be diligent about setting aside time for content creation.
Some people find it works best to spend time every day on content creation, or maybe you can spend half a day on creating new content for the next week and knock it all out at once.
The important point is to consistently schedule time for content creation, and realize that it’s a major part of your social media plan.
Schedule time for content creation instead of just haphazardly posting stuff.
Stick to your schedule and once you’ve built up a collection of content, then you’ll be able to go back and re-purpose or update the older content to make it new again.
Or you can dig a little deeper on topics you’ve previously used in blog posts or videos and add new content with further discussion.
4: Determine (ahead of time) What Types of Content to Create and Share
It can help to think of 3 buckets of content that you’ll pull from when creating a content calendar:
(1) Your Original Content – which should be helpful, educational, customer-focused, problem-solving, human-interest or inspirational. Examples can include:
- Blog posts
- Reports or White Papers
- eBooks
- Videos
- Infographics
- Photos/Graphics
- Email Newsletter, eCourse
(2) Other people’s content – information about your industry, related industries, current or local events/news, customer interests/topics, human-interest or inspirational stories. Use some tools to set up a content curation system to easily find and share good content.
- Industry news
- Influencers’ blog posts, videos, Infographics, etc.
- User-generated content: including current customers or your target audience (with unique hashtags)
(3) Promotional content – where you explain why your product/service is the best for your target audience, offer unique deals or freebies to your ideal prospect, build social authority with testimonials from happy customers and share your brand story. A few ideas:
- Product/Service demonstrations
- Testimonials
- Sales or Discounts, Special Offers
- Free Giveaways or Samples
5: Create Your Content with A Plan to Re-Purpose It
Make sure that every piece of content you create can be turned into another form of content. For example:
- Each blog post is used to create a short video or SlideShare presentation at a later date.
- For each blog post, create 2-3 short tips from the content that can be used as Tweets or in Graphics.
- If you’re blogging once a week, take a quarter’s worth of posts (12 weeks) and compile them into an eBook, Whitepaper or video series.
And don’t forget to share your original content more than once. Create some content that will be relevant several months from now (known as Evergreen content), and re-post it on your social sites for new followers or people who didn’t see it the first time around.
6: Pay Attention to What’s Working (and What Isn’t)
Make sure you keep track of reach, interaction, lead generation, etc. on your social sites so you can determine which types of content your online community responds to and shares.
It’s also important to notice what content doesn’t work on your sites: if you’re spending hours creating Infographics, but your Facebook Fans respond better to short informal videos…then adjust your strategy accordingly.
Most major sites have built-in systems (Facebook’s Page Insights, Pinterest’s Analytics Dashboard, Twitter Analytics) to help you monitor your content’s reach and engagement. Or you can use Google Analytics or an all-in-one social media dashboard to track your posts.
Take stock of this data at least once a quarter to determine what adjustments should be made to your content strategy.
Use these tips to put an effective content strategy in place today!
Need some extra help with your content strategy? Let’s talk! We offer a free, 15-minute consultation to offer tips on small business content strategy and planning, and help determine if your business and our social media services are a good fit.
Contact us today by email, and put “Free Consultation” in the subject line. We’ll get back to you within 24 hours.
[Updated 6/5/18]
About Terry League