Social media savvy businesses and marketers are coming around to the fact that content is an invaluable asset to their brand.
Whereas digital entrepreneurs have realized this for years (one recent example includes Arianna Huffington… to the tune of 315 million) businesses are just catching up to this fact now.
Just some reasons a continued stream of fresh content published to your brand’s owned social channels is valuable (side note: don’t just blindly give your content away to someone else’s platforms without a strategy):
- More content means more hooks in the water for search engines. Further, with the engines placing a continued emphasis on social and personalization, fresh content to win the tail is becoming essential as we’re all seeing different SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
- Google’s recent update continues to de-emphasize content farms (big, impersonal sites which aggregate as much low-value, horizontal content on the cheap as they can). This marks a continued encouragement for experts in their industry to answer search demand with authority and be given priority in results. If your business doesn’t do this, competitors or even media entities can and will usurp your brand’s position as a thought leader in search and social.
- Without consistent, useful and sharable content published to the central hub of your social media efforts, you do not position your brand to grow a core community. No one wants to opt-in to communities that aren’t kept fresh.
- Well-optimized content (for both search engines and social channels) has an extremely long, perhaps indefinite shelf life. We have seen a single piece of content attract a steady stream of organic traffic, leads and media attention for years. Likely if you are publishing to the web you have too, at least somewhat. Now what if you had 5 pieces of content like this? 10? 20? When each piece of content published can be considered its own marketing funnel for your brand why stop expanding this?
- Content published to a social channel your brand owns, like a blog, produces immediate feedback from a community and very actionable analytics, letting you take a data-driven, iterative approach to your efforts. When you can shift any communications off “gut feel” to one with stronger marketing accountability, you can more easily make a case to increase budget and trend results up methodically.
So likely you’re on board with the fact that content is an asset, and you should be producing it with frequency, following a strategy. The next step is, of course being efficient with content creation in order to get maximum impact from your efforts.
Today, we thought we’d share a few simple ways to be more efficient with content:
1. Get modular with content
Don’t just publish a white paper. Don’t simply publish a presentation to SlideShare. That’s acting tactically and spreading efforts thin, not strategically and working to build up momentum. For every piece of content you publish, matrix out a use for it across social channels and develop in advance as part of your plan.
For example, your latest thought leadership white paper could also become 5 unique, useful and optimized blog posts for your company blog, 2 guest blog posts for industry sites or contributed articles for trade media, a presentation for SlideShare, a YouTube video, an infographic, etc. You get the idea. Or even the flip it, perhaps 5 blog posts on one subject are pieced together into an attractive eBook and a SlideShare.
The point is: plan to re-purpose smartly, with added value (and of course not creating duplicate content). It sets your team up for success with content to continue to tell your story over longer stretches of time across channels.
2. Create a content workflow across social channels
A self-hosted platform like a blog (or even company newsroom) provides benefits to your brand far beyond Micromedia like Twitter. Self-hosted publishing should be organized as a hub within efforts, with a focus of your time here. I share why this is important in an upcoming Vocus Webinar on Facebook Marketing (it’s free, you can sign up here).
Visualization of a potential organization of syndicate efforts from an owned channel:
3. Develop templates for frequently-used content archetypes
During your initial planning of content concepts, likely you’ve come up with archetypes you want to develop consistently (perhaps a once-a-week roundup of 5 links, a bi-weekly Q&A with a customer, or a daily listing of 5 thought leaders and why they are relevant, etc.). Don’t keep reinventing the wheel with creating this content.
Develop templates so creating your most frequently used archetypes goes quickly. Then modify your templates over time as you discover what’s working and what isn’t from an efficiency standpoint (but still allows enough room for creativity that your team can create great content).
Conclusion
Developing systems that make sense for content creation and getting the most value out of your team’s hard work are always well worth creating.
Of course, these are just a few ideas for being efficient with content. We have a list of fun efficiencies we use with client programs at LEWIS but wanted to share just a few to get you thinking.
What else would you add for being efficient with content creation efforts in social channels?
windmill image credit: goosegrease via flickr
Tags: content marketing, Social Media
