With so many disruptive changes that have happened since the beginning of 2020, we still haven’t felt the true economic impact which is expected to play out in various ways over decades. And it will definitely affect the world of digital marketing. It affects it right now, as we speak, by changing consumer behavior and sparking new trends. The evolving need for digital connection, the hypergrowth of eCommerce, and audio social are only some of the trends announcing that businesses should hurry to adopt and adapt.
All these changes will touch the realm of social media. In the previous two years, social media has started to emerge as a shopping platform. It became even a larger part of daily life. There’s been a proliferation of short video content, growing utilization of user-generated content, and a growth in augmented reality options.
With so many brands using content to cut through the noise of social platforms, your business needs a strategic and organized approach to be able to keep up. Choosing the right platform as well as the right content form is essential because it can significantly increase potential return.
Decide What to Create and Build a Content Map
When it comes to the foundation of your social media marketing, the first stone you need to lay is determining what kind of content you’re going to share there. If we are to apply the 80/20 principle (according to which 80% of revenue comes from 20% of clients) to your social media strategy, then 80% of your content should be informative, entertaining, educational, and non-promotional. As for the other 20%, you can use it to talk about products or services that you offer and successes that you’ve achieved.
Before you get concerned with whether you’re putting enough content out, take a step back. Make a list of internal content that your organization has created. Next, make another list of content that doesn’t come from your organization (e.g., industry articles you prefer to read, industry influencers, customer reviews, etc.). Then, divide both lists into categories to create a content map.
Essential Ways of Keeping Your Social Media Content Organized
1. Content Calendar
A social media content calendar can help you create a schedule for your blog, email marketing campaign, and social media posts. With a content map ready on hand, you can create a content calendar that organizes your content and helps develop an editorial strategy.
To create a content calendar, you can find a detailed template online, or create your own using Excel. If you decide to do it yourself, the most important elements you should include are:
- Content category
- Post verbiage
- Social channel
- Links
- Posting date and time
What kind of content calendar you should use depends on the frequency of your posts and how many social channels you’ll be posting to.
2. Build a List of Resources
[Source: Unsplash]
When sharing content on social media, you can also implement the 80/20 principle, with 20% of the posts you share are your own brand assets. Most of the content that should go live on your channels should be from external resources. By sharing other people’s content, you connect to influencers, build value, and give back to your online community.
You need a list of media outlets and industry blogs that regularly publish content worth reading and sharing. Either bookmark all of them or create a unified RSS feed of your favorite content sources. You can refer to these sources whenever you’re working on your social media posting schedule.
3. Timing is Crucial
Posting something at the right time on social media can make a world of difference when it comes to maximizing the impact of your social media posts. If you share something in the middle of the night for your U.S. audience, your post might get a few likes and go unnoticed. But if you post something at 12 PM on a Wednesday, you will get more eyes on your post.
A strong and well-defined posting strategy will also help maximize your SEO efforts. According to the best Toronto SEO agency, brands maximize their reach and engagement by following smart publishing recommendations. These are especially useful if your business has localized pages in different regions in the country or around the world.
Each social media platform dictates different rules when it comes to posting time, read more about that here.
The second thing we need to talk about is managing your own time when it comes to social media post scheduling. Once you have a good picture of the perfect posting times during the week, you should learn how to schedule your social media posts ahead of time. That will save much of your time and let you focus on other aspects of your job.
Set aside a certain time of the week to work on scheduling, and be sure to stick to it. Despite sounding quite simple and logical, people in social media marketing often fail to follow this step. Scheduling your posts ahead of time will allow the flexibility of making necessary changes to your content calendar, and prevent last minute scrambling to get a post out there.
4. Set Aside the Time to Interact
After posting an interesting article or sharing something of great value, your followers will respond to it by commenting or sending a direct message. Interacting with your audience is a must because it helps build a relationship between your brand and them.
Leave no message or comment unanswered! Set aside some time during the day to respond to all the messages you get. Make sure to close up each message as you respond to them, so you don’t get lost in the sea of insignificant messages and make the entire process more effective.
5. Create a Media Library
Visual content (e.g., images, infographics, videos, etc.) is an integral part of any social media post out there. All the images, infographics, videos, illustrations, GIFs, memes, visual CTAs, screenshots, visual quotes, and other visuals you use should be consolidated in one place. If it is spread across multiple folders and devices, your social media marketing team won’t be able to reach it easily and quickly.
Use Google Drive, Dropbox or another cloud storage service to build your media library. Just make sure you have enough space available and you won’t have problems when it comes to accessing or sharing your content from mobile and desktop.
Conclusion
Staying organized and building a strong social media content calendar can underpin your social content strategy. You will create consistency and organization across all of your social media channels. Whether it’s a comprehensive and high-tech dashboard or a simple Excel spreadsheet, staying organized is essential for the effectiveness of your brand’s social media marketing plan.