4 Ways To Improve Your Social Media Content Strategy

Lots of people spend lots of time nowadays thinking about how to build up channels/audiences/communities (choose your buzzword as appropriate) through social channels. Relatively few, however, seem to apply similar rigor to the process of communicating with those people after the fact.

With a few degrees of variation, most people will suggest you look at around a 90/10 ratio of engagement to static content on social channels. That means, if you post 20 tweets (for example) per day, you have roughly two opportunities to insert your own POV into the stream.

Are you making the most of the static content you post on your channels? Are you using each piece as an opportunity to move towards achieving an objective, or are you just throwing words out there for the sake of posting something?

Here are four ways to begin to improve your social media content strategy.

Set Goals

Launching a new social channel, or campaign on a channel, isn’t the end of the planning process. You should know, clearly, what you’re trying to achieve through your social media activity, and bear that in mind at all times. Sometimes high-level business goals may be a bit abstract, so distill down from those:

Business objectives –> communication objectives –> social media objectives

Tweak these depending on where social “sits” in your organization, but make sure these ladder up, and make sure the content you’re posting does the same.

Optimize

Are you optimizing your content based on previous results? If not, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

Content creation doesn’t just mean throwing out posts randomly. Just as media buyers analyze which versions of ads convert better than others, you should take the opportunity to look at the types of content that:

  • Generate more engagement
  • Lead to more click-throughs
  • Lead to more conversions
What type of content works best? Is it UGC-focused content? Links to third-party sites? Opinion pieces? What time of day works best? (Visibli and RowFeeder are two great tools for helping with this)

Think “Search”

What are you doing to ensure you “own” the first page of search results when you make an announcement? Think beyond your marketing terms, and towards what people are searching for. Create useful, interesting content that targets those terms, and publish it at the right time.
Why does timing matter for search? Because in today’s fast-moving environment, if other influential online sites get out of the gate with their content ahead of you, they’ll become the go-to source and they’ll claim your spot in the search results.
If you’re currently losing this battle, take a look at what the other sites are doing better than you.
Remember – you have the advantage – you know what’s coming down the pipe, and you know when it’s coming. That means you should *always* be able to beat them to the punch.

Use Multimedia

Multimedia is such a 90’s term… everywhere except search. Universal search is meaning that different forms of content are being displayed next to each other in search results. That means you’re not just competing for the top-ranked text; you’re competing for the top-ranked image too, and the top-ranked video. Not everyone has cottoned-on to that yet – take advantage of it and think beyond text when you’re planning-out your content.
There you have it – four tips for optimizing content. What other tips would you add?
Dave Fleet
Managing Director and Head of Global Digital Crisis at Edelman. Husband and dad of two. Cycling nut; bookworm; videogamer; Britnadian. Opinions are mine, not my employer's.