In the previous two blogs we have introduced you to content and discussed content strategy and storytelling. This time we help you find your content, store your content and then distribute it!
Where can you find your content?
Firstly take a look at what you already have. Is your website full of content? Do you blog regularly? How active are you throughout social media? You can find content in all places but looking at what content you have already generated is always a first port of call. Time is a factor here, and we have spoken about how little time we all have, so collating current content will save you some!
Look at your other social media channels, listen through your twitter account using hashtags or by following industry experts. Through Facebook groups and pages you will find blogs and discussions. Pinterest is one of our favourites to source a wider amount of content, and by reading more and more blogs. Subscribing to regular newsletters will make sure that the right content gets delivered to you, which you can then share. Using apps such as Feedly or Flipboard allow you to choose what news you see, and so you can tailor that to your industry. Ultimately, it is being at the forefront of your industry and keeping up to date with all the latest news and events.
So, you are collecting all this content, but how do you store it?
We would love to hear your thoughts on this. At Cosmic we use a number of ways. We have our own private Facebook group where we store all the news reports or relevant blogs that we have come across. This means we can share anything relevant to other staff members here too. We also use public and secret Pinterest boards to store our content. Pinterest is a great social media tool to share content with your followers, but you can use secret boards to store ideas for weekly blogs, or monthly activities, or client suggestions.
You can also use cloud apps if you are already using them. Trello, Evernote, Google drive can all store information. It is working out what works best for you, and how easy you can access that content. By storing it well, you can then plan how and where you are going to share it.
So you’ve got your great piece of content – how do you share it?
The beauty of content is that you can share it all over. You can have one piece of content that you can then distribute throughout all of your social media channels. If that content is a video, an infographic, an image, it doesn’t matter, it can be put on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram & Pinterest (or wherever you hang out.) If it is something that requires more thought, then writing a blog post would be the best approach, which then you can share throughout Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. What we are saying is to use to COPE approach – Content once, Post everywhere. All that needs to be done is to speak the language of the platform you are sharing it on.
What do I mean by this? Well, on Twitter you only have 140 characters and if you are sharing an image or link that will take up 21, and if you are sharing both that’s 42. You only have a limited number left to ‘speak’, whereas on Facebook you can say a lot more, and on Instagram you can hashtag the hell out of that post! Learning the language of each channel will help with maximising the content post.
Planning & Scheduling your content
Planning is so important with regards to content sharing and helps to eradicate the panic you feel at the beginning of the week! We have come across many strategies with regards to planning, and each of them works for their own user, but ultimately it is about deciding what content you want to put out, and when.
CoSchedule has a great downloadable planner and tips to create a great plan and it is well worth a look.
Always try to link your content marketing strategy within all of your social media and we recommend you take the following advice.
- 70% of your content to be planned campaigns
- 20% near future
- 10% real time
And remember the Rutgers research, and try to flip it so that 80% of your content is shared from another source, and 20% to be your own.
Once you have planned your content it is then easy to schedule it out using tools such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. We have spoken about these time saving tools previously so please do take a look to help you get to grips with them!
So to summarise, you need
- Clear strategy
- High quality, relevant content
- Aimed to the correct audience
- Quality visuals and videos
- Conversational writing tailored to the correct channel
- Correct grammar & spelling
- Shareable information
- A comprehensive plan!
We understand how important it is to get your content strategy right, and we can support you on this. We provide a content creation service where we will meet monthly with you to discuss step by step recommendations and assist you in developing and delivering that great content.