Do you feel like social media success is elusive?
If your social media content strategy isn’t moving the needle for your brand, try adding visual content. Building out a social media content strategy with photos and video can be a confusing maze for consumer brand teams, but it’s now table stakes for success. In fact, content that is visual is 40 times more likely to be shared via social media than other content formats.
Don’t get lost—follow our four-step guide to ramp up your social media content strategy.
1) Set a Path
Revisit your goals for social media. What do you want to achieve overall and with content specifically? Make sure everything is in alignment.
Social media is a vehicle to build audience engagement, so your goals around social content should continue to have your audience at the core, along with brand and activation elements. The beauty of visual content is that research shows it helps drive much more engagement and brand recall than text.
Once your goals are solid, determine how you’ll measure success and lift with content. Put some numbers against your social content dreams so you can see if they come true. Go deeper than tracking additional followers, likes, comments, views and shares. Look at and listen to what audiences do after that and to the measurements that carry across media. For example, increased social channel referral traffic, click-throughs to your website and the overall share of voice you are getting in the marketplace vis-a-vis competitors are key indicators of what’s working (and what’s not).
2) Meet and Greet
Find your audience. Let’s face it: it’s getting harder to reach and connect with them, but more and more, they’re on social media and mobile screens consuming content. And they want more. A recent report found that video was the most requested content from brands and businesses that respondents supported; further, 34% of respondents wanted to see more social videos from them and 41% wanted to see more social images.
As you start building out your social communities, think about each social platform as a distinct destination for content, because the content options, as well as the audience and the types of content they want to consume on each, vary. So build platform-specific (and mobile-friendly) posts that offer value in a sea of content alternatives. Posting multiple times per day is becoming de rigueur for cutting through the clutter of media, so scheduling posts in advance remains a best practice. As a guide, research suggests that emotive, funny, educational and behind-the-scenes posts perform well for driving engagement. The general rules for social media also apply: Use tagging and hashtags strategically, interact with your audience and make it easy for your them to get more information about your brand.
Look at the people proactively generating content pieces around your brand already. Are these fans engaging their broader networks to extend your message? Keep your friends and followers close but your fans and advocates closer.
3) Find Your Voice
Tell your visual story and amplify it. Think about what you’re saying and how, make it distinctive, and ensure alignment with your brand values, style and message. Trust and authenticity of content matter to consumers today so there is great power in authentic brand stories.
Determine how you want to build your content to tell your stories—with video, images, audio or all of these. Video, in particular, is increasing in use on social media as the quality of recording and editing tools, social features, and mobile screen experiences have improved. Along with high audience interest in video, research indicates that over 90% of mobile video viewers share videos with others.
Look at what’s in your arsenal already and what you can build. Do you have the tools and structure in place to create and share the plethora of content you need on your own these days? Try tapping into the communities that know you best by making it easy for your brand advocates to collaborate and communicate with you and help tell your story. Give them content to share and let them create authentic content for you.
For example, this season Greenfly has helped Major League Baseball and the 30 Clubs route nearly 1,200 pieces of daily, original content that was collected from every ballpark. Through the Greenfly platform, MLB’s Live Content Creators have been able to distribute multiple forms of media assets directly to team and league social editors for near real-time multi-platform publishing, ultimately giving fans the unique perspectives of the game and its players they cherish and share.
4) Check Your Progress
Finally, regularly monitor your data. Based on your key metrics and goals, are you going the right way? Is your visual content connecting with your audience and bringing them closer to your brand or sending them running for the hills? Are you posting at the times when your audience is engaging deeply with content on each social channel or are you screaming into the abyss? Are people talking about your content online? One survey has found that monitoring content performance is a primary benefit of collecting social data.
Test different types and delivery of content posts on the various social channels and gauge the response to help guide future tactics. Perhaps different metrics may provide more insight into specific behaviors. If you aren’t reaching and activating people, pivot and refine your tactics until you do.
Follow these four steps, with an audience-centric focus as your North Star, and you’ll be on the right road to success with social media content.
Want to build collaboration with your community and power your authentic brand stories at scale? Contact us at Greenfly.
