One thing I often hear when I start working with a new client is: how can we possibly create enough content to share on our social media platforms, we just don’t have enough content/ideas/photos to share multiple times a day.
It can be hard moving to a culture of content creation and sharing if it’s something you’ve not done before. You might not see the gems such as sharing a customer anecdote on LinkedIn or tweeting a photo from your team’s latest fundraising activity. (If you want a recap on putting in place new content marketing objectives for the year, then read about it here.)
In fact, you are probably doing lots of interesting things, or having lots of engaging conversations, but you aren’t yet seeing those activities through the frame of content creation and sharing.
And, not all content has to originate from within your own organisation. You need a mix of curated external content, and your own content. The reason for this is that followers probably don’t want to hear about your company 24/7, they want to hear insights from you, peppered with a few updates here and there about what you do.
LinkedIn suggests you should curate your content sharing in the following way:
- 40% thought leadership content and industry news (i.e. links to interesting articles you’ve come across or important news in your sector and your own thought leadership articles and content).
- 25% talent brand (positioning your company as a key brand to work for to attract talent)
- 20% company/product news (which is often the ONLY thing that some brands post)
- 10% event promotion
- 5% ‘just for fun’
There are lots of other resources that put the % in different ways, but I always like to maintain a 1/3 split on content, so I usually work to these numbers:
- 33% external, industry news and articles
- 33% thought leadership, non-branded or promotional content (but created by your company) – as an example, we published the Big Big Cloud Report, see here.
- 33% semi-promotional, i.e. promoting an event, promoting a new launch or PR
This way, you are always sharing a degree of content about yourself, and still keeping followers happy.
And actually, as a brand becomes more established, I might move the numbers to being more weighted in the favour of the brand’s own content (at a thought leadership level), as they become more established as a go-to thought leader in their sector.
But the question still remains: how can you possibly come up with enough content to post on social media about our company – how can 66% of the week be focused on us?
Here are a few ways to achieve that:
- Get your employees thinking about newsworthy content pieces. Are they going to a meeting in an unusual location? Are they at an event which they can share a photo of (and please, not another empty sales booth photo)? Try and encourage your employees to share these snippets into their daily work life with your marketing department to keep the flow of content high.
- How can you share the inner workings of your company? What about sharing a picture and an update from your latest team meeting? ‘We’ve just finished another busy Monday morning team meeting, getting the Northern Sales Team motivated and energised for our XYZ platform launch into Education this week – read more here’.
- Can you share general customer anecdotes – i.e. perhaps you have been asked three times this week about your GDPR position; could you share this and some insights on social media? Or perhaps you have heard a regular worry coming up in customer conversations regarding a new industry regulation, could this be something to share?
- When you read any interesting articles, rather than just posting a link to an article, think about your perspective and share that. ‘Forbes is reporting that…. My concern is how this will affect …… What do you think?’
- Take a look at your website and pull out interesting quotes from your blogs and general website pages. Are there any good straplines or key phrases that would be good for sharing? For each blog, you should be able to get at least 20 quotes – which can be scheduled in advance on your social media profile.
- Reshare, reshare, reshare – don’t just write an article and then leave it there with one share. Reshare it a week later, then a month later, then a few weeks after that, and so on. If it is valuable, evergreen content, then keep sharing – maybe put a different perspective when you share it each time or pick out different arguments from the article to highlight various themes. Make the most of your content.
These are just a few of the ways we develop content and create a wealth of shareable information, hopefully, that gives you a few ideas about how to start building up your own content repository!
Find out more about how we help with content creation: https://contemsa.com
