With more and more people flocking online to follow and connect with their favourite companies over social media, it’s time to get your content marketing in order. Many of you know I am fond of saying, “Content is the Currency of Social Media.” For that reason, you will need to create, plan, and schedule the publishing of your content on a consistent basis in order to be successful in social. Without the right social media tools this will be challenging. Fortunately, ContentCal, a social media planning and publishing tool, can make planning and content creating a relatively simple and stress-free experience.
Is your business active enough on social media?
As you hopefully already know, bringing your company online can do wonders for your business, especially if you’re a SME and looking to grow. As businesses on social media often appear more trustworthy and approachable, companies online can find it much easier to communicate with their customer base, enabling them to answer questions and learn from customer feedback. Furthermore, opening the dialogue between company and consumer is amazing for creating brand loyalty and forming a bond with the target market.
Both well-established businesses and start-ups can benefit from an online presence. While bigger companies will be able to connect with their customers and get involved in the right conversations, start-ups will also be able flourish with the opportunity to showcase great original content and raise their brand awareness.
By heading online, business can also stand to learn from their competition. By keeping abreast of their rivals activity and content on social media, businesses can learn from the successes and mistakes of similar brands. While closely mimicking other companies is not a recommended strategy, it is completely acceptable to be inspired by the content of others.
Basically, social media is the perfect place for businesses who really want to succeed in business. If your content is popular, your social media efforts can make a huge difference when it comes to increasing your brand awareness through shares, retweets, and engagement. And you know what that means? More followers, website visits, and, over time, increased business.
With hundreds of companies making waves across the social-sphere, it’s time to get involved…or get left behind.
One of the best parts about social media is its immediacy. Social media gives businesses the perfect place to showcase their products and services, but also the opportunity to directly engage with and react to the world around them, in real time. By capitalising on social media trends and popular hashtags, you can get involved with the right conversations and be seen by the right people.
The more content you create, the more you’ll also begin to learn about your audience. With a varied content strategy, you can compare your ideas to discover which of your posts are getting the most engagement. Over time you will then be able to alter and adjust your content strategy for optimal reception. It’s important to review and reflect upon your strategy regularly to ensure that your social media content is living up to it’s full potential.
Sounds easy right? (It’s not)
However, it’s one thing to head over to Twitter and set up an account, but it’s another thing entirely to really master your social media strategy. Without the necessary planning and preparation, your content marketing is essentially doomed to fail. Mark our words, even if you’re incredibly confident in your ability to ‘wing it’ – don’t. Sooner or later the creativity well will run dry and your improvisation skills will flounder.
Whether you’re a social media amateur, or a more digitally savvy individual, it’s vital to take a step back and really think about your company’s approach to social media. Think about companies similar to your own – what are they doing that you like? Take the time to think about your tone of voice and how you want your brand to appear online, and carry out both competitor and consumer research.
While enthusiasm to launch your social is amazing, it’s a good idea to plan your content, and strategize before you start. By thinking ahead, you can avoid the classic mistakes that most businesses make online.
Because an oops online is basically an oops forever
With thorough planning and time to properly craft your content, you can say goodbye to stressful sweating, embarrassing typos, inconsistencies, and lots of promo-repetitiveness. Many businesses fail to keep their content varied, fun, and genuinely interesting. Nevertheless, with the correct level of planning and attention, you can bring more value to your audience, increase brand awareness, and ultimately help your business thrive.
Poor quality content is content made in a hurry. We all know how irritating a small typo can be, but when it’s coming from a business account it can also look pretty unprofessional. Mistakes can be incredibly damaging to your company’s reputation and potential customers might begin to wonder if your social media blunders are a reflection of your products or services.
It’s also a great idea to nominate one person in your company to take charge of the social media content. By assigning the social media management to one singular person, you can avoid dramatic changes in your company’s tone of voice, and prevent duplicate or inconsistent content. You also need to make sure you’re choosing optimal times to publish your posts rather than leaving it to the end of the day when your target market might not even be online, and therefore unlikely to see your content. Every target market and industry is different, so make sure you know your audience and monitor when your posts get the most engagement. This will help with content planning and creation for the future.
ContentCal to the rescue
Social media scheduling and content planning software, ContentCal, gives you a color-coded bird’s-eye view of your upcoming social content to make your social media marketing more effective.
ContentCal’s speciality is planning with numerous features to make content creation as easy as pie. Developed by a social media marketing agency, this platform aims to tackle all the classic social media marketing pain-points and simplify social for agencies, businesses, beginners, and gurus.
One of the best parts about ContentCal is its placeholder function that allows you to map out your keys themes and ideas with the ability to swap them around and edit as necessary. Basically virtual sticky notes, placeholder posts help you make notes about key dates, begin drafting your ideas, and start spreading your themes across the coming months.
Once your content is finalized and ready to be approved, you can then set your content yellow. Once approved (by a member of your team, or a client) your content will then be turned green and set live. This means that your content will automatically be posted to your social channels by ContentCal at the designated time and date. Simple right?
Furthermore, ContentCal’s color-coded calendar platform not only means that you can check on your content and its status at a glance, but the easy visual layout helps to ease feelings of anxiety, and prevent your copywriter from becoming overwhelmed when crafting the upcoming social content. You can even view your upcoming content in weekly and monthly view!
ContentCal also comes with helpful features such as channels notes and campaigns enabling you to reach new levels of organization. In the ‘Organize’ section of ContentCal you can drop in any videos or pictures you might want to use in your upcoming content, meaning absolutely nothing gets lost. With custom planning channels you can even prepare all aspects of your marketing strategy with the option to plan out your emails, newsletters, blogs, or whatever you want! As a result, you can keep all your marketing assets and information in one centralized location, eliminating potential confusion once and for all.
Team collaboration is another thing made simple with the ContentCal platform. With the ability to comment on existing content, it’s really easy for writers to make edits and improvements. You can even use the calendar filters to display only the content you want to view. Approval workflows will also ensure that your content is approved by the right sets of eyes, in the right order. This is especially useful when it comes to preventing mistakes and ensuring none of your content goes live until it is absolutely perfect. Use ContentCal’s audit trails to show you where your content has been edited, approved, or denied, and by whom, giving you ultimate visibility.
How are you planning your social media content right now? While spreadsheets can seem like a logical choice, businesses often encounter problems with version control, approvals, and general confusion. ContentCal offers a more efficient and time-saving way to organize your social media content saving hours across entire teams. Even features as simple as the ‘re-use post’ button can save time when it comes to replicating evergreen content across the coming months.
And finally, when disaster strikes ContentCal can halt all content. By clicking the ‘pause all content’ button, you can prevent any incorrect, inappropriate, or insensitive content from being published in light of recent events or natural disasters.
Pretty neat huh?
The moral of the story? Planning your social media content will give you the best chance of succeeding in the social media world. Once online, your business will have the best opportunities to engage with the right people, learn about the target market, and reel in more customers. Soon it will be 2018, and almost every business is heading onto social media to make their mark online. Fortunately for you, with the above tips and advice (and a little help from ContentCal) you are well on your way to Maximizing Your Social.
Do you agree that planning is crucial to perfecting your social media content? Let us know in the comments below.
Commentaires