Within social communities it is context that creates value from content. Understanding the people who will be consuming your content and then developing a content plan around the needs, wants and desires of those people is what provides context.
The combination of content with context and timely distribution is what gives it meaning, relevance and creates value for your audience.
The first step in developing your content plan is understanding your “content themes” and what are your “content assets”.
1. Content Themes
Content themes come in a number of forms but should be consistent with the 3 E’s of social media – Education, Entertainment and Engagement.
- Education. Providing valuable content that educates your audience is a great way to build trust, credibility and authority. Examples of education content are topics like how to guides, research reports and interviews with thought & opinion leaders.
- Entertainment. In the words of Robbie Williams “Let me entertain you!” Probably the most difficult of content themes to execute well is developing content that is highly entertaining to your target audience. Crafting a content strategy around entertainment is not right for all brands, but can be include topics like humour, action and drama to communicate your message. We’ve seen some great campaigns recently like the much publicised Old Spice campaign and DC Shoes Gymkhana campaign that have done a terrific job at using entertainment effectively.
- Engagement. Creating an engaging personality around your brand is key to success. People want to be engaged in social media and developing content themes around topics like customer success stories, staff profiles, real world events and topical news stories provide engagement opportunities.
2. Content Assets
Once we know what the themes of our content will be the next step is understanding how we will bring it life through the various mediums. Think of content as an object that can communicate the same message in a number of different formats.
For example research report used to educate your target audience could be provided as a blog post (or series of blog posts), a white paper, a slide show and even a video.
3. Bringing It All Together
Now we have our conversation topics (content themes) and we know how we are going to communicate them (content assets) the final step is developing a content schedule as to when, where and how we are going to distribute them.
We’ve found simple is usually best for this and a simple calendar that highlights when each content asset will be distributed works best.
This is part 6 of our 10 part Social Media stategy series. In the next post we'll cover 'Listening' to gather intelligence. If you need any further information developing your social media plan, give us a call at Traffika, or just leave a comment below. We'd love you hear from you.
This article was posted by Matt Forman. Matt is Managing Director at Traffika. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattforman.
