Developing Content for Social Media Campaigns

Feb. 22nd, 2008 by Lisa McNeill

Today I’ll answer the 4th question of the “Marketer’s Foray into Social Media“, which was “How will my content be developed?”. To break down this process (which often times is the most intensive of social media campaign efforts), I’ve made the following cliff-note process of content development stages, listed below:

Step 1: Analyze Audience: This stage of content development is taking a good hard look at the target audience and analyzing its use and participation within social media. This isn’t just a look into what topics the target audience is talking about, but how they are consuming it. This will effect a company’s social media efforts greatly: giving insight into whether the audience prefers video messages versus detailed blog posts, or if the audience prefers forums over social networks. This insight also allows a company to better shape the content that it needs to communicate most effectively with its audiences.

Step 2: Set Content Creation Goals: This is the stage that makes or breaks content. Effective content should be created with the audience in mind, but should also help the company achieve its objectives. In an excellent post about strategic content development, Copy Blogger outlined the following questions that are important to ask in this phase:

* Who should be reading, listening to or watching your content?
* What do they want, need or expect?
* Should you be producing content in another format?
* Where can you find more of the right readers, listeners or viewers?

Step 3: Review Internal Resources: Once the audience is discovered and we begin content goal-setting , we always take a look first at internal resources. The three main internal resources we look for are:

Experts/”Star’s” of the Industry or Company: An internal person who has an interesting voice or expertise that can connect with external audiences.
Created Content: Surprisingly, most companies have a wealth of information that they simply aren’t distributing via social media. This is where we take existing content and make it easy to share and easy to retrieve.
Repurpose-able Content (if that is a word): This type of content is content that we feel that can be re purposed and still used effectively for social media. This type of content can be internal training videos that can be edited into videos for customer support or existing newsletter articles that can be changed into blog posts, etc.

Step 4: Define Content Needs: This step is the time to define what the company isn’t saying that it should be saying - or what customers are talking about in the social media space that the company isn’t participating in. This is where companies have to look at what content resources they have, versus what content resources they need to meet objectives.

Step 5: Arrange an Editorial Calendar: An editorial calendar is essential to an ongoing social media effort. It may not be a detailed month by month schedule, but it needs to define what the content strategies are, and how frequently content will be published. A good rule of thumb is to arrange this with regular content, and allow it to be flexible enough to update with time sensitive content.

Step 6: Assess Content: By assessing content during the campaign, and keeping an eye for the audience, you can see changes that need to be made to content strategy by noticing the topics that get an audience engaged, and listening to what they want to hear more of.

And finally, the question you may be asking is “Does this take time? You bet. While content creation is often times the most valuable social media effort, it is an effort that requires companies to take a realistic look at its internal staff and resources. Though it isn’t impossible for a company to manage internally, we have found our role as a social media agency is often times to work with these companies and provide our expertise and staff.

Any more steps you would like to add? Feel free to continue this conversation in the comments….

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About the author:
As a Social Media Strategist for Ignite Social Media, Lisa McNeill outlines social media tactics and develops social media campaigns to help companies reach customers and build brand advocates. Her expertise in project management and marketing additionally guides the execution of these campaigns.