SEVEN STEPS FOR RELEASING HIGH-VALUE CONTENT THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA
by Maribeth Kusmeski
Valuable content is the key to get and keep people interested in your social media sites. You can put endless time and effort into creating your social media profiles, but if you don’t have content, you won’t have a following. Because your social media is an extension of your brand, make sure that it represents who you believe your firm is. To develop consistent and valuable content on your site, follow these steps.
- Take an hour to go through pre-approved or pre-written content available to you (or have a staff member do this) and create a list of potential topics for inclusion in your social media.
- Use this list to set priorities based on the timeliness of the topics and the potential interest level of your target markets.
- Determine how often you should release the content you’ve listed – weekly? monthly? quarterly? Set specific dates for release.
- Segment time on your monthly calendar month to write, compile, and edit this content. One to two hours a month should be enough to write three paragraphs if you already have the content in mind.
- Get compliance approval for the use of the materials in your social media.
- Post your written content based on the dates in Step 3. Use a social media dashboard such as www.HootSuite.com to post content in multiple places from one site and monitor your results.
- Monitor and discuss the analytics of your social media sites (at least monthly) to see if people are interested, reading, passing along, and following your posts. Based on your analytics, make adjustments to continue growing and enhancing your relationship with your followers.
Maribeth Kusmeski is president of Red Zone Marketing, LLC; 1509 N. Milwaukee Avenue; Libertyville, IL 60048; phone: (847) 367-4066; fax: (847)-367-5226; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: www.redzonemarketing.com.