As we head into a busy holiday season and start planning for  a fresh new year in 2017, it’s time to set social media content goals for the year ahead. Having a solid social media strategy that ladders back to your business goals is one thing. But how do you execute your content marketing day to day?

Here are our 5 go-to planning tips to help you build richer, more insight-driven content.

1. Facebook Insights Portal

Facebook has really stepped up their game over the last few years in terms of arming marketers and content creators with research and trends to help inform their content development. Go down the marketing research wormhole with the Facebook Insights Portal and learn about seasonal trends, consumer buying behaviours and other fascinating info that will help you turn insights into action.

2.Google Search Trends

A healthy content calendar has a mix of evergreen and more timely, relevant storytelling. Get your finger on the pulse by visiting Google Trends daily. Mine insights across a variety of topics, including business, entertainment, technology and sports. This helpful tool can also break these trends down by country, which can be helpful if you have a global audience.

3.Historical Website Data

It’s stating the obvious, but sometimes you have to look back to where you were to determine where you want to go. That means reviewing your website analytics and top performing landing pages or historical blog posts is crucial to understanding the behaviour of your audience. Often times you can predict the seasonal interests of the audience based on performance from previous years.  Create a Google Analytics dashboard to give you a window into top performing past and present.

4.Ask Your Audience

Take the guesswork out of content planning and come right out to ask the audience what they want to see. You can be overt about it by doing a survey or a poll, or run a series of content tests to see what category they engage with the most. Use these insights to fuel your content and you will see your content performance jump in leaps and bounds.

5.Aggregate and Curate What’s Trending

There are about a bajillion places to mine and curate ideas from. Depending on your industry, you’ll have go-to blogs and news sources. Aggregate them using Twitter lists (yes, Twitter is still sort of a thing) or Flipboard so you can get all your trends, news and information in one place. And don’t forget about the folks who are attuned to the heartbeat of the Internet! Here are a few sources I check on a regular basis to see what’s trending:

• Reddit AKA “the front page of the internet”
• What’s Trending – a news site that specializes in top trending content
• Twitter Moments – a one-stop-shop for all things trending on Twitter

Do you need advice on planning your content calendar? Get in touch with us!