There’s nothing worse than getting into the office on a Monday and feeling panicked that you have nothing to post on social media. With the new year, comes new hope for a stronger, tighter, and more effective content strategy. But, how do you get started with building out your annual social media strategy? Here are three considerations to help guide you along the way when building your content framework.

Align Your Content Strategy With Your Business Priorities

It seems like a no-brainer, but in many organizations, the social media prime is either wearing many hats and running social off the side of their desk without time to build a content strategy. If the company is large enough to have an individual or team running the online content – they may be operating in silos from the individuals tasked with determining organizational goals.

Social media is crucial touchpoint in your communications strategy and the foundation of your strategy should always align with the objectives of your company. Having a good sense of your business priorities allows you to create a funnel of key messaging that will help steer content themes (pillars) and specifics around subject matter (topics).

Refining Your Content Mix

Your content mix is a crucial component to addressing your short- and long-term storytelling needs. There are four key segments of content that you want to focus in on:

• Evergreen content is timeless and is relevant now and into the future. This is content that stands the test of time, and can be repurposed time and time again.
• Seasonal or campaign content is comprised of those hero moments that pulse in and out of market and are time sensitive. They may also have a larger weight of production and media budget.
• User-generated content is driven by your online community and a critical component to a healthy relationship with your customers. Incenting, recognizing and sharing the content created by your power users rewards advocacy and sustains brand engagement.
• Short-lead content is focused around trending and very timely opportunities to news-jack or capitalize on broader conversation taking place online at a given time. You can plan to listen for, but not depend on this as a source of inspiration.

Set Your Foundation

Once you have a good sense of the content framework you’re working within in terms of pillars and topics, you can then focus on building a well-balanced content calendar. Start with your “big rocks” or the hero campaigns and seasonal messaging that is most important to your business. Next, layer in your evergreen pieces that fill in the gaps and help round out your storytelling. And, finally, sprinkle in user-generated content and listen for short-lead opportunities to round out your content mix.

Once you’ve completed your 2017 planning, it’s time to get creative! Check out our recent blog post about content planning tips for more inspiration on where to get content ideas.