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.

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!