Once you’ve pulled together all the content you already have (blogs, photos, videos, company website) and figured out how you will go about creating or finding new content to share with your audience in social media, the next phase is to begin a content cycle. This means producing and evaluating content on a regular basis using the key metrics you defined in your strategic plan to see what’s working, what needs to be tweaked or removed and what you should focus on more.
The content cycle has 5 stages:
1. Listen
Track what people are saying about the brand and what people are saying in general. What’s trending?
2. Plan
Outline what content you have that is relevant, based on what you hear. This could be a direct response or something you keep in mind for general content. For instance, did someone mention they want more information on your product? Plan how you might respond in an @mention and then how you might send more messages about the product on an on-going basis.
3. Create
Work with your staff to write or curate the content that fits the plan.
4. Publish
This is the obvious part; Post the content.
5. Evaluate/Listen Again
Review the engagement on your individual messages and any stats you may have selected as part of your strategic plan to see if your goals are being met. These may include: growth in fans/followers, average click per follower rates, average shares/retweets per fan or per message, etc.
Begin to plan more content based on what’s performing well. Does the content mix have the emphasis on the appropriate content or should it be shifted to include more messaging around the product, for example, and less around the company itself?
Building a Content Cycle Timeline
As you first get into the content cycle, you may want to go through these steps on a weekly basis, tweaking here and there as you try out different types of content. As you refine the content mix – feeling good about the results and meeting your goals – you could move to a monthly content review cycle or even quarterly before you make changes to the content. However, in specific cases where campaigns and contests are taking focus in the content mix, you might need to review that content daily and again against a weekly baseline, to make sure you are not over promoting or under promoting that special content.
