Framing our thoughts on social media
We need to begin thinking about not only our audiences but the networks our audiences are a part of – both online communities and that of the physical world. Most of us are overloaded with content every day, and even if we are not glued to our smartphones or laptops, we all know some people who are. We can always catch up on the latest trends or news updates with peer recommendations. So, content is everywhere. The marketplace is flooded with information, and readers are selectively parsing what they want to see on their preferred platforms. Thinking about how to break through all that noise to reach our target audiences is what we should be strategizing as content strategists.
Factors to consider when developing content strategies
Consider three crucial questions:
- How will we create value? (That is, value to your customers’ eyes, not simply that of the company’s.)
- How will we deliver value? (Think multi-media!)
- How will we capture value? (What is our relation with our audience and how does that come in to play in terms our defining our value?)
Learn about your audience and find the influencers and experts for a topic or community. When you locate that information, identify and serve them by retweeting their content. Learn about the hashtags they use and watch what they discuss on different topics. In a sense, become a part of their world!
There are also advanced social monitoring tools out there that can help you examine topics and give you the break-down of key words used around topics (for example, Salesforce’s Radian6 and IBM Social Media Analytics). These tools can produce raw data that can put your quantitative data into actionable insights. With more insight about our audience, we can adapt our content strategy to meet the needs to changing live trends.