Social media is a HUGE time suck. Creating and finding interesting content every day is a major hassle.
When you’re the official social media manager for your business (as well as the CEO, head of client delivery, finance manager, IT manager, etc etc) it’s important not to let social media creation and posting eat into the precious hours that you have allocated to other stuff.
But, you know how important and effective social media marketing can be for small businesses, so you can’t take your eye off the ball either.
In this blog, and last week’s (which was about how to create an interesting and engaging social media feed) we’ re focusing on techniques you can introduce to create and find interesting content, and build a thriving social media page, without spending ALL the hours on it. We use these techniques ourselves and they’re lifesavers.
Today’s obvious yet often overlooked recommendation:
All of your content doesn’t need to be 100% related to what you are selling.
As long it’s in the same ballpark, feel free to mix it up a little.
To be clear:
- If you sell shoes, your content doesn’t need to be ALL shoe-related.
- If you are a physiotherapist, your content doesn’t need to be ALL physiotherapy-related.
- If you are a divorce lawyer, your content doesn’t need to be ALL divorce-related.
So how do you work out what else to include?
At The Marketing Architect, we rely on an approach that we learned while studying with Digital Mums.
It’s a simple 5-step process that helps the social media manager (or you, if you haven’t yet built a marketing team) to create a content prescription for your social channels. Here are the steps.
- Create or refer to your Dream Client Profile (the description you have of your perfect customer) while donning your detective hat (Sherlocky deerstalker or Poirot’s homburg, either will do).
- Head to a flip chart or whiteboard and conduct a brainstorming session – best done with a helpful friend, but you can equally do this alone.
- Interrogate yourself on what you know of your Dream Client. Besides having a problem that you can solve, what else do you know? Which other topics might they feel strongly about? What are they interested in? Which subjects do they want to know more about. You might have to use some guess work here. Your answers don’t need to be closely related to the subject of your own business, but if they are ‘adjacent’ you’ve got some good material. For example, if you were a shoe seller, selling children’s shoes to parents with an above average income, you could be pretty sure that your audience would be interested in subjects that are in the area of and ‘adjacent to’ family life. Such topics could be: children’s parties, fun things to do in the area, parenting, family holidays, discipline, fussy eating, children’s sports clubs, etc, etc.
- Have a think about your own audience and create a list of the top 5-10 adjacent topics. It might seem a bit weird to be sharing a post about a brilliant holiday in Greece on your shoe shop page, but if you phrase the intro correctly, you can weave it in. You could say, for example: ‘Which sandals would you be packing for this wonderful trip of a life time…?’
- Decide on the ideal proportion that each alternative topic will occupy as a component of your entire curated content strategy and record this in a pie chart. The more closely related to your subject, the higher the proportion should be.
Et voila, no need to tax the little grey cells any further, mon ami. All you need to do now is track down online content, that sticks roughly to the proportions laid out in the pie chart. When you mix it in with your business content you’ll suddenly have a rounded non-party bore (see last week) type of social media page.
If you need more help getting into this mindset, here’s an analogy: imagine your social page is the finest cheese retailer in Leadenhall Market.
It’s your job to stock your shop by hand, selecting the finest cheeses known to humanity, from all over the UK (and beyond, Brexit permitting). You want to include cheeses in a range of styles, with a range of flavours (that’s your curated content, in case you aren’t following).
If you do this well, your shop (social media page) will become a hub for cheese-lovers from all over London. You hope that these fromage-o-philes (your prospects) will be happy to make a detour on a rainy Thursday to sample your latest cut of Wensleydale, simply because they love cheese so much, and they perceive you to be the expert on sourcing the best.
While your customers are perusing the wares in your shop, you might also suggest that they try a sample of cheese using your patented cheese-calorie-removing gadget. Your incredible invention retains 100% flavour, but only 20% of the calories. It also delivers a much higher margin than the actual cheeses in your shop, so your aim is to sell one to at least 50% of the customers attracted into the shop by your Red Leicester.
This is exactly how the social media curated content strategy works. In the same way that Kelis used her milkshake to bring all the boys to the yard, you will use your interesting content to bring your audience to your feed – and, ideally, you’ll keep them there long enough for you to also showcase your product or service.
For more help developing this strategy in your business, why not book in a free, no-obligation chat with us? Let’s talk interesting content! (Or cheese!)
