An effective social media marketing campaign starts with a better and well-planned social media content audit. It helps marketers ascertain many strengths and weaknesses of the activities to be carried out across your marketing channels.
Being part of the social media community and an owner of several Facebook business pages, I do go through the same concerns you face on numerous occasions. The same challenges occur when we explore content to publish on various platforms especially the social network biggie Facebook.
10-Step Social Media Content Strategy
It has now evidently tough to engage audience with the every post/ feed you publish. So what's the remedy? How can we gather specific and audience-centric content ideas to publish on Facebook? Ideally, a content audit could take many routes, but eventually depends upon how an organization plans it as per its previous experiences. A standard process of social media content audit is the following:
1. Identifying the right content platforms
In the very first step of content audit, you should identify and focus on the content platforms that are relevant to your industry vertical. Zeroing in on the right content platform will help you optimize the resources as well.
To identify the most suitable content platform, you need to work on two key areas- Demographics and competitors. Your target audience is the staple food for your business. Therefore, you should know every demographic detail about them. It includes - who are they, where they live, what their average age is, and so on.
Once you find an interested audience on social media channels, connect them with your brand’s audience. This is how you can reach the right people at the right time. For instance, if you're looking at women buyers under 25-40 years of age who could be interested in your products, optimize your content for Pinterest. For the even younger audience, you can focus on Snapchat and Instagram also.
Another important aspect of identifying the right platform is to check how your competitors are following their social assets. For instance, if you want to find platforms where you can sell your Instagram marketing plans, look at your competitors. Check out which social platforms they target, the number of followers they have, the frequency of the posts they publish, and the average user engagement they ensure.
2. Measuring the engagement:
When finished with finding the right social content platform, measure organic metrics across these channels to understand how much content engagement and traction these channels are generating.
Every social media channel has built-in analytics to track the campaign performance. Facebook Insights, Pinterest Analytics, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Insights or Instagram Insights are some of those tools that can give you detailed insight into your social media content health.
You may also give a try to tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to fetch insights into all the premium social networks in one place. No individual logins are required to access each network. Just a single sign-on and you can access all your social channels via a single interface.
3. Classifying the content:
Tools like Buffer help you gain insight into the content that receives the most and least engagement on various social channels you're targeting.
If you're using 'buffer', choose a social network from the list, go to the analytics section, and choose a date range. You can filter posts to get the list of the Most Popular and Least Popular posts in respective tabs.
This is how you can find patterns on the content that is not generating engagement or one that's generating. If you find that your video posts are performing well than your text posts on an individual network, consider sticking at creating more of this type of content for that platform. You should change your content strategy as per the insights available. If you discover that text posts are not doing good or engaging anymore, start posting other types of content that are more successful.
4. Identifying your competitor’s content:
How successful your competitors in their social media content strategy is also a key factor to evaluate. Glaring at their content helps you identify areas of opportunity to improve your social strategy further. You can use tools like Fanpage Karma to analyze your competitor's social media strategy.
Within the tool's dashboard, click on the “Analysis” tab and filter by the competitor you want to start analyzing. It will display the most engaging content based on metrics such as Top Pictures, Top Videos, Top Links, Top Hashtags, Top Words, and Type of Posts, among others.
5. Get Ready To Catch It Anywhere
I come across a number of people, places, and objects every day and possibly they all have something to tell. All I have to be quick to grasp it. Starting from my home to my office and then from my office to the nearest shopping center, several happenings take place at frequent intervals. Open your notepad on your mobile and pen it down. Who knows it has a solid and pushy idea to share on Facebook.
6. Create A Facebook Content Calendar:
Once you have done with your ideas and points that you publish on Facebook, associate them with a Facebook calendar. The calendar will assist you in planning, identifying, and launching your content from time to time. It is however very important to review the content association and its impact further. If you find it unable to retain the motive alter the schedule with a different calendar.
7. Catch Something From Everything:
It's not always true that business ideas are generated from the business stuff. It can be anywhere and everywhere. All you have to spot them as soon they reflect. The ideas may come from the flicks you watch, conversations you are engaged in, conferences you have attended recently, and milestones you have achieved. Any of these instances can give you some better ideas to convey to your audience and relevant communities.
8. Choose Topics And Be With Them For A While:
I have a big team consisting of IT professionals and social media marketing strategists working for me. I asked them to generate keywords every week so that I could develop perfect content ideas for my Facebook feeds. This will help you to trace the most-searched and most worked content ideas for your business page. Work on these key topics for quite some time to get the insight if all these are working well.
9. Go Hand-in-Hand With Industry News:
The industry is a happening place from where you can subscribe to numerous instances of events and happenings. Browse websites, forums, and portals where you can find the related industry news and information. Be part of those relevant niche sites and explore the news and feeds you can use on your Facebook timeline.
10. Learn Ideas From Your Competitors:
Lately, the motive behind all your efforts is to leap your nearest competitor(s). I must admit their competence if they are ahead in the race. Here is the advantage for you. Visit your nearest competitor's timeline to find what unique he is doing that you are lacking. If you do this you will easily find the major benchmarks and strategic points your competitor relies on.
Sumant is an accomplished content marketer with years of experience in producing meticulously researched content in the dynamic world of digital marketing. His deep insights into industry trends, consumer behavior, and emerging technologies have consistently resulted in engaging, informative, and effective content.
