Social Media Content, Part 1: Strategy

It's one thing to encourage businesses to come up with fresh, catchy content to plaster all over the profiles they've no doubt construed on the "Big 5" social media sites.  It's entirely another thing for businesses to actually do it.  Perhaps the reason why less than five percent of businesses involved in the "Big 5" study have been actively engaged in social media is because it's utterly confusing exactly how businesses as such should engage.  On the professional level, you can't just spew the latest gossip like the next tweeter, nor post status messages about how the weather affected your commute or your roommate's snoring habits.  On the social side, you can't simply flood your social media profiles with advertisements about your business, no matter how "newsworthy" the may seem to you.

So, what's a business to do?  Again, business would do well not to avoid social media altogether, but there are better ways to go about not avoiding - that is, interacting with and through - social media.  Businesses who wish to better will arm themselves with a social media strategy.  The first step towards a social media strategy is content: human generated content, lest you get confused with the apparently countless hackers who have recently been coming out of the wood works.  And, not surprisingly, the first step to creating content is having a content strategy.

This is not as unfamiliar as it sounds.  All marketing advice will tell you to "know your audience."  Social media content is no different.  In fact, it's even more imperative that you know what your audience is talking about and wants to talk about, what with all the tracking (in the form of "follows" and "likes") social media enables users to do these days.  The goal is not only to capture attention like it was in the simple days of image marketing (like billboards, zine ads, etc.), but also to involve them in conversation.

Social media has added an intermediary step between a customer seeing an ad and a customer purchasing the product: conversation.  What's perhaps most important for businesses, though, is that they monitor their conversations - both the ones they generated and the ones about them.  Social media has, of course, produced numerous sites and applications to aid in the tracking process.  Socialmention scours the scores of social media created daily and puts together a list of alerts which you can set up to have emailed to you on a regular basis.  Twazzup, Twitter's version of a search engine, does the same sort of searching, but just on Twitter.  And Addict-o-matic, aside from perhaps unwittingly confirming the state of our relationship to social media, tracks how you and/or your brand present on the social media sites of your choice.

And, lastly, there's the good old market research tactic.  Businesses wishing to begin developing a social media - and thus a content - strategy will afford some leisurely reading time to browse the general content being posted on social media sites daily.

Photo Credit:  Socialmediafactory