After talking with people all over the world about social media, today Neal is talking about content. Yes, content is important, but with an oversaturated market, itâs important that the content you are creating and sharing is legendary! So why not leverage successful content youâve already created and used in the past? This week is all about why you shouldnât be scared to repurpose old content, and how to best go about using what youâve already got.
Key Highlights
[03:51] The Traditional Approach on Content Marketing
[05:21] Every Content Should Be Legendary
[07:58] Look At What You Have
[09:41] The Strategy
[12:47] The Execution
[14:38] Killer Functionality of Post Planner
[18:07] One of The Easiest Thing To Do To Scale
[18:53] Easiest Way to Start Influencer Marketing Program
Notable Quotes
- You always want to keep your eye on those other networks and see where your community is.
- We know that social media marketing is not content marketing content in of itself is its own art. But in order to engage in social media, which is part content, part communication, businesses need content, right. And the content needs to be in different formats in different lengths, different mediums, depending on the network, and obviously our objective.
- Good content is not enough, stop spewing out good content,
the content almost needs to be legendary. - As social media marketers, we're always in this, for lack of a better word, we're always in flux as to, we need to stick with a certain calendar and create a certain amount of content for minimal engagement. But on the other hand, we only want to produce high quality content.
- If the content and the time is not there, don't just do it for the sake of doing it. And it serves as a good reminder.
- Part of the system is we want to have minimal effort to create the best and most awesome content. One of the ways we do that is we repurpose, we leverage what we have.
- It's really about asset management and going in and cataloging all of your assets, setting them up for repurposing, and then having a system in place that allows you to continue the repurposing of that almost automatically in terms of a process.
- It's important to understand that you want to make content that's 10 times better than anything else out there. And that should be the single most driving factor.
- But with Facebook, don't be afraid to repost that content again. And this is where you become less reliant on always having to create mediocre content to fit an editorial calendar. And you begin to scale because you're reusing content, you you're you're repurposing content, you're also reusing content to fill the engagement, the regular engagement needs that your social media channels have.
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Welcome to maximize your social actionable advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social, social media author, speaker, consultant, founder of maximize social business, the Social Media Center of Excellence, and the social tools Summit, Neal Schaffer. Everybody this is Neal Schaffer and welcome to another episode of maximize your social, it was a crazy May. And that's why this podcast is delayed a little bit I was actually speaking at 10 different events in May, in three countries, including Bucharest, Romania, where I spoke for five hours on social media, sort of like an an hour and a half keynote, on the latest trends concepts followed by a four hour workshop on the social media platforms. And as I listen to my voice, now, I realize that my voice is finally getting back to semi normal and probably if I listen to my last few podcasts, you'll you'll hear a difference. So you know, I always try to record these when I'm on the road. My apologies I couldn't get when you in Bucharest it was a pretty amazing place. The workshop was attended by I don't know about 125 people from brands like Carrefour, the famous French supermarkets, orange, the telecommunications, you know mobile provider, as well as agencies as well as small businesses as well as social media professionals, a freelancer. So it was, it was really a great event. And obviously, when you look at social media around the world, it tends to be Facebook centric, in most countries that are just developing. Obviously, Facebook is the number two number three most popular website wherever you go in the world, it seems with the exception of some Asian countries, I digress. But clearly everyone there was really Facebook centric, you know, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, they're sort of out there, but not nearly as popular obviously. And, you know, paid social is an important part of what these brands were doing as well. So it was really, really interesting to get a feel for the market there. And I think that, you know, if you're in one of those countries, you know, it's really hard to compete on Facebook, when all the big brands are on Facebook, obviously. But you know, you always want to keep your eye on those other networks and see where your community is. And you know, after Bucharest I went to United Kingdom and Liz Ozzy on great person follow, she's based out of London, she got a little get together, together. Pun intended. And everyone that was at her get together, maybe that was because it was part of her community. I don't know, it was really an Instagram. And I think you can agree once you begin to use Instagram personally, it's a lot of fun, right? It's on your smartphone, you take a picture, you check out everybody else's pictures. And one of the people will come in actually, she wanted to focus on Instagram as being her competitive advantage, or just a way of differentiating herself in the world of social media marketers, and the same thing can work for brands. And there are ways to engage in Instagram. And I'm going to talk about that in future podcasts. I know I say that a lot. I got to listen, I got to go through all my transcripts and you know, take count of where I said I was going to do it in the future. And it's related to everything I've talked about today. I want to talk about content. And, you know, we know that social media marketing is not content marketing content in of itself is its own art. But in order to engage in social media, which is part content, part communication, businesses need content, right. And the content needs to be in different formats in different lengths, different mediums, depending on the network, and obviously our objective. So today is really to get you thinking about that content. Now. There's a few different approaches we can take here. And I'm going to start Okay, I'm going to do my traditional approach. But I'm going to first start with a really, really good comments or I should say, quote or posts that came out since my last podcast that came out from Rand Fishkin over at Moz Moz has been one of the the leading tools for SEO, but you know, they've added social, if you've ever used Followerwonk, which used to be a standalone Twitter analytics tool, Moz bought them out, they have a lot of great, you know, web, SEO, social tools now, great site, I think it's like $99 a month subscription plan. But needless to say, they're really, you know, a great site with a great tool and a great blog and ran the sort of, you know, the chief officer there and, and he's a great blogger. And he does these Whiteboard Fridays, where he talks in a video with a whiteboard and sort of sketches out his ideas. And he put on one recently about content. And it's time to end the era of good content. And what he meant by that it's a provocative title and all content needs a great title. So he definitely has it down there. So when you start watching the video or reading the transcript, what he's talking about is everybody's doing content more Today, everyone really, and there's so much content out there. And the more brands realize they need to do that as not only for content marketing, but as part of their social media. Obviously, you have a supply and demand, and there's just so much supply, but there's limited eyeballs on limited newsfeeds, right? And limited Google search results. Everyone wants to get to page one. So what Rahm was saying was good content is not enough, stop spewing out good content, the content almost needs to be legend. Wait for it. Dary. Hopefully, you'll enjoy that I, I unveiled my first speech at social media campaign in Victoria, British Columbia recently, for those that were there that are listening, that was a lot of fun. But anyway, it has to be legendary. It has to be epic. And what Rand says is look at like the top Google search results, and basically find content that that's up there like the number one result. And if you can't do anything better than it, in what he says, If you cannot do something that's 10 times better than that content don't. So as social media marketers, we're always in this, for lack of a better word, we're always in flux as to, we need to stick with a certain calendar and create a certain amount of content for minimal engagement. But on the other hand, we only want to produce high quality content. And I for one have been trying to get out of the well need to block x times a week. And although I try to and the podcast is the same, you know, I do try to stick to the once a week podcast, obviously, I've missed out on a week last week. And that's because you know, if the content and the time is not there, don't just do it for the sake of doing it. And it serves as a good reminder. Now, this is like your primary content, right? We have primary content and secondary content. primary content is your blog content, its content that leads people to your website, okay. It could be infographics, if it's linked to content on your website, when people clicked on Pinterest, they get to your website, or it's branded well enough so that when it's shared in social media, it'll drive people to want to go to your website. That's what I mean, when I talk about primary content. When we get above and beyond social media marketing, we talk about content marketing, we get some other things like you know, white papers and ebooks and things you can download, and, you know, live events, webinars, and Google plus hangouts in the whole bit, I guess Google Plus Hangouts. Now it goes back into the social world, webinars being that sort of traditional content marketing in the non social world. So there's obviously a lot of things we can do. And what I want to begin with is I you know, I want to begin with my process, and I'm actually working with a few clients right now, going over this process of just making sense of all the content. Now, you may already be doing this. And if you've been listening to the podcast, this is like episode number 107, or eight or nine or something. I've been talking about this for a while. So you're probably already doing but even if you are, I want you to take a step back. And first of all, I want you to look at what you have, a lot of companies have a lot of content that cannot leverage. I don't want you to reinvent the wheel. You know, probably the topic of my next book, which is undecided though, you'll see a few free ebooks coming from me. Hopefully the next few weeks, at least one of them is about the process of social social media operations, creating a social media system. That makes sense part of the system is we want to have minimal effort to create the best and most awesome content. One of the ways we do that is we repurpose, we leverage what we have, if you have podcasts that you haven't repurposed into blog posts, maybe a blog post that you haven't repurposed in the LinkedIn blog post, maybe you have newsletter content, maybe you have content from a few years ago that is still evergreen in some industries, right? That you can repurpose me I see Google search results, sometimes from 2008 910 11. And it's still relevant because it's evergreen. And that's what evergreen means it's four or five years later, if your consumer brand the same thing, that recipe for, you know, lemon strawberry margarita that was a hit at the Super Bowl four years ago, could be a hit today, right? So it's really about asset management and going in and cataloging all of your assets, setting them up for repurposing, and then having a system in place that allows you to continue the repurposing of that almost automatically in terms of a process. Now, when you do that, if there's not so awesome content, don't repurpose it. I'm only talking about the good stuff, right? So you don't need to do all of it, but it's going to help. But it's the first step in creating an infrastructure and a process that's going to help you going forward. And when you go forward, you plug everything you do into that process. Right. So that's sort of the infrastructure. There's also the strategy. One of the things that I like to do with strategy is I will literally go to Buzzsumo and it's a great tool if you don't know about it, be use easy su Mo and I will plug in the keywords that I'm looking at what are the most shared posts in social media? For certain keywords, you're going to see stuff different on Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. What's your community, maybe if it's a Facebook specific post, you'll want to look at the Facebook shares. If it's more specific LinkedIn demographic, you want to look at the LinkedIn shares. But that's gonna give you a really, really good sense as to what is popular. I'm all about data driven social media marketing. And they provide you a lot of data now, specifically to Facebook and I went over this with a client this morning, we can go to a product, a tool for lack of a better word called Post Planner. And Post Planner allows us to do this, inside of Facebook, looking at photos, links, they also status update ideas, based on the photos and links, we can once again get an idea using their algorithm as to how they rank the virality of different things in Facebook, but it's going to give us a really, really good idea. And we may see things differently than we see on Buzzsumo. Obviously, Google search results is another one, right? Putting the keywords what's showing up there. And with Google Plus. And, you know, obviously, the results that you see may not be the same that I see. So you probably want to log in incognito. And if you don't know how to do that, just you know, look it up on Google, and you'll figure out a way to do it. But that's going to give you an idea as to and you know, I should take a step back here and part of the terms of strategy. And whenever I read a social media strategy, we always talk about keyword strategy as well. And the keywords you're looking at here for your content are different. I had this conversation just a little while ago this morning. The keywords for the content are different for the website. I am a social media speaker, I am not blogging about social media speaking, right? Buffer makes a social media tool for scheduling posts. They don't write blog posts about social media tools, although sometimes they do. They're a blog post about how to be better at social media, social media productivity, social media efficiency. So it's not about those seo keywords, like for me, social media speaker, social media consultant, whatever it might be social media author, those are links that we can put in different profiles around the web. And sometimes we put it in the byline of our posting, right? Maybe sometimes we can fit it in, you know, last week as I did a social media keynote speech, you know, hyperlinked to the event I spoke at, you add those in, but we're talking about the content, people are searching for the content in order to find you, right? So what are those Content Keywords going to be that fit into your content marketing, your blog posts, the content that you share? In social media, it helps you both curate as well as share relevant things that help you build a stronger brand, so that when you do post your own content, you have a greater chance of having a bigger community and getting more engagement and ideally, more traffic or whatever objective you have or more conversions with that content. So that's the infrastructure. That's the strategy, the execution is there's obviously a little bit more to it, you know, above and beyond that, we look at what are the categories of content or the content buckets, right? For those of you that read maximize your social, you should be familiar with this. How do we align all that with our content buckets? Well, this is where you come out with the old color coded editorial calendar. And you put things in priority order. And you basically fill in those blanks on each day of the week, so that you know what you need to post now with blog, YouTube, you know, LinkedIn, blog posts infographic with these unique types of content, you're not going to be creating new things on a daily basis, you're going to be doing them on a weekly or monthly basis. But it's important to understand that you want to make content that's 10 times better than anything else out there. And that should be the single most driving factor, the secondary content that you engage with the curated content, you know, on Facebook, quote, images, or you know, whatever it might be the content that's not directly related to to that ROI that you indicated in your social media strategy. That's easy to continue to do on an ongoing basis. Right. And part of I should have mentioned when I talked about repurposing is also repeatedly posting your own content in social media, it's evergreen, one of the reasons why I love Post Planner, and I'm going to be writing a blog post about it, because Post Planner has truly helped me find my Facebook Mojo. And it took a while actually took a long time to find it after a concerted effort. But it's really helped me do that. And one of the functionalities that Post Planner has is the ability to repost things that you schedule in Post Planner. So Post Planner has a buffer like functionality, you pick the days of the week, the times, you can also pick the type of content photo link or status update. So when you add new photos or links or status updates, they basically go into the buffer and it automatically calculates everything for you. And then that's awesome. And it has the curation engine, which is awesome. But the killer functionality that it has, is when you post something in the queue, you can decide to Riku it after it's published. Now the client that I was talking to this morning, they do a lot of news jacking. It's not evergreen content, its content where they want to publish it in the first 24 hours and that's it. But they also are creating evergreen content. It's the evergreen content. intent that if you posted monthly look, you know, even for my most popular Facebook posts, and I just actually published a review of Agora Pulse on maximize social business where I share some of the stats. So you can actually check it out and see, I think my most popular posts got 40% of my fans solid in terms of organic impressions. So that's awesome. So I have like 6000 fans 2200 2300 2004, and it got to see it. But that's 3600 that didn't get to see it at any given time, and you're getting new fans every day, right? Or you should be. So when you're looking at it that way. And it's the same thing with Twitter, it's almost a best practice to tweet the same thing a few times. And if you use buffer with the Chrome extension, and you use their power scheduler, which is another awesome tool, it'll actually suggest post now post in eight hours, post tomorrow, post a week from now. So that's indicating, after you tweet, you should tweet at least three more times. Some people do more, some people do less. But with Facebook, don't be afraid to repost that content again. And this is where you become less reliant on always having to create mediocre content to fit an editorial calendar. And you begin to scale because you're reusing content, you you're you're repurposing content, you're also reusing content to fill the engagement, the regular engagement needs that your social media channels have. And I found it to be quite successful in all honesty, not only on Twitter, but on Facebook as well haven't done it as much on the other channels. But I do know people even on Google Plus, they'll post the same thing twice, they'll come back maybe a month later, give some time separation. And you know, not everybody's seeing all the content all the time. Even my client was saying, hey, you know, this is NEWS, Jackie, and it was a week all we published it, it's been one of our most popular posts. Well, not everybody is seeing all the news within 24 hours. If you know, if President Obama said I'm going to declare a nuclear war, you'll probably see that news within 24 hours. But for all the other things that are happening in the world, you don't have to like do it within an hour. Unless you know, really becoming the Associated Press or some news authority is your goal, you can wait a little while you'd be surprised with the results. So you begin to revive or to tweak your social media content marketing, for lack of a better word, by following this right by first of all, cataloging your assets as part of your infrastructure. Number one, to creating this system of repurposing three creating a system of reusing. So maybe on Twitter, you don't have edge rank. So it's not as important. But on Facebook, you really want to get some metrics down as to your average organic reach or average engagement. And when something goes over it, and that content is evergreen, why not republish it again, right. And then we have our keyword strategy and content strategy, which is, you know, this is going to be driving everything that we do. And then we have the actual execution of that in an editorial calendar, which for the content should be easier once you start using the philosophy of reusing. And there's other things we can use to help us scale. Without our own content and content creation. One of the easiest things that we can do, which I recommend for all my clients, you've heard the term influencer marketing influencer outreach, I just offered a tip to simply measured that was published a few days ago, you should check that out. I posted it both on my personal Facebook wall, Neal Schaffer, as well as maximize social business, but you should take a look at some of the tips there. But you know, one of the things they said in the article was that 60% of businesses are looking to increase their influencer marketing budget in 2015. And it's all part of leveraging the other those of you who have seen me speak know that as a brand, as a business, it can be lonely out there, let's get the help of others, whether it be employees through employee advocacy fans through brand advocacy, or quote unquote, influential people in our industry, through influencer marketing. So one of the easiest ways you can start an influencer marketing program, after you choose those people that you think are influential to your target audience, is to send them social signals by sharing their content in social media. And when you share it, you share it in a way. So it shows up as an ad mentioned, it shows up as an engagement. And maybe you offer a little bit more so that when they see that pops up in their dashboard, they have little respect for you, instead of just someone that is retweeting everyone else's stuff without adding any original comments or content. It's going to help you get a leg above the competition. It's going to help you curate great content, and you are building rapport with influences as you do it. And I think that was the message of the tip that I contributed to that simply measured posts that you should definitely check out. Hey, we covered a lot of ground today. As you know, whenever I talk about something like content, which was the original theme of this podcast, there's so much associated with it that ends up coming out in this free flowing conversation that I hope you enjoyed, you know, my podcasts. My mission really is to provide this sort of free flowing, unstructured. I know some people do it the Other way around, and they'll write a blog post, then they'll, they'll sort of create a podcast or on the blog post, I am the opposite of that. I create these podcasts based on my experience. They're very much in the moment in the spur of the moment when I'm working with a client. When I have an aha moment, an epiphany moment, these are the things I want to share with you. And today, it was content. Thank you, as always, for listening. I appreciate your comments. I know there's a lot of you listening and I'd really appreciate your help. If you have the time to just go out there and iTunes. If you haven't subscribed, subscribe. And if you could write a little review to recommend this to others. That would be really, really incredible. I'd be incredibly grateful. So feel free to reach out if you want me to cover anything in this podcast and wherever you are in the world. Well, first of all, make it a great June put wherever you are in the world. Make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate all of your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social calm. Please also make sure to check out Neil's new community, the Social Media Center of Excellence at social media ce o e.com. As well as Neil's first social media event, the social tools Summit, which will be in Boston on May 12. And in the Bay Area this fall. Thanks again and make it a social day.