“If you want to make a song more hummy, add a few tiddely poms.” – Winnie the Pooh.
No matter what you want your website, social media stream or blog to do for your business, compelling content is non negotiable. Content that connects with your stakeholders, inspires action and arms them with a story worth repeating.
Australians spend more time talking to their friends and colleagues about what they like and don’t like than their US counterparts. Now that we pass a significant part of our week online, story telling has become entrenched in our online activity. Take a look at the first on and offline study on word of mouth done last year by Keller Fay – you may be surprised!
With compelling content, a weak performance in other areas of your website may be overlooked. With weak content, even the most beautiful and easy to use websites will ultimately fail to achieve any notable level of success and forget search engine optimisation (SEO) – Google is too wise to keyword density.
When you transition your activity to social media, there are a number of other considerations that you must also understand and integrated to ensure your content is like social media honey. This is especially pertinent when using Twitter as there are many acronyms to also adopt and employ.
The following recommendations will improve the chance for your content to be picked up and shared by others; they’ll also assist in understanding what your followers like, what they don’t and the relevance of that follower network to your business.
Types of social media content.
Keep your audience engaged with a diverse array of content – you will be engaging with them on a regular basis, so consider this when constructing your communications. No one likes to listen to anyone droning on oblivious to their audience. Consider mixing up the your communications in the following ways:
- Informational: Informing your community on relevant company or industry topics.
- Conversational: Asking questions, seeking feedback, asking for help.
- Editorial: Offering an opinion on industry-related issues.
- Promotional: Syndicating your content, including blog posts; important website pages and press releases; announcing and updating sales / event promotions; announcing, updating and managing contests and polls.
- Replies: Responding to questions and inquiries, reacting to other posts.
- Event updates: Publishing real-time tweets when attending seminars, presentations, conventions, etc.
Use of Hash Tags.
A hash tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. Categorising your tweets by the hash symbol (#) plus keyword will allow people to easy find content on topics that interest them. It also increases the change of information being discovered by people outside your network of followers.
Twitter specific acronyms.
Twitter has a number of conventions when acknowledging your sources and these are taken seriously. Most of us know the ‘RT’ – a ReTweet is when you republish another person’s tweet to the wider community. Acknowledging the source of your content is considered best practice on Twitter.
Other ways to reference people include:
- ‘MT’ – a Modified Tweet is an edited RT (see above). This reference is generally used when you have run out of characters to retweet and you need to reduce copy.
- ‘HT’ – a Hat Tip is used when someone has given you information offline, that you are now publishing online.
Other handy tools to help your content to shine:
Publishing Tools.
Ensuring regular updates on your social media feeds can be difficult to manage. Social Media dashboards such as www.hootsuite.com and www.tweetdeck.com allow you to manage multiple social media updates at once as well as schedule of updates in advance.
Content Curation.
There are a number of tools that allow people to display twitter content in an inordinate variety of ways. Content curation is made easy with http://paper.li/ a tool which allows you to create an online newspaper on specific topics. Note: well chosen hash tags increase your chance of being featured in these online newspapers – the value being that they are likely to expose your brand to a complete network of untapped people. For those of you with a particular topic of interest, they allow a quick scan of relevant news. Here is an example of a daily online newspaper focused on aged care in Australia.
Social Media Monitoring Tools.
Social media monitoring tools range in price significantly according to their offering. There are a number of tools on the market that, when used in conjunction with one another, provide a reasonable overview of social media activity. This is extremely beneficial when managing your own online channels, but also to monitor industry and competitor activity. These tools include:
Take the time to improve your content as well as understand its impact and your stakeholders will thank you for it.
