Thursday, January 27, 2011

5 Key Tips for a Successful Social Media Content Strategy

Frank Marquardt is director of Content Strategy at The Barbarian Group, a digital services and creation company with an almost radical devotion to Internet culture and nice red Swedish Fish™.

Good, smart, fun and relevant content should be at the core of any social media strategy. Great content should reflect your brand and give people a reason to stay engaged.

That’s why it’s critical to build a content strategy into your social media campaign. Without a framework for what you say and a plan for how and when you say it, you risk leaving your audiences, at best, confused. At worst, they’ll ignore you. Who wants that?

These five content strategy techniques will build better relationships and earn your brand better results on the social web.

1. Know Your Voice

Everything you say on the social web should “sound” like your brand. It’s something Skittles does well. Some of its status messages garner more than 1,000 comments, and many exceed 10,000 “Likes” on Facebook.

Why are these little content snippets so successful? The writing is just like the candy: colorful, playful and imaginative. The pithy, daily, flavor-packed observations are reliably surprising. You can relish today’s post and look forward to tomorrow’s — like candy in word form.

2. Time Your Content

Create a calendar that spells out what you’re going to say and when you’re going to say. Make sure it’s relevant to where people are in their lives and the season. Nobody cares about Santa Claus in January, but a whole lot of people care about sales after Christmas. A quick look at Google Trends will confirm that.

Banana Republic’s tweeters got the memo.

Macy’s and Walmart didn’t.

3. Know Your Audience

Why does somebody follow you? Why do they like you? It’s because your brand offers them something. Make sure you deliver. Here’s SKYY Vodka on Twitter with a message that’s relevant to most of its followers about the ultimate Bloody Mary, with personable responses to those people engaging in the conversation.

Compare that to Grey Goose, which hasn’t tweeted since September 2010.

And Grey Goose’s Facebook wall features a weekly “drink card” with identical copy.

Grey Goose isn’t talking to me, it’s talking at me. Points for posting regularly, but why should we care?

4. Solve Problems

Humans have survived for so long because they’re great at answering questions like “What do I do when my t-shirt’s stitching rips?” We all love it when somebody helps us the way Threadless does in this Facebook string.

Give your audience the tools to help themselves, and make sure your social media team has the right information to share. By making things easier for others, we build trust. Trust strengthens our relationship.

5. Be True

Good content isn’t fake. It doesn’t make promises that it can’t keep. It’s human and honest. It has a personality and a point of view. It’s intrinsically social. That’s why it engages us. That’s why we follow or like your brand.

Your audiences will sniff it out if you’re pretending. But if you’re fun, honest and relevant, they’re going to recommend you to their friends. Isn’t that what social media’s all about?

Digitalia