Optimising Your Social Content Strategy

The transition into the new year presents an opportunity to reflect on the current state of social marketing, and to take a look at what will be crucial to brands’ success on social in the year to come.

2013 saw a more complete integration of social media into brand’s overall marketing and business strategies.

For many brands, at the start, social media was run by fairly isolated teams, in a way that was not fully coordinated with their other marketing activities. Recently more and more brands have realised that this approach was not ideal, as it did not allow them to harness the full potential of social media to help them reach their business goals in a meaningful way. Brands have begun to bring social into the fold across their organisational structure, and manage their social media presence in a more goal-oriented way.

This shift was absolutely necessary for brands: as the number of active users on Facebook climbs over 1 billion, it has become crystal clear that social channels have become one of the most effective avenues for reaching clients and prospects.

But the transition is not without complications.

Social media is a completely different world, with a different set of rules, than those that a

lot of brands were used to playing by. Previously, the marketing cycle demanded months

of careful planning, strategic media buys, and a long creative lead time with room for

multiple layers of approval.

In social media, certain projects still follow this pattern, but others need to be executed in

a timeframe of a few days, or a few hours (or less), often demanding collaboration

"Brands have begun to bring social into the fold across their organisational structure, and manage their social media presence in a more goal-oriented way."

Why you need a social content strategy01

Social content strategy

Content planning

Though social content can have a shorter lead time than other types, brand communica-tions on social, as elsewhere, benefit from advance planning. On an organizational level, seeing what is scheduled for publication in the upcoming weeks gives a better perspec-tive on the overall content mix, and allows for edits and adjustments if needed.

Engaging customers means reaching them wherever they are. For most brands, this means Facebook, Twitter and Google+, at the very least. But depending on your social strategy and goals, and your target audience, you may need to manage a presence across multiple other networks, from Snapchat to Pinterest, to Sina Weibo to Vine.

Wherever your brand is present, to optimise your social content, it’s crucial to know what will be posted where, and when. Coordinating your content across all social media,

between multiple internal and external teams, across different geographic zones, on multiple channels on a real-time basis. More and more emphasis has to be placed on flexibility and speed, while still maintaining the rigor and quality that the prior system was set up to ensure.

In this whitepaper we will lay out several aspects of brands’ social content strategies that are essential to their success.

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Social content strategy

not just on a network by network basis, makes it easier to ensure that your are hitting all your targeted channels, that you are varying types of content to increase engagement, and that publications are adapted for the networks on which they are being published.

Further, social networks reward consistency. Publishing content regularly has been shown, across multiple social networks, to increase the size of your audience. And, with the right tools, brands have the ability to see at which times published content drives the highest engagement. Taking this into account when establishing an editorial calendar will increase the effectiveness of your social content.

Social content strategy

Adapt your content across markets

International brands need to manage content creation and publication across dozens of countries and many time zones. To optimise engagement in time zones separated by many hours, brands need the flexibility to schedule content for publication at one time in one geographic region, and at a different hour in another.

A single brand now has the ability to run not just a global Facebook page, but also “child” pages for individual markets. This means they can create content that is honed to fit the language, culture, campaigns, seasons or more in any given market. This increases the likelihood that the content will be relevant to the users who see it, making them more likely to click, share and act on it. It’s not only on Facebook, but on all a brand’s social pres-ences that content must be adapted.

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The right tools allow your teams to be fast and agile, letting them produce their best work.

Social has added a new set of challenges in terms of creative work. The rise of real time marketing, which truly took off last year, means that for some content, the creation and approval process needs to be severely compressed in terms of time, without suffering in terms of quality. Brands need to equip their teams with tools and processes that allow them to work quickly and effectively.

Concretely, this could take the form of tools to share content—photos/graphics, videos, copy and more, in a finished or unfinished state, along with notes for its use. Once crea-tive teams have molded these content building blocks into something viable, they must be sent to the correct team member very quickly, so that that person can give notes and it can be modified for publication.

It’s imperative that this procedure be streamlined as much as possible, opening the door to in-the-moment social content publication and driving more engagement across social channels. The right tools allow your teams to be fast and agile, letting them produce their best work. This frees up resources and time, allowing them to focus on optimising their content and strategy.

Tools to manage workflow04

Social content strategy

Looking beyond the workflow process on a micro level, brands also need to consider how they empower internal and external teams to collaborate on social content activities. Many brands work with agencies to varying degrees on social and other digital projects. And brands need to collaborate with teams across different divisions and markets.

The decentralized nature of social networks can make it easier for a team in Brazil to create and post content one day, and a team in China to do the same the next. But to manage social presences and coordinate more effectively two things need to happen: These relationships and responsibilities need to be clearly defined, and different collabo-rators need to be properly equipped to work together flexibly and effectively.

Effective enterprise collaboration 05

Social content plays a crucial role for brands who want to engage their existing clients and reach new ones. As brands become more sophisticated and numerous on social, there is more and more competition for fan attention. Brands that want to perform on social media need the right people, the right tools, and the right strategy. As social conti-nues to evolve in the future, brands will need to evolve and adapt with it. But if these elements are in place, they will grow their odds of social success.

Raising the odds of success on social06

Social content strategy

To learn more about Nuke get in touch with us at: contact@nukesuite.com

Nuke is the first comprehensive social data management platform. Nuke was created to help brands and agencies increase the impact of their social media marketing activities. Launched in 2013, It is used by over 150 top brands and agencies worldwide to enhance their presence on social.