November 8, 2012
Unless you have a social newsroom churning away in the background, keeping your site and social estates replenished with fresh content is no mean feat.
And with real-time social media platforms such as Twitter churning out a record 32 million tweets in the space of 24 hours during US Election day, it’s easy to see how fast social media moves, how rapidly content is shared and how quickly topical tie-ins can become old hat.
It’s fast, it’s overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Or time-consuming. Consider the following three content creation tips when looking for inspiration:
1) Finish what you start – content should tell a story and every story has a beginning, middle and end. If your company is throwing an event, then begin with a hefty publicity push, (blog posts, tweets, Facebook Events). Push out live tweets during the event, preferably with Twitpics of attendees having a fabulous time. Capture photos, videos and vox pops on the day and follow-up by sharing these out socially afterwards
Tool tip – Storify is a useful tool for curating and collating content around a given theme. Capture everything from tweets and videos to images in one place and add the perfect ending to your content marketing activity
2) Be topical – take advantage of seasonal tie-ins with relevance to your brand or product. From national days and weeks, to key calendar events, a simple nod to these will add relevance and more reason for consumers to share
Tool tip – HootSuite is a social media management dashboard that enables you to filter conversations by keywords and hashtags to identify topical content curation opportunities
3) Recycle – you don’t always need to rethink the wheel. If you need a fast fix of content, revisit your archive and consider how old posts can be updated with more recent stats and current thinking
Tool tip – LinkedIn Today is a news aggregation service within LinkedIn, which collates stories recommended and shared by industry connections and peers. Useful for following the most up-to-date thought-leadership which can be reworked into existing content to provide a fresh slant