It’s no secret – social media marketing is complicated. Not only do you need to know your target audience, you have to know how to reach them, where to reach them, when to reach them, and (the hardest part) what’s going to grab their attention.
When you’ve hired a top social media team to handle your campaigns and bring in the big business, you’ve already made a step in the right direction by letting an expert take the reigns. But you might get curious; how do they know what to post? Well, we’re going to let you in on some of the secrets that our social media team uses to find the perfect content for any social media calendar.
The first thing to do while finding content is assessed what’s already been done. Has a post made six months ago continued to get interaction with clients? What about a post that was a witty and immediate response to something that happened, say, in a Super Bowl commercial? If anything is soaring past the other posts, that’s a great baseline to keep in mind about while curating new content. Knowing what works and what gets ignored for each individual brand or industry is crucial, and once we’ve got that locked down we can begin setting up the social media calendar.
With the basics in place (think something like bi-weekly coupon posts that grab consumer attention and drive business), we turn to researching the top trends and news surrounding the client’s industry. By keeping up with what’s happening in the field, we can schedule posts that have a more immediate reach.
For example, if you’re a remodeling company and you know that HGTV is about to drop a brand new television show that focuses on kitchens, it would be a good idea to schedule a post that highlights kitchen renovations for the weekend the show premieres. We turn to all sorts of news sites, social media platforms, and even word of mouth to find out what’s hot and what’s not.
If we still need content ideas after researching the industry, we’ll turn to an outside source to check out what’s going on throughout the Internet. A great tool to use for searching content is Buzzsumo, which looks through keywords related to niche businesses and brings up what the competition is doing. Although we’ll never copy a post or idea, it’s a great way to get the creative juices flowing. Even social media platforms like Twitter, where you can look at the thoughts of any company, can be wonderful for curating great content.
Social media calendars are the bread and butter of social media marketing, but they do take a lot of time and thought. Finding what to post can be a long process, but the payoff of quality content is reaching the most qualified customers with a minimal spend, which makes it all worth it to us.