Things to comprehend in social strategy
Social Media Listening Besides keyword research, the most important way to learn your audience is to perform social media listening and generate social media business value. This helps you determine what conversations your target audience personas are participating in. If you learn their interests and pain points in this way, you can build engaging content for them. Studies suggest that around 70% of the buyer journey happens prior to filling out a contact form, downloading a free trial, or in some way indicating direct interest in a product. Some of that discovery happens in venues outside your website—in forums, blogs, or other social media social media analysis platforms such as Twitter. Listening to these conversations is obviously very important in learning your audience. But how do you find the conversations of interest to your target audiences? Once again, you need tools. Most listening tools work in roughly the same way. You input the keywords related to your marketing campaigns, and the tools find conversations containing those keywords. Some tools also offer a relevance feedback loop so you can say which conversations are on point—and which are irrelevant—so that the tools can better isolate the right conversation. Most tools can also analyze those relevant conversations for positive or negative sentiment. You can imagine that the negative sentiment conversations might be good candidates for identifying the language around pain points. Determining which negative topics have significant conversation volume can provide fodder for your content marketing. A common mistake is to enter your brand names into the social media listening tool. While this might help you understand the social sentiment related to your brand, it cannot help you understand the conversation volume related to the problems your products are designed to solve. Most of the conversations in social media do not mention brands. They talk about issues or problems. It’s your job to build and market solutions to those problems. So learning what unbranded conversations are taking place related to your solutions will get you the fullest understanding of customer pain points. The good news is that you already know the words you need to enter into your social listening tools because you found them through your keyword research. In this way, you can understand not only the words that become the building blocks of your content but the pain points your content is designed to solve. Your content marketing also benefits from social media listening by learning which conversations you should engage in. Think of social media content strategy as a cocktail party with many people that you don’t know very well. After you get your drink, you linger on the edge of a conversation until it is appropriate to contribute. And you make sure you contribute something positive without being too pushy. If you do it well, you might come away with a fledgling relationship with one of the participants in the conversation. At minimum, you learn a little more about what they care about. Social content done with a self-promotional attitude resembles pushy, selfcongratulatory content marketing—inside-out “look at me” marketing, rather than marketing intended to truly help your customers—and it does more harm than good. It is better to refrain from participating in social content than to do it badly. That said, it’s not enough to simply contribute something helpful and then disappear. Developing a relationship is a commitment to being persistently helpful. Before leaving the subject of social media, you should realize that marketers often won’t use the insights from keyword research and social listening if you force them to leave their content authoring systems to check a resource on the company’s intranet. Marketers are very busy and typically work on tight deadlines. Perhaps one in four marketers will be diligent enough to check a corporate resource on such things as style, let alone audience research data. Marketers need the insights integrated into the tools they use to plan, create, curate, and manage content. So it’s not only important to have the right audience research systems in place but to ensure that their insights are readily available and served up inside the content messaging systems—right when authors need them. Content Messaging Systems Without content messaging systems, you’d have no content at all. Let’s look at three main systems that produce the content in our world: Content authoring systems. These are tools to help your writers, designers, and user experience (UX) practitioners build effective web and social content. For authors and editors, the state of the art looks like a word processor but actually builds structured web content under the covers. Designers then flow this code into elegant user experiences with the help of UX experts. Content management systems. These are typically complex databases that populate web templates with content elements (headings, body copy, metatags, etc.). We say they are complex because they contain many subsystems for specific aspects of content creation and maintenance. Taxonomy and tagging systems. These databases of controlled values map the way you name products and services with the way your clients and prospects think and talk about them. These are probably the systems you know best, but don’t worry if they are not familiar to you. The following sections walk you through what you need to know. Content Authoring Systems Of all the systems we describe in this chapter, perhaps the most misunderstood are content authoring systems. More money has probably been spent on systems to create web pages and multimedia assets than on any other systems, and in many ways that money has been misspent. The problem is that we have been using the wrong kinds of systems, in large measure, to create assets that do not have the characteristics needed for modern content marketing. Many content assets created today (such as white papers, case studies, and data sheets) are published in print-oriented systems such as PDF, which falls short of what is needed for today’s marketing. Modern content marketing needs well-structured content. What do we mean by that? Read on for the main requirements that are emerging for modern content, which content authoring systems are being pressed to support. Better Findability Simply put, if no one finds your content, it’s worthless, regardless of how much effort and money went into creating it. James was the editor of a large organization within IBM that created a lot of white papers. One year, he edited 300 30- to 40-page white papers, line by line, to ensure that they were the highest quality IBM could muster. At the end of the year, the entire corpus totaled 25 downloads. So the first thing he did to start the next year was to optimize them for search (which turns out to be a simple thing for PDFs). That year, the same set of white papers got 150,000 downloads. But times have changed. Each year audiences seem less willing to slog through a 40- page white paper, at least up front. They need to trust that the white papers and other collateral you develop to solve their content problems are worth their time. A major part of findability is building this trust with simpler, more accessible content. Audiences need simple, straightforward answers to their questions. If you can take all the content out of a white paper and break it into discrete, snackable chunks that answer specific questions, and then serve those chunks to users when they need the answers in the format that works best for them, you will be solving the central problem of content marketing. You can’t do this without an authoring environment that enables writers and editors to focus on answering those questions and building experiences that string together the answers in common user information paths. Eventually, you can present the whole paper, but you need to do it just one chapter or section at a time. Simpler Sharing Digital content has always been about sharing. The original use case of the web at CERN was to enable physicists to share information more quickly than they could with the traditional journal model, with its layers of review and perfectionism, not to mention printing and distribution. The first form of sharing was simply linking your research to other related research. And that model persists today for much web content. Following the tradition started by Tim Berners-Lee, the innovators of the web have built systems like Twitter and Facebook to enhance the ability for users to share content. In measuring these systems, we have learned a great deal about the kinds of content that people share—and we have found that it’s small, like short video clips or quotes. Only about .5% of users share pages by using the share buttons on pages. Most page sharing is done by simply copying and pasting the URL into a sharing tool such as HootSuite, shortening it, and writing a tweet or post that complements the link. This is called “dark social.” According to Rio Social, a company that developed a way to track dark social, about 6% of users typically share pages in this way, on average. It’s still a low number compared to snackable content. But pages do get shared in small numbers if they’re well built—single purpose and authoritative. White papers and other monolithic content doesn’t get shared all that much. Since most companies create many web pages and white papers and not many small digital assets such as infographics, they suffer from a lack of social sharing. Structured content can help solve this problem. A case study, for example, might contain a set of vital statistics on a company, a public profile of an interviewee, a pull quote, an infographic, and a video. Though few people would share the whole case study, they might be inclined to share some of those components and perhaps link back to the full study in their posts. This can work only if your case studies are chunked up and coded in parts that are assembled as web pages but shareable in chunks.
