Is it love at first sight?
This is a great question to ask yourself when it comes to content curation to share on your blog and social media channels. With all the conversations about strategy and approach, messaging and creating content that will convert readers to customers, it comes back to a basic principle in social media—are you creating content that your audience will love? If you can’t answer “yes” to this question, then it’s time to rethink your approach. While it sounds quite simple, often it’s more difficult than it sounds at the outset. The truth is, there are many companies and brands out there that are just not that sexy, and coming up with love-at-first-sight content is just plain hard. This is what makes my job interesting–figuring out what the love-at-first-sight content is and helping clients to create it.
Does your audience fall in love with your content?
For digital marketers, it’s a constant struggle to create that compelling, love-at-first-sight content. Even the sexiest of brands or topics can struggle to constantly be in the love zone. But that’s the point. We create, we curate, we try and then we do it again. We use metrics to evaluate what really was a success and then we try to figure out how to do that again. That goes for campaigns as well. Sometimes you hit it and the metrics match up, and sometimes they don’t. What you do with what you learn is the most important part of this process. Recently, I was reviewing 2014 metrics for a client and noticed a major bump in Pinterest traffic. I dove into that “bump” to see where it was coming from. Interestingly enough, it was from one popular blog post that had made been repined many times. I reviewed the post and the boards that repined it and brought the information to my client along with recommendations of possible posts that may garner similar attention. This post was a shining example of love-at-first-sight content.
Using what you learn
So how do we use the data and information from analytics like this? In this example, we can start with the topic. Travel is very popular on Pinterest, and it was worth noting that months such as March, April and May as well as September, October and November are good months to write about travel plans–these were the most popular months for the blog post we were analyzing. Additionally, using Pinterest is worthwhile for this topic area, and future posts and testing shall ensue. Also, it’s worth considering testing paid promotion with the same post on Facebook and Twitter—perhaps people are eager there as well. The takeaway is that metrics are just numbers until we analyze them and create strategy. To me, the most exciting part of social media is analyzing the metrics and figuring out what’s next. Analyzing metrics may sound like it’s time consuming and it is. But if you consistently analyze the metrics for your content, it can be worth the effort. If you find the love-at-first-site content, you can work to create and curate similar content and build on your online footprint. Your content is not always going to be love-at-first-site content, and to create and curate compelling content you have to be ever-present, creative and thoughtful about what you do. It’s an art and a science, and it’s all about the love! Go give some love and get some love back today! — Photo Credit
