Anyone who manages a multitude of social media accounts knows the pressure of coming up with great content every day. You can’t let the accounts go fallow or engagement drops and that can generate stories from people wondering if your campaign or group died.
But you can’t just post anything, because that reflects badly on your campaign or group, too. And even posting bad content requires finding the bad content to post.
Make sure you post content people will want to engage with — they love it, they hate it, they want to comment on it. If people feel only “meh” about your content, they won’t interact with and share it, and you’ll not get additional reach (plus the algorithms will punish you going forward.)
Post a mix of content. Make sure to mix in photos, links, status updates, and videos —especially live videos. If you only post one type of content, that will limit the size of your audience because the algorithm prioritizes content for people based on their individual preferences. Your link posts won’t reach people who prefer videos, and vice versa.
Post much more frequently. Try to get consistent on posting and the algorithms will reward you. Aim for at least once a day if you can.
Now, how do you find that great topical engaging content without spending all your time on the hunt?
In my work, I liberally borrow from other accounts that are doing it well, subscribe to way too many e-newsletters and have a ridiculous amount of google alerts on various topics.
I also use the “save post” function in Facebook whenever I come across something interesting that could be used for later. But it gets overwhelming to sort through all that content squirreled away, and hard to find the best stuff.
There are tools that can help you gather content. This summer, I worked with the ActionSprout team on organizing the health care vertical for their social media tool.
At the same time, I’ve been able to use the tool for my own clients, to save time and increase social media performance for the Facebook pages I administer.
In case you haven’t come across ActionSprout before, it’s a free-to-nonprofits/affordable-to-campaigns social media curation tool for Facebook. It’ll help you identify top-performing content on a variety of issues, and then schedule out that content for your pages at the best times to reach your personal audience.
As a result, I have been able to ramp up the content and engagement on all the Facebook pages I regularly manage over the past few months, while taking up less of my time. The increased regular top-quality content helps those pages reach a larger and larger audience.
Now, I take a day or two and schedule out the upcoming week for my clients — but paying attention to current events and pausing content if real world news affects scheduling.
I spend much less time curating, as opposed to strategy and deep thinking on longer term goals for my clients, while dramatically increasing engagement and performance on their pages. If only there was a tool similar to this for Twitter.
Laura Packard (@lpackard) is a partner at PowerThru Consulting, a progressive digital strategy and social media firm.