Social Media Recipe for Success - Part 3 - Getting Organised!

We're at part three of our Recipe for Social Media Success, parts one and two looked at creating an effective strategy and engaging with consumers but this section focuses on how to source and organise your most important social media asset; content.

Content Sourcing

We believe engagement is the key to a successful social media presence but it's easy to create a presence and not find effective engagement methods. Through our years of managing platforms for brands, we know that successful interaction comes from the posting of interesting, valuable content. But how do you source the inspiring content?

A few tips...

• Pick the right sources - follow, friend and read other relevant social accounts. Don't forget to retweet, share and link to the interesting content you find. The other accounts will give you some inspiration to generate your own content but will also allow you to build a meaningful relationship with them

• The aim of content sourcing is to create a bank of relevant content to then develop into a content calendar that spans across years, months and weeks. We've developed a customisable content calendar planner to help you do this

• Keep a list of burning questions from fans - these can form the core of your social topics. Take the time to read questions, while responding and adding key topics to your bank of content to release at various times

• Use Google Keywords - this free tool is useful for discovering keywords you may not have thought about for your brand. You can then develop themes around those keywords and creating unique, interesting posts

• Remember quality over quantity! It's better to find a few really interesting, unique posts each week than hundreds of random, un-inspiring ones! If that means you only have content for three posts a week on Facebook for example, then so be it

Content Organisation

So you now have a bank of relevant content to push out to your online consumers via social media but how do you organise this information? We've found that creating a social media schedule and adding content to that is one of the most valuable things you can do. It saves time, ensures posts are timely and also enables a focus on key messages.

Things to think about...

• Your content schedule - as you can see from our customisable content planner, it's best to break down your plan into themes and then content areas to focus on at various times. Add in relevant awareness days and you'll never be stuck for inspiring content again!

• Find your optimum frequency - after creating the content plan, if you decide you're only able to post and respond to people once a day then that is fine. It's best for you comfortably manage your presence and get used to engaging as it'll help you to grow it in the future

There's nothing more inspiring on social media than seeing a brand discovering what their online consumers want to see and creating unique content for them. The above tips and tools will help you to develop your presence and manage it in an effective way for you!

Have fun!

Jane x

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