Beth Kanter

Beth Kanter is a consultant, author, influencer. virtual trainer & nonprofit innovator in digital transformation & workplace wellbeing.

One Simple Secret to Social Media Success: Post Consistent Content Your Audience Loves

Filed Under: Digital Strategy, Measurement

Post consistent content that your audience loves and your social media will be successful.   Is it that simple?  Yes and no.    Using best practices and tips based on research can help you improve.  But if you want to get better results, you need a content strategy, strong creation and curation skills, and a  robust measurement process.   And the latter is not about gathering data – it is about making sense of it and using it to continually improve.
One technique I use to get insights from my social media data is to do an analytics  Rorschach Test.   What does the visual look like?    This past week, my Facebook insights chart of reach and engagement looked like a pregnant woman lying on her back or maybe a wide and steep mountain.      What’s going on here?
For much of June,  I was not posting regularly because I was delivering training in India for Packard Grantees – and I didn’t always have reliable Internet access and I didn’t pre-schedule posts.   You are only as good as your last Facebook post and if you don’t post consistently, using  an editorial calendar – then your engagement and reach drops.       If you are just posting any old content, not what your audience loves, then you won’t see much engagement.   And, if you don’t bother to look at your data, get insights, and make changes – you are wasting your time.
After returning from my trip and getting over jet lag,  I restarted my editorial calendar – drawing on the insights that I have gained over the past three years to identify and share content that I know resonates with my audience.    I came across this post called “10 Types of Content That We All Love” and I know from my tracking, that my audience tends to love #2 and #9 (at least on Facebook).    I focused on sharing content that they want based on data.  In fact, several posts received highest ever in the number of shares such as this one.
In early July, Facebook announced that it will include mobile data.   Facebook  reach metrics will now include a combined number that accounts for both desktop and mobile reach.
And Facebook added that it will load new stories quickly, eliminating interruption in how users scroll through their news feeds. Reach  may be affected in insights, but the way users see the stories will be unchanged.    So, it is unclear how much adding mobile metrics has made a mountain out of my mole hill, but it is a reminder to me to post consistently and be highly selective in the type of content I curate and share on Facebook Page.
Because I am developing some material for upcoming training workshops this month and next,  I’ve been on the prowl for useful and practice resources for content marketing.

I am a huge fan of cheat sheets, one pagers that consolidate the best practices or tips.  I like to them print out and keep by my computer as a visual reminder. I know from my past data that my audience also loves practical cheat sheets too.  So, I’m always on the hunt for good ones.   I found this posting guide from Top Nonprofits — and really liked it and added it to my Pinterest Content Strategy board.      Yesterday,  I grabbed a screenshot and posted it to my Facebook Page.  I watched as it got hundreds of likes and hundreds of shares and more than the usual comments and double the highest reach ever.
Success is based on knowing what content your audience likes based on making sense of measurement so you can replicate that success.
Here’s a short list of useful links about that I curated this month about content strategy that got high engagement or reach:

What insights have you gained from measuring your content strategy?   What’s keeping you from measuring and learning?

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Thanks again Beth! The past 24 hours have been a lot of fun.
    The social media posting guide is also being translated into at least 2 other languages (French and Spanish) with more in the works. For those interested in being notified when versions in another language are made available, head to http://topnonprofits.wufoo.com/forms/let-me-know-when-this-is-translated/
    I’m also working on a series of companion resources such as editorial calendars, campaign briefs, etc. If you would like to be notified when these are released, sign up at http://topnonprofits.wufoo.com/forms/let-me-know-when-this-releases/

  2. A great post Beth and a really interesting read. A content calendar and strategy is something we do for our own clients but not so much for ourselves but this might prompt me to do so.

  3. Thanks Beth for reminding us that even with all of this innovation, we still need to utilize traditional tools such as editorial calendars to strategically share content. I appreciated the reminder as I will be traveling in a few weeks with limited internet access.

  4. Hi you have a really nice Blog would love and very appriciated it if you visit Fantwister.com or maybe you write some nice article about it on your Site?!
    Cheers

Trackbacks

  3. […] Sure the Posting Guide clearly met a perceived need and was appreciated by a lot of people.  There were elements where the design helped to speed the spread of the resource such as decent design, realistic advice, and the cheat sheet format that it fits perfectly on a standard sheet of printer paper. Still Beth had much and more to do with this as well. Read more on her post about how she helped make this happen through the art of consistently posting content people love. […]