Read This Before You Create Content Plan for Social Media

Indian Social Media

Jun 27, 2013

From participation to sharing to engagement to excitement, social media is all about content. The design of various platforms, their strengths and limitations, are all done to help people share slices of their lives with their friends and family, which in essence is nothing but content. Content is what a business also shares on social media with a hope to influence its target audience take a certain desired step. A handful of companies succeed at this and countless many fails.

The quality of content is what differentiates success from failure on social media, but the question is how to create compelling content for social media which get loved by many? This is what this article aims to explain.

Gauge content need by keywords

Every industry has a certain set of words that define things in that industry. These words are called keywords. It should not come as a surprise to you that the entire web is organized and indexed by search engines (like Google, Yahoo, and Bing) on the basis of these keywords, and savvy webmasters create content around keywords to stay on the top of the game. But in a big industry, it is not possible to create content for all kinds of keywords.

Untapped keywords and content needed to meet those needs are what you need to find. For this purpose, you can use Google Keyword Tool. It is a free tool, which anyone can use to find content need for keywords in your niche.

Understand context of conversation

Most of the webpages that are created in isolation. They are consumed with mindset distinctively different from the one people have when browsing through their social media profiles. Before you begin creating content, you need to understand the context in which a certain conversation is taking place, and the best way to analyze the context is to go down on your knees and get your hands dirty.

You need to analyze the threads after threads of conversations on social platforms of your choice to see what kind of language people are using, what is the nature of information they are seeking, and when is that happening. Timing, nature, mode, tone, and choice of words, all of these are equally important. Analysis of various conversation threads will help you understand how to place your content in the most effective manner.

Develop a content gap-closure plan

So far in the article, I talked about finding the content need for different keywords in your niche and understanding the context in which conversation takes place. These two are important factors, but they will not yield much if you do not prepare a content gap-closure plan.

Content needs to be created for different keywords. These keywords require different ways of handling them, and you need to clearly define which problem will need what kind of solution. In an Excel sheet, you can make a list of content gaps that you have identified, club them on the basis of keywords and then in an adjacent column list down the solutions to fill the content gaps. You should also assign a particular time when you are going to post it on social media.

In the Excel sheet you should also mention what type of content will it need to fill the need gap. Will it need a video? An image? A contest? An interactive game? A step-by-step guide? This needs to be included in the content gap-closure plan.

Conclusion

A good deal of social media efforts goes down the drain because there is no proper content plan in place. A marketer erroneously thinks that just posting witty content will bring the desired result. Funny content pieces make people laugh, but that is how far those can go. Such content cannot influence your audience. Keep in mind that the goal of social media is not just to entertain. The main goal is to meet your market’s information need.