In January 2020, we were privileged to have an in-house LinkedIn training delivered by the team at Social Tree Global. Max and James shared with us some of the fundamentals they use with their clients to create attractive content and build engaged audiences on LinkedIn.
Shortly after the training, I shared a snap of my handwritten notes in a post I called “the 4 tips to master linkedin”. I promised I would later go into the details of each of these 4 sketches in separate articles, and I wrote the first article in the series…
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Today, almost a year later, comes the second article, enriched by about one year of testing and personal practice… So let’s look in details at the 4 phases of content production for Social Media.
My handwritten notes read:
- Social Listening
- Content Plan
- Content Broadcast
- Review & Improve
Let’s take them in turn to understand how you can build a simple yet efficient process to create content that resonates with your audience.
1. Social Listening
This first step will help you define what to talk about.
Of course in absolute, you could talk about anything… but to connect with the respectability step of our persuasion list (see first article), it helps if you pick topics where you have something interesting/valuable to share, i.e. in your domain of expertise, or where you can bring a personal point of view.
And it also helps if you know whether your audience is indeed asking questions and discussing these sort of topics. This is where social listening comes into play.
Social listening consists in literally finding what your audience (real or prospective) is discussing, reading, reacting to on social media, so you can identify the key questions they are asking about your topics of choice, how they are trying to find answers and whether they are satisfied with those answers.
This social listening can be passive: you just read and take notes of what is being discussed; or active: you take part in the discussions by asking questions to try to go deeper in understanding their needs and concerns; please note that at this stage you should not blow your cover and try to address their questions directly.
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2. Content Planning
This steps runs contrary to the general impression that social media is 100% spontaneous.
In fact building a strong and engaged audience, is all but spontaneous. First it takes time and second it requires a strategy… It also requires consistency. So in essence, you should not publish whatever, whenever, as this will guarantee that you fail to mobilise any audience. In other words, you can not be “everything for everyone”… as you will find yourself attracting no one in the end.
Content planning is therefore helpful in setting strict boundaries to the content you will produce, in essence defining the lists of topics you will focus your message on. It will also organise the content, so that each piece supports the others and reinforce your general message.
Lastly, content planning will also concern the formats of posts you are using as well as the frequency of posting, to ensure that you provide a variety of formats and keep a good production rhythm. Your objective should be that your audience knows what to expect and when, this will guarantee that they tune in and also that once they have identified you as a reliable source of content, they talk about it around their network.
3. Content Broadcasting
This is probably the most ignored step in the process… although it is perhaps the most intense and enriching part of content production (imho)!
Simply said: content broadcasting is the art to supporting your content once it starts its journey on social media. In other words, you should not just “dump” your content and expects it will perform, and results in 1’000’s of followers.
Initially your post will be shown to a fraction of your audience. Their reaction and how you respond to their reaction will determine whether your content continue its journey. This means that answering to all comments and trying to create a dialogue with your audience is a must. And this applies to the entire life of your post.
If this initial engagement does not happen naturally, you should try to force it, either by tagging people who you know have an interest in the topic you are writing about, or by commenting yourself on your own post, to thank people who have reacted for example and asking them what they have thought of it, so that you start the discussion.
As you become a more frequent contributor, you will also notice that the reciprocity step of our persuasion list (see first article) kicks in at this point: people whose posts you have liked and commented on will take an interest in your own content and will reciprocate your interest in their content by liking and commenting on your content. Make sure you cultivate this.
4. Reviewing and Improving
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Like any process, keeping track of what you are doing will help you identify mistakes and successes. Fixing mistakes and repeating successes will ensure that you are continuously improving the quality of your production and should guarantee that your audience grows over time.
Starting with a simple spreadsheet, like the one you will have created to help you track conversations in your social listening phase, or the one you use to build your content plan, you should keep a tab of the number of views, reactions and comments for each post (at a minimum).
Your objective should be to understand the topics that your audience favours, as well as the formats, so it can guide you in refining your social listening and content planning phases.
It will also help you identify your most engaged followers who you should consider leveraging for future contribution and also with who you should reciprocate to maximise the impact of your content broadcasting phase.
My personal take on this…
The most difficult step for me has been to organise an efficient social listening process.
After a year of practising though, I have come to the conclusion that although the steps were neatly differentiated initially, once you are in flow, they tend to happen simultaneously, as conversations start on your own posts, on posts from your connections, or influencers you follow. This has gradually solved my social listening process.
Recently, I came across a post on Twitter:
This has prompted me to revisit my strategy for social listening a bit, so it becomes more systematic.
I have also developed a spreadsheet to help me organise my content planning and a report to monitor my impact and identify trends in my audience. I will gladly share the formats with you if you are interested.
I hope you have found this article useful in your quest to master LinkedIn. Feel free to share your impressions in a personal comment below, I will be happy to read it and to reply to you.
You can also follow #myLinkedInexperience to read the next articles in the series.
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHICH
