#PlanAhead – How Monthly Themes Will Keep Your Content Fresh & Current

Our advice for 2020? Don’t wing your social media marketing!

There aren’t enough words to adequately describe how beneficial it is to start the new year with a social media marketing plan. One of the best ways to do that is to sit down and figure out a content theme for each month of the year.

Monthly Themes

For example, if you are a carpet cleaning business, your themes could look like this:

  1. Clean Carpets in Winter
  2. Babies Need a Clean Carpet
  3. Clean Carpets & Family Health
  4. Should You Invest in a Carpet Protector?
  5. How Often Should You Clean Your Carpets?
  6. Carpet Cleaning Tips for Pet Owners
  7. What’s Lingering in Your Carpet?
  8. What to Look for When Investing in New Carpet
  9. Carpet Cleaning Myths
  10. Getting Your Home Ready for the Holidays
  11. Putting Together a Household Cleaning Schedule
  12. The Benefits of Regular Carpet Cleaning

This simple list gives you a whole year’s worth of content to talk about on your social media platforms. We’d also encourage you to create original content with these themes such as videos, blog posts, or podcasts. Original content can then be repurposed into social media content (such as quotes and tips) and email newsletters.

If coming up with twelve topics is intimidating or hard, spend some time researching your industry online. Seek out publications, blogs, or other websites to get inspired and see what others in your industry are talking about. Check out last week’s blog on how to not run out of things to say in social media for more tips.

Weekly Themes

If you are ambitious, we’d recommend breaking this down even further. You can take your monthly theme and break that down into weekly topics.

For example, if you are a Reiki practitioner, you could have a month of content that looks like this:

Monthly Theme: Reiki Energy for Busy People

Week 1: Reiki for Stress Relief

Week 2: Reiki for Better Sleep

Week 3: Reiki for Focus & Clarity

Week 4: Reiki for Energy Boosts

Setting aside a couple of days a year to focus on being strategic about your content will ensure that you always have something to post for your social media marketing efforts. It will also keep you from repeating yourself too frequently or having stale content.

If you’d like help creating themes, or becoming more consistent with your social media marketing in 2020, let’s chat!

Be sure to Follow us and Let’s Engage!

Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media, Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedInFacebookTwitterBlogGoogle+YouTubePinterestInstagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media TrainingSpeaking and Strategy Consultations.

#BePrepared – How to Repurpose Your Content in Social Media

How long does it take you to write a really compelling blog post? Three hours? Four? More than that?

And what happens once you’ve posted it? Does it just sit there and languish, all of that effort wasted?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could take that content and repurpose it in other ways? Maybe get it in front of a different audience?

Well . . . why can’t you?

When you write a stellar blog post and you KNOW that it’s useful to your audience, why not share it across the board?

Keep reading for our favorite ways to take those old blog posts and repurpose them for social media, so you can get the most bang for your online marketing buck!

  1. Create graphics. Take short snippets of useful information from blog posts and turn them into quote graphics or take a list and turn it into an infographic. It’s a fun new way to display the same content and (as an added bonus) visual content often drives higher engagement than text alone.
  2. Build a social campaign. If you have a blog that includes a TON of useful information, you can easily break it down into parts and share each one as a separate social media post. Let your audience know that there is more to come and share a new tip or snippet each day. It will get them hooked and keep them coming back for more.
  3. Utilize your newsletter. It would be nice if everyone in your audience always logged on to read your new blogs, but that’s just not the case. Use your newsletter to get in front of fresh eyes by including links to your blog, writing up summaries of new content, or even sending out a “Top 10” curated list of your favorite posts.
  4. Get ‘em hooked on Twitter. Love a good one-liner? Consider Twitter. There, you can take the most impactful quotes, statistics, and facts from your blog posts and share them as punchy little snippets. Phrase them in a way that leaves your audience dying for more and, of course, link back to the original content.

You put a lot of time and effort into your blog posts. It seems silly to just slap them up on your website and then ignore them. By repurposing your content for social media and other outlets, you can gain a new audience and improve your ROI.

If you need help with brand engagement or building a presence on social media, consider our Social Power Program. We’ll give you all the strategies you need to get your business started on the road to online success.

Be sure to Follow us and Let’s Engage!

Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media, Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedInFacebookTwitterBlogGoogle+YouTubePinterestInstagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media TrainingSpeaking and Strategy Consultations.

#PlanYourBusiness – Repurpose Your Content from 2018

You already know how important it is to create blockbuster content. You also know that it is not an easy job. That’s why you no doubt commit lots of resources to it.

Here’s a question for you, though. Do you have a plan for getting the most out of your existing content? If you’re like many of us, once you’ve clicked that post or publish button you wipe that particular item off the list. Instead of considering it done, why not queue it up to use it again? Yes – to get the most out of your content you should be repurposing it.

Repurposing content doesn’t necessarily mean you are recycling something old; it means you are taking something that works and giving it new life. Here are five ways to do just that:

Check your analytics – Before you get started, identify which items hit the mark. The most straightforward way to do that is by checking your analytics reports to see which content was the most engaging.

Try a new format – If you have identified a blog post that was popular or shared often, why not turn it into an email series, a video, an infographic, or a presentation? Of course, the proper format will depend on the type of information, but there are plenty of ways to repackage information so that it can find a new audience or reinforce the data to the existing audience.

Update and refresh – Perhaps the best way to use an old article or post is to update it with the latest statistics or give it a new perspective based on the latest thinking.

Bundle it – Have you ever thought of putting all the content you have on a particular topic into an e-book or white paper? Depending on the type of information you prepare, this may be the perfect way to offer it to your audience again. People love downloading free information and making it into a book may do the trick.

Repost it – In the content world we often hear the term “evergreen.” Evergreen content never gets stale. Identify content you have that is still fresh and simply repost it or put it on a different platform.

As you begin your planning for the New Year, make sure that you capture the value of your existing content by including repurposing on your to-do list. Not only will you make the most of what you already have, you are sure to generate ideas for ways to create new content that supplements what you already have.

Be sure to Follow us and Let’s Engage!

Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media, Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedInFacebookTwitterBlogGoogle+YouTubePinterestInstagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media TrainingSpeaking and Strategy Consultations.

#PlanYourBusiness – The Benefits of Themes (Daily, Weekly, Monthly)

Keeping marketing materials fresh can be a challenge. When it comes to social media, it can be all the more difficult since the landscape changes rapidly. Nevertheless, it’s essential that your content stays on-brand, relevant and timely. While that may sound like a tall order, there is a way to simplify the task of developing content — creating themes.

When you design a series of themes to use on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, you provide yourself with a framework for your content. This enables you to focus on specific topics and to spread that focus across all the platforms you use. Focusing on specific themes can help jump-start your creative juices.

Before you start to develop a series of themes, remember that the most effective social media is consistent, engaging, and authentic. That means that your themes should work together with your entire business objective. It also means that you need to know who your audience is and what type of information will be most useful to them.

Before you start, take a quick inventory of:

  • Your audience: If you don’t know who your audience is then this is a great time to find out. Even the best content will miss the mark if it doesn’t target the right group.
  • What your goals and objectives are: For your content to be consistent and authentic, it needs to fit in with your overall messaging.
  • What tools you will use: Knowing how you will develop your content can help guide you in selecting themes that you can execute. It can also help you develop a plan for how to go about the job of actually creating the content.
  • What platforms you take advantage of: Each platform has unique requirements. Understanding how you will present the content can help you work more efficiently.
  • What your budget is: It doesn’t do much good to create a list of daily themes if you don’t have the resources to produce daily content. Be realistic about what your limitations are. Remember that you want consistency. If you only have time to post monthly, then be honest and open about it.

What themes are best for you will depend on your audience, your business, and your resources. Regardless of what your constraints are, focused themes can provide a valuable framework for developing your social media; they can jump-start your creativity and help you fully utilize each platform.

Be sure to Follow us and Let’s Engage!

Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media, Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedInFacebookTwitterBlogGoogle+YouTubePinterestInstagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media TrainingSpeaking and Strategy Consultations.


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