Spring Clean Your Content: Part II, Content Mix

Welcome to Part II of Spring Cleaning Your Content!

Last week, we looked at the “media mix” – or the type of media you’ll be posting and where to post it.

This week, we’re talking about the “content mix” – how to organise your content strategy and how to keep your content consistent, varied and interesting.

Your content should be…

1. Informative

2. Valuable for your readers

3. Community-driven

4. Targeted

Informative content gives your customer a place to go to gather the information they need, whether that’s how to buy your product, how to use it, or just a way to get them involved in your area of expertise. All of this content must add value to your readers’ lives. In time, they’ll build trust in you and, eventually, invest their money in that value.

For those who are already part of your online community, and those who wish to join it. To inform and add value to your customers’ experiences, your content should be accessible and inclusive. That also means it will be targeted towards those who need it most. The more you can niche down, and the more specific you can be, the better.

Remember: online content is not just about sales: it’s providing a valuable resource, or even a place for people to hang out and share their interests. Build their trust, build your brand, and sales will follow.

Defining your content mix

Now that we’re familiar with what your content is seeking to accomplish, and which platforms are best suited, it’s time to think about what you’re posting and when.

Your content mix might include…

Company news – like a new product or an upcoming event.
Industry or customer-related news – e.g. an exciting innovation in your sector, or new technology that’s exciting for your customers.
Seasonal posts, holidays and tie-ins – like Spring Cleaning (duh!), a UN day of interest, or a Fashion Week tie-in – whatever is relevant to your business and your audience.
Content partnerships – content in collaboration with industry specialists or thought leaders like bloggers. This could include partnered giveaways and other types access to someone important to your audience.

No matter the topic, make sure your content mix is relevant to your audience. You can also include lots of evergreen content that you can share time and time again.

You may emphasise one of these content types over others, but as a general rule you should talk about yourself in a minority of posts. I like to use the 80:20 rule – so roughly only one in five posts will be about my own products and services, while the rest provide things like news, relevant but fun content, or guest blogs.

Content themes

We’ve talked about planning your content calendar before, and these tips still apply.

As long-time readers might have realised, I have a themed content mix in place here on nicolabalkind.com. Most of my posts share knowledge and advice, with the occasional post about a relevant event or a piece of industry news. I post once per week, and these tend to fall under the following categories:

Social Media and Content – practical guides like the one you’re reading, or like this post.
Microbusiness Interest – sharing resources that have helped me, or posting about topics around small businesses.
Recommendations – like tools, apps, and processes.
Notebook or Links posts – sharing the best industry-related posts I’ve read each month.

As I hinted above, the goal is to create a healthy mix of content that provides value, teaches your audience something new, and shares what you’re doing without boring them.

For more tips on varied content on social media, take a look at my tips for content curation.

Your turn

How do you keep your content varied and interesting for your readers? I’d love to hear your plans in the comments, or you can email me or tweet me anytime @robotnic.

Spring Clean Your Content: Part I, Media Mix

By Nicola Balkind

Trends change quickly and it’s easy to get in a rut with your content strategy. What better time to clean up your content than in Spring?

Before we dive into defining your content mix, first it is important to understand the type of media you’ll be posting and where to post it.

Today I want to help you take a look at your offering, give you a summary of trends in digital media, and suggest some ways to Spring clean your content. Next week, we’ll talk about the content mix and how to organise your own.

So, let’s learn about your options – or as I like to call it, the “media mix”.

Media Mix

Let’s talk about the media mix. We’re thinking about the types of media you can post, primarily text, images, video and audio, and how they’re best placed across digital platforms.

Blog Updates

If you’re still blogging – and I hope you are – text and images are probably your primary tools.

Words are always well-supported by pictures. They give your reader a sense of expectation, frame what’s to come, and illustrate your arguments.

Blogs are also important because they are a home for your content that you control. As we’ll discuss more below, every social media platform wants to keep you on-site, so linking out to other places is becoming less effective. The trouble is that you never know when a social media site will crash, go out of style, or even disappear.

Your blog is your home, and it’s an ideal place for your content to live. If you post a video to YouTube or a podcast to SoundCloud, it’s easy to embed these on your home blog. It gives your audience a central place to go where they can always find your latest news and updates. Don’t underestimate it!

As we’ve talked about previously, the same goes for email. Meet your audience where they’re at, get their email address, and keep them up-to-date with links back to your best content.

Social Media Updates

Updating your social media pages used to mean posting some text and maybe a link on Twitter or Facebook. Now, things are far more visual.

Currently, two of the fastest-growing platforms are Instagram and Snapchat – both visual, image and video-based platforms with massive young audiences. Not to mention Tumblr, a hugely visual platform and community which, arguably, focuses more on sharing and curating content than creating it. Users still create here, but it tends towards remixing and repurposing extant content from elsewhere (i.e. TV, YouTube videos, new memes).

Meanwhile, Twitter added images and Facebook also favours visual content that keeps users on-site.

My point? Social media still has a strong basis in text, but visual media is taking over.

Video

Let’s talk about dedicated video content. Video is one of the most rapidly-changing dynamics online these past fea years. Industry leaders have been heralding its moment for years now.

While YouTube launched 10 years ago and is credited with democratising video, it’s not until the past year or so that we’ve seen more platforms embrace video. Twitter launched Vine and Instagram added video capabilities around the same time; meanwhile Facebook favours auto-play and Twitter has now added a 30-second video option.

These are important changes as they keep users on-site. We can now post video directly on these social platforms – we publish the content directly to social, rather than publicising links and asking our users to follow them. The imperative to leave Twitter or Facebook and follow a link to YouTube has been weakened, so it’s time to start creating video content that’s fit for your chosen platform or platforms.

Audio

Audio content has great potential, and some sea changes have taken place of late – not least the massive success of Serial, which exploded the audience and appetite for podcasts.

Podcasts, micropodcasts and even audio clips shared on social media are an intimate way to connect with your audience. The direct voice-to-earbud delivery is unparalleled in this regard. Audio also occupies a different space in people’s lives: you’re reaching them while they’re out and about, walking, driving, doing daily tasks or even sleeping.

Next week we’ll look into defining your content mix.

Til then, what are the trends that you’ve seen in digital multimedia? What are you trying to achieve in your content strategy, and do you need help in going about it?

Drop me a comment below, tweet me @robotnic, or email me.

I Love Pocket

By Nicola Balkind

I bloody love Pocket, so I’m going to tell you about it.

If this reads like an ad, it’s because I don’t know how else to tell you how much I was waiting for this app. I had a pain, and this solved it. In return, I’ll gush about it to anyone who will listen.

Last year I used this app so much I was in the upper 1 percentile of its users. I know, right?

Ok Nicola, so what does it do?

It took a long time for the internet to help us to deal with the inevitable information overload that it brings.

In the beginning, there were regular ol’ bookmarks. A bit later tabs finally came into fashion, and various other bookmarklets that allow you to save bits and pieces here and there.

I tried all these things, and would invariably forget to go back to the content I’d squirrelled away in all the tree-knots and shallow-dug holes of the internet.

And then there was Pocket. My very own content crack den. It’s a place to save all the articles and pages and videos and whatever else that you haven’t gotten around to reading online. It’s a plain text reader, it has some great design options, and it’s fully integrated.

Here’s what my Pocket list looks like today:

As well as putting the content you want to save for later all in once place, it also pares it down into a really easy-to-read format. It keeps the images and important links, but ditches the ads.

Here’s what a typical post looks like:

Much better than most websites, right?

How does it work?

You can install a Pocket extension anywhere. I use it on Chrome and Twitter across all my devices.

There’s also an app for desktop and iOS/Android devices.

All you do from there is click the Pocket button on a page that you want to save (or a tweet with a link you want to save within it) and it’ll save it to your queue.

Once an article is saved to your queue, you can read it offline, distraction-free!

Key feature: Reading

My favourite features on Pocket are the reading adjustment options and the social sharing.

I stare at a screen for a huge chunk of the day, and it can get pretty wearying. One of my favourite things about Pocket is the Sepia tone reading option. It makes the screen and text more warm-toned, making it easier on the eyes. You can also change the font and text size to suit.

Key feature: Sharing

The social sharing options are my primary way of sharing links onto Twitter. It’s also my shortcut for curating my weekly Reading Week link list.

It’s pretty simple. I read a piece I like, and share it directly to Twitter, or to Buffer to go out at a better time, or I highlight a passage and save it to Evernote for later. Voila!

You can also favourite posts by clicking a wee star button, which saves all your favourite articles in a separate list. Pocket Premium also optimises everything you save for comprehensive search.

Years ago, Evernote promoted itself with some of the same features, but it also saves all the information locally, which makes the app a bit of a bloater. In my experience, Pocket is also much faster to sync.

Want to give it a go? You can visit the Pocket website here.

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What’s your favourite read later app? Give me a shout in comments.