Creating Content

As this piece of content is being written I sit here in week 11 of a 16 week semester. For one of my classes I was tasked with creating three pieces of content a week. My feeble inexperienced mind has begun to seriously struggle in the later weeks with what to write about. Enter chapter nine for this weeks reading. Based on, generating content. There are four key types of content on all forms of social media.

Written:
Often the first impression of a brand or company comes from writing. Writing tools are readily available it is good to write constantly on any ideas that come to mind. Connecting your ideas to your brand or your audience also adds to the ability of your writing.

Audio:
Audio is a powerful tool that connects to an audience. Podcasts have become increasingly more popular and with increasing audience for them their use has expanded. Interviews and talk shows are two audio mediums that have taken social media interest.

Visual:
Visual can take many forms. Reports, analytics, presentations, statistics all play a key role in grabbing attention and being keen content for a brand.

Graphic:
Perhaps the most popular of the options above graphic content is sexy. The key to graphic content is not losing sight of the whole picture. What do graphics achieve for a brand what do they give to an audience while they may grab attention sometimes they don't accomplish the intended needs.

Creating content is difficult. The keys behind content are what make it difficult. Using all of these forms adds to the diversity of a brand and its platforms. If a brand can lock down these and bring them all together into a constant diverse stream of content they are on their way to a well run social media campaign.

How to Find Brand Voice in Writing

Before a brand can take off and even begin its digital presence and marketing it needs voice. The ability to connect and be unique. This can be broken down platform by platform or audience by audience. Making each writing style unique and different depending on the intended audience or goals. 

1. Give your brand a personality and stick to it

2. Find attributes you want to stay away from

3. Determine the attitude you want your audience to have towards you based on how and what you share platform by platform

4. How do you want people to feel about your content

5. What is in it for your audience what are their benefits from connecting with you

6. Who are the audiences you want to focus on and key into

7. Know your competitors including how they communicate and what their voice is

8. What are your goals

9. Does everything you post have a goal or purpose reflect on your content right now and where it is and should be

10. How do you want your audiences to respond to your content

These 10 key steps can help drive your content and writing and where it should go into the future. The ability to review and look at the content already being managed can have a lasting impact on all of your existing audiences.

Monitoring and Listening to Social Media

Research into social media has become a major tool in marketing and advertising to be able to identify audiences. There are two main ways to do this. Monitoring and listening. Each have their own benefits and each are a bit different.

When monitoring analytics become a key factor in the research. Tools have been created to make a systematic and sustainable program to range your success. Listening is finding feedback from the audiences. Comments, questions, concerns all tie into listening to an audience.

Here are the top five benefits to monitoring and listening to your audience:
-Finding what key words, hashtags, phrases, accounts, and user help to reach and impact the audience.
-Identifying which accounts, websites, blogs, and other external links strengthen word-of-mouth traffic.
-Following trends.
-Identifying the growth of your brand through various platforms and outreach.
-Finding overall following data when audiences are active when they respond and when they want to be contacted.

Being able to read an audience and use it to your advantage in the business world of marketing and advertising has become a key to success. Using these benefits of monitoring gives businesses a needed edge in finding the right ways to reach their audiences.

Social Media an Ever Developing Platform

Social media has become a continuously developing tool. Taking shape over the past decade platforms have become tools for business, communication, and marketing. Self proclaimed gurus shower the globe but in reality as social media continues to develop it changes everyday. Specialist work to stay on top of what is new but most would admit it changes all too frequently to be an expert. In the final chapter Guy Kawasaki gives a few brief tips in a final chapter of his book.

His top tips for the most used platforms:

For Facebook the biggest thing he looks to inform readers on is that not all viewers see everything you post. The "news feed" does not show everything posted in a day. Facebooks argument is that it does not want users to be overwhelmed with posts. Your job is to make your posts worth Facebook's "news feed" worthy this is caused by interaction. Use your posts to grab peoples attention. Give people reasons to interact with your posts and profile.

For Instagram while it is a somewhat restricted form of social media it can still be extremely powerful. Keep it short and interesting attention grabbing and informative. Make sure to add hashtags and other easy ways to look back and identify your post and business.

For Twitter be bold and grab attention. Add graphics to stand out. Make sure you understand who can see which tweets and how they are affected by addressing. Understand the keys to twitter and how you can interact with others using mentions and tags along with retweets and replies.

Social media is a new age tool. It's ability to effect society is immeasurable. How it can be used is still developing as more and more functions are added each day. These few tips from In every form we are all still learning as it is still evolving.

This Blog, Social Media and Business

For those of you wondering the purpose of this blog, and why in the world Trevor is writing this blog the answer is quite simple, it's a school project. That is how it started, but even though I have only posted two items, (this being the third) I am enjoying the ability to write in both a personal, and as you will see in this post an educational perspective.

The blog is for my Social Media Principles class in which we are to write about our weekly readings coming from "The Art of Social Media" by Guy Kawasaki and take a key aspect of it and expand. This week to begin with, the first chapter was about profile creation. Being completely honest the generation growing up in this day and age is very aware of profile creation and its importance and its need to catch the attention of any potential follower, or reader, or employer or any connection it could be.

Now the second chapter however brought up a concept called "Feeding the Content Monster" and this chapter looked at explaining how to amp up the content of your page in any platform of social media and how it is needed in business endeavors to help you stick out and how it can be used to profit your business.

One of the key things talked about was the idea of "Piggybacking" and re-sharing what is already popular. This is a quite easy task that almost all forms of social media are already doing for you, on Facebook it follows who and what you follow to generate a trending topics page, on twitter there is the "for you" page in the search engine both designed to give you the user content relevant to what you already follow. Sharing that adds to your content while also expanding on your network.