There is no doubt that you can’t expect to become influential if you publish something once a week or even, once a day. The need to often produce and publish quality content can be overwhelming for brands. But it doesn’t have to be that hard. Part of the solution is to better manage your efforts. The way that I achieved the right balance between quantity and quality is by being a curator and a content producer. In fact, each function fuels the other.
The first order of business is figuring out what you can do to share relevant tweets, statuses and posts to your followers. What I found out through my consulting work is that companies have many sources of meaningful information that they don’t put to use. This is where collaboration between several business units at your company can save you time.
For example, talk to the people who follow the news on your industry at your company. It doesn’t have to be their official job. Ask them to feed you the best stories to read, to write about and to share with a comment. Most news should not be about you but about topics that are relevant to your customers and prospects. Make sure to tell the people who follow the news what you are looking for so they can bookmark the right stories and pitch you the right ideas.
Many corporations sponsor causes and participate to events. So make sure to know way ahead of time about these. You can interview speakers and inspiring people related to the cause. Or you can simply introduce them to your followers. In any case, make sure to make the story about them and their issues.
Another way to make content marketing manageable is to keep your messages short and simple. Not every idea requires a post. Sometimes, sharing a link with one sentence over a few social networks is all you need to be useful. A straightforward retweet might be enough. When you want to discuss your views or perspectives on things, use your blog. My best blogging advice is to aim for a maximum of 200 to 500 words per post. If your topic requires a longer text, split your idea into a series of posts instead. Keeping your post shorter has three advantages:
- More people will read your posts up to the end;
- The more targeted topic is better for SEO;
- If the topic doesn’t appeal to your audience, you didn’t waste a lot of time writing a long article.
Like anything else in life, practice makes us better. You will develop your own techniques and will become more efficient over time. Story ideas will come more easily. Content marketing will never be about cutting corners. It will always be time consuming. By mixing on your newsfeed your meaningful content with relevant content from other people (with due credit), you can achieve a great balance between quantity and quality.
