Unfortunately, no article about content creation tips can give you a definitive answer as to how often you need to create content. Every business needs to do their own research to find what works best for them. The “correct” answer is going to be different for every business. Each business has different goals, different audiences, and a different strategic content marketing plan.
The two most important content creation tips to remember are: consistency matters more than frequency and quality matters more than quantity.
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Consistency is Key
The overall content marketing tip is that consistency is more important than frequency. Posting three times a week consistently is better than posting ten times in one week and not at all for several weeks after. If an organization doesn’t create content regularly, they are more likely to lose their audience. Your audience will see that you are inactive and find somewhere else to fulfill their needs.
In addition, consistency is one of the ways businesses can differentiate themselves from their competitors. High quality, consistent content helps brands establish their authority as thought leaders in the industry. How regular your content is has a direct relationship with how credible people think your business is. The more consistent you can be, the more credible you will appear. Similarly, the longer you can produce content, the more credible you will appear.
Why Are You Creating Content?
Social media content creation tips are most useful if you first understand why you’re creating content to begin with. Some of the most common reasons for creating content are:
- Increasing Traffic: Whether you are using inbound marketing, SEO, or a combination of both, the purpose of these strategies is to bring more people to your business.
- Connect with Your Audience: Social media users are easily distracted. There’s so much choice out there for what they can consume. They will quickly forget about your business unless you give them a reason not to.
- Keep the Conversation Going: Consider new content like replacing a store’s front window. If the display in the front window never changes, people stop paying attention to it and are not motivated to come back. The same can be said for your social media accounts. Posting new content keeps people interested and engaged.
Quick Win vs Value Added Content Creation Tips
An important tip for content creation is knowing the difference between quick win and value added content. When businesses start posting lots of new content, they sometimes get stuck posting quick win content. Quick win content would be things like infographics, funny videos, or memes. This type of content usually takes less time and involvement to create. It may generate a lot of immediate buzz, but it will not have lasting power. Quick win content isn’t all bad, but it should be used with caution. Save this type of content for times when you are busy or on vacation and don’t have the time to spend curating content.
Value added content is a more time consuming type of content. This includes how-to articles or videos, long form blog posts, or research studies. This content will showcase and prove your expertise, answer questions, and gain trust.
Value added content is also the type of content that can become evergreen. Most marketers will tell you creating evergreen content is a key content marketing tip. Evergreen content never goes out of date. It will be about a topic that is always relevant to people, no matter the season. Posts about recent news events, a certain holiday, or current pop culture trend are not posts that would be considered evergreen. There will be a time, whether it is in a matter of hours or weeks that it no longer becomes relevant. Evergreen content can be repurposed over time with minimal updates.
Frequency of Posts by Platform
Many people looking for social media content creation tips want to know how often they need to post on popular platforms. Keep in mind that these recommendations are very general. As always, you should monitor how your posts are performing to find out what works best for you.
There have been numerous studies to find out how often businesses should post on Facebook. Most Facebook content creation tips suggest posting once each day is best, with two posts every day being the maximum. Hubspot found that pages with less than 10,000 followers or likes experienced a 50% drop in engagement per post if they posted more than once a day. At a minimum, you should post three times each week.
How frequently businesses should post on Instagram is similar to Facebook. At a minimum, small to medium-sized businesses should post once per day. However, no more than 3 times per day. While some large brands post up to 30 times per day, most businesses will not be able to keep up with that schedule.
Recommendations for often you should be posting on Twitter vary greatly. Some content creation tips suggest only posting once a day, while others suggest 50 times each day. However, the general consensus seems to be that between 3 and 30 times a day is ideal. Keep in mind that tweets have a very short shelf life. You will want to spread your tweets out throughout the day.
Blogs
At the bare minimum, businesses should expect to post on their blog once a month. Once a week is preferred, with two to three times a week being the ideal frequency. These content marketing tips mainly apply to new websites or blogs. For a recently established blog, the more content you can produce will move you up in the search engine rankings. Established blogs that already have a lot of content should spend less time focusing on creating new content. Instead, they should update and optimize the content they already have.
Content Creation Tips
Don’t try to be on every platform all the time. Most likely, there are certain platforms that work best for your type of business or your audience uses the most. Instead of spreading yourself thin trying to consistently update every platform, you can choose the ones that are most useful for you.
Share Other People’s Content
This tip for content creation is an easy way to create content quickly. You can follow other accounts in your industry or topics that relate to what you do. Share noteworthy posts or news that they share. You can repurpose their content to serve your audience. In addition, you can also repost user-generated content. If a customer posts about your product or service, you can share their post as well. Add commentary or respond to them to create a conversation.
Repurpose Content
If you write a great blog post, don’t be afraid to share it more than once. You put a lot of time into it, so you want to make sure that as many people see it as possible. On a platform like Twitter with a high volume of content being produced every second, resharing the same link is more than okay. Any time you repurpose content, it should be done carefully. It shouldn’t be a mere word-for-word copy of the previous post.
Be Social
Social media is called what it is for a reason. You should be engaging with your audience. Ask questions that inspire people to respond. Like or reply to comments to keep a conversation going. The goal of social media shouldn’t be to talk at people, it should be to talk with them. Communication should always go both ways.
Schedule Posts
One of the reasons many businesses struggle with posting consistently is because they don’t plan ahead. The day gets away from you and suddenly you realize it is 5pm and you still haven’t posted on any of your platforms. A good rule of thumb is to plan about a week in advance. You can also schedule your content to be posted at various times. HootSuite and Buffer are two of the most popular social media posting automation tools. Remember that even if you schedule your posts, you should still be engaging with your followers too!
Define Your Target Audience
Tips for content creation are best utilized when you also understand who your target audience is. Just because you interact with content one way doesn’t mean your target audience does too. You need to think the way they are thinking, not the way you are thinking. Who exactly is your target audience? What information is this person looking for? How and where are they looking for the information? Finally, what do they care about? Never assume the answers to these questions. Interview your audience or do research to find actual information. Answering these questions will guide what kind of content you should be creating and where to share it.
Bottom Line for Social Media Content Creation Tips
At the end of the day, consistent posting is more important than the frequency. Quality is always more important than quantity. A smaller number of high quality posts will be much more beneficial than a large number of low quality posts. Finally, you must have a goal for your social media strategy. Without an overall strategy, you will have no way to measure how successful your content or posting schedule is.
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