Scheduling Content

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Considerations

When scheduling in your content, keep these four concepts in mind to remain relevant and increase your chances of achieving your content goals:

• Timing. Is this message relevant right now? For example, an ice cream post sent out on a Monday morning is not in keeping with consumer behavior. Audiences are unlikely to engage with this content.
• Frequency. Have you already posted today on Facebook? Or are you running the risk of spamming audiences? Always think of high-quality content versus high quantity.
• Reach. Is this channel really the best for reaching your audience? Are they using it actively? And are they engaging on it? If not, how could you change to reach them better?
• Occasion. Is what you’re saying right now relevant? For example, posting about Christmas tree sales in July makes no sense. Also, be cognizant of fixed end dates. For example, posting a happy St. Patrick’s Day post that goes out over a four-day period when St. Patrick’s Day only occurs on one day, may be confusing and irritating to consumers. Make sure your content promotion is for a fixed period of time and that your dates make sense.

Topical versus reactive content

Topical content

Creating content for moments that you can predict or plan around is called topical content. This concept is about inserting your brand into a contextually relevant moment, for example, Pancake Tuesday recipes or romantic restaurants on Valentine’s Day.

Reactive content

Reactive content, however, is a more agile form of content, which is created around real-time conversations. For example, a social media phenomenon like “The dress” goes viral overnight. This kind of topic allows you to create something that is timely and hyper-relevant to what it is that your audience is discussing at that moment in time.

Case study: Oreo

Oreo hinged their content strategy on social media around topical content. The Daily Twist was a strategy that saw Oreo create over 100 different topical moments through social media using their iconic black and white cookies. The content resulted in hyper-relevant moments within the newsfeed that resulted in over 433 million Facebook views, which is astronomical. There was a 280% increase in shares of their content because their audiences engaged with it more. Oreo became a living, breathing moment in popular culture that lived far beyond its packaging.

Case study: #TheDress

Brands clamored to create reactive content around #TheDress, an image that divided audiences online as to whether it was black and blue, or white and gold. People were arguing and couldn’t come to a decision as to what color the dress was when it hit social media newsfeeds. And ultimately, the real winners in this were brands.

A great example of social content in the reactive space around #TheDress was this campaign from the Salvation Army (see slide ‘Case study: #TheDress’). You can see they’ve used a very clever play on words to highlight victims of domestic abuse. Being able to tie in a brand moment, which people saw as quite whimsical, and flip it into something that is meaningful and emotive, helped drive donations and awareness of the Salvation Army’s campaign against domestic abuse.