What are the best ways to create timely and relevant social media content?

Follow accounts your target audience follows. Test and experiment with new content styles that mimic social accounts in adjacent verticals.

My process for creating timely and relevant social media content: Plan: I start by brainstorming topics and researching trends to create a content calendar that includes a mix of evergreen, timely, and promotional content. Create: I then produce high-quality content, including engaging copy, visually appealing graphics, and informative videos. Promote: I share my content and I engage with my audience to reach a wider audience. Analyze: I use social media analytics to track my results and identify what content resonates with my audience.

The best way to create relevant content on social media for your audience is to answer the questions they ask the most frequently. I do this on a regular basis, at least once a week here on Linkedin and those publications drive a lot of engagement and lots of impressions. Perfect to work on your (personal) brand and generate credibility and trust, that are what makes a sale.

Through gathering data and information points from your audience you can ensure the content you’re creating solves problems for them in real time. Speak with your audience, ask them questions, polls, start discussions, this will help to create content pillars for your brand.

You need to first become a member of your audience. Find the feeds, thought leaders, content sources, and conversations as if you were an audience member of your own brand. If you aren't aren't in the same ecosystem you won't know how to position yourself, your content, or your messaging to define your value in the space. Find the content that is getting the most engagement and read the comments. If you are a brand look at competitors' comments and content to see what is working and find the pain points not being solved. Finally, solicit feedback and engage with your target market. Join conversations and create conversations. Too many brands use social media to broadcast instead of creating content with the intent to engage.

A content calendar ensures your social media content aligns with important dates, events, and trends relevant to your niche. This strategic approach not only helps maintain consistency but also prevents redundancy in your posts. Remember to revisit and adjust your calendar periodically to keep it in sync with your evolving goals, company's mission, and audience preferences.

A content calendar can be an instrumental tool, especially if you are soloing your social strategy! However, there are a few tips you can use to make sure it stays relevant and engaging. Awareness days, and keeping up with seasons and trends can be excellent for staying current with your audience and the wider community. But make sure your content aligns with your brand, audience and mission. Stick to tapping into trends and awareness days that are relevant to you. Try to mix up formats too, a balance of graphics, photos, videos, behind-the-scenes, and quotes keeps your feed fresh and diverse. Don't be afraid of showing the face behind the brand, people love a humanised view of a business!

A content calendar is a linear approach to content marketing where you know what is going out and when. To develop a deeper feed you need to think in terms of layers. These layers are filled with one-off and evergreen content because your whole audience isn't looking at their phone at one time when you post and the shelf life of a post is highly limited. Whether you use a traditional content calendar or develop a multi-layered content feed with integrated strategic layers and objectives, both should be just the start not the finish. Having content scheduled allows you to be free to both engage and also to create real-time relevant posts which act as an additional layer. Very few people or brands go beyond the content calendar

Utilizing pillars, themes, objectives, etc can help make sure timely content is in fact, still relevant to your audience and strategy. It's a quick gut-check if a current meme or trend aligns.

For effective social media content creation, it helps to know your 'content pillars'. These are the broader topics that you post about. You don't need many different topics, because having 3-5 content pillars will keep your content recognizable while still allowing for some variation. Don't worry when you don't know your content pillars yet. Just start with posting about your work and then find out which topics work for you (about which topics can you keep posting?) ánd are interesting for your network. Onze you have found your content pillars, they can help you think of new social media posts. And they can help you keep your posts varied.

Content pillars are the foundation of your content strategy. When you know the broad topics that align with your brand, goals, and audience, then you can start digging deeper inside those pillars and know that everything you create within those pillars supports your objectives. Once you have a pillar you can ideate and break down the key messages within that pillar. All of those pieces of content will then be automatically connected for your followers and audience. The content pillar is the context of all the content within. Your job from there is to build out the content within the content pillar and then connect and bridge the other pillars. This creates a content ecosystem. It will streamline ideation and lead to more creative output.

One great way to generate more content is to repurpose blogs and articles into social-first content that offers standalone insights or value without needing to click off to another destination. (Clicking might be additive, but it's not required.) Users don't log into social to be taken to your website. They log on to be entertained, informed, or a little of both, on that platform. Find a way to remove the friction between your content and your audience and deliver value to them where they already are. Some of my favorite ways to do this are through carousels, pull quotes, a data point, or a LinkedIn poll.

Repurpose content is definitely one of the ways you can save time when working social media, it is also super helpful to attract more audience since some people aren't necessarily attracted by "Videos" there are people that might prefer "text posts". We can tweak our videos into carrousels to reach "readers" and take advantage of this while saving time when creating content!

Repurpose high-performing content after 4 months. On LinkedIn, for example, this could be both long-form and short-form written pieces that perform well in terms of engagement, reach, and conversions.

Curation is invaluable, but so is strategic imitation. I've found immense value in analyzing well-performing content in my niche and using that as a springboard for my own original creations. Not only does it offer quick inspiration, but it also tends to resonate with the existing audience. So, while curating, also keep an eye out for trends or pieces you can adapt and make your own. It's about the balance of sharing and shaping your content.

Curating content has many purposes in your feed. It isn't just about saving time and resources by leveraging already existing content from expert writers. You also get the benefit of unlimited content supply on-demand. You get content you couldn't have even imagined if you were creating it yourself. You can also attract readers of other peoples' content to your audience. A few less obvious strategic reasons to curate content: You need to cleanse the brand palette. If every post is your brand, it becomes easy to ignore if you have had enough of one perspective and then people leave your feed so audience retention is another factor to consider. Curating content is cost-effective and delivers diverse yet strategic value to your audience.

Testing and optimizing your social media content is crucial for understanding what resonates with your audience. In my experience, maintaining an Excel sheet where I document various variables—from hashtags to post timings—for each piece of content has been invaluable. This granular approach to tracking allows for effective A/B testing, helping to identify the specific factors that make a content piece hit or miss. Small tweaks can lead to significant improvements, and this method ensures you're making data-driven decisions.

Social media feeds move forward so fast that the idea of going back seems counter-intuitive but it is very valuable. Looking back can squeeze out more performance of future content that you both create and curate. It will also help you get feedback from your audience so you can devote resources to content they will like and engage more with. Letting future content decisions be driven by data reduces the marginal cost of each new piece of content you produce and lets you be more agile getting the same or more results with less. Not knowing what is working and what is not is like shooting an arrow with no target.

Creating timely and relevant social media content depends on both current events and audience needs. Here are few ways to be timely and relevant: -Use tools like Google Trends or Twitter's trending section to monitor real-time events and popular discussions. -Engage with followers regularly, asking questions or conducting polls to understand interests and preferences. -Use live streaming or instant posts during major events or trends relevant to your brand. -Plan content around significant dates, holidays, or industry-specific events.

Leverage social media trends and add your spin. I did an IG post about writing using the SM trend "He's a 10 but..." What I got was "The brand's a 10 but doesn't but doesn't write the way people speak so it's a 2." That post got over 319K impressions.

There are many ways to create and manage your social media content. Once you decide what is best practice for your organization and how to reach your company goals, most importantly be decisive and don't be afraid to stand out in the industry. Be fresh, creative and active. Remember out of site, out of mind!

Relevance is key in social media, especially with organic content. When developing a content calendar, allow room to flex based on social conversations that pop up that are relevant for your brand to tap into. We try to follow an ~80/20 rule with our content calendar. We try to plan about 80 percent of the content ahead of time, aligned to our content pillars, to allow us space and time to develop content related to current events as we see fit for our audience and our brand goals. Having structure with flexibility enables us to be relevant while also satisfying our other brand objectives.

Creating timely and relative content is more of an art than a science. Each audience is different and a formula won't apply perfectly to every audience, brand, or person. There are principles and practices that can guide you but you have to understand your own voice and find the audience that your content will resonate with. If it is a brand you have to get clear about what the expectations are of your audience, you have to build that audience on social, and you have to deliver value they want and value they didn't know they wanted but do. It is an art that is easy to start but takes time to dial in.