There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing an interesting piece of information (or “teaser”) on social media, only to find that once you’ve clicked for more information, you’re led down a rabbit hole loaded with click-bait barriers. This is just one example of how poor planning, annoying marketing tactics, and/or a lack of consideration for user experience, can rapidly result in lost business opportunities. Why not make it easy for consumers to access content?
Why not make it easy for consumers to access content?
In this article, we outline the steps for creating an enjoyable social media user experience, positive brand experience, and even help generate more website traffic using content mapping to:
- Maximize social media content,
- Pair content effectively, and
- Improve overall user experience by decreasing navigational clicks necessary to view information
What is Content Mapping?
In marketing, content mapping usually describes targeting content based on characteristics of consumers and/or how close consumers may be to making a purchase. Content mapping, as described in this article, is more of a mind-mapping process for your content. If you’ve ever created a mind map, you know that you typically throw all your cards on the table (really into one of those cute little digital mind-map/brainstorming diagrams) in order to begin a streamlining process that usually focuses on increasing efficiencies. When you apply this to your social media content, you’re looking at not only the entirety of your content, but additional factors that allow you to streamline audience experience. These factors include:
Table 1. Content Mapping Factors
Including all factors, effective content mapping includes 7 steps:
Don't send your audience all over the internet to view your content, keep it simple and focused.
On the surface, it might appear that these steps can be cut in half. Review Platform Capabilities? Really? However, social media platforms are constantly changing. They compete with each other and they’re all competing for businesses to use them. If one can get an edge, they’ll find it. Plus, did you know Twitter is thinking about expanding their character limit? That can change the game for your content, especially if you’re not really into Twitter because of that limitation. Twitter might now just become your best friend.
We won’t go into in-depth capabilities of each social media platform in this article, but we will summarize the heavy hitters that you should be focused on at a minimum.
Step 1: Review Existing Social Media Platform Capabilities
As mentioned in previous articles, 2016 will present new challenges with regards to customer engagement. Efforts to keep up with trends will mean that video dominates the social media scene. Not only will it be important to ensure you’re familiar with which platforms accept video (and in what format), but you will want to re-familiarize yourself with additional capabilities of the top platforms outside of video as well so that you’re providing diverse content.
Features that can provide added visibility, such as consistent hashtag usage, can boost posts on platforms like Twitter and Instagram at incredible levels. Instagram will even tell you how many times a hashtag has been used as you begin typing it. This allows you to make an educated choice when assigning a hashtag, especially when you see that variations can show a difference of hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions. Below is a quick summary of the top social media platform capabilities. We’ve given LinkedIn a column of its own for LinkedIn Publications, definitely an area to maximize in 2016 as long as you can pair content appropriately.
Table 2. Social Media Platform Primary Content Capabilities
As an added benefit, most platforms now have analytics to help you analyze trends and make informed decisions in adjusting your social media strategy. Take the time to set these features up and they will help you make educated paid advertising choices.
Step 2: Decide Which Platforms to Use and/or Implement
Facebook and YouTube continue to dominate the social media scene with over a billion active users. Instagram and LinkedIn follow at 400 million users each. At the very least, these top four should be an active part of your overall social media marketing strategy. They also target a variety of content capabilities (see table 2) which provides your audience with a diverse delivery of content and more interesting overall experience with your brand.
Note: Although Google+ users exceed 4 million due to registration requirements on Android devices, etc., it is estimated that the ACTIVE users for Google+ are much lower (i.e., users register because they have to for their device to work properly, but that does not mean that they actively use Google+ as a social media platform).
Step 3: Tune-In to User Social Media Platform Expectations
Each social media platform has a “behind the scenes” personality. If you can fit your content into the user expectations of the platform, you are less likely to disrupt their experience and more likely to grab their attention. The diagram below outlines perceived user expectations. Note how LinkedIn is the only platform not utilized for fun. I’m sure we’ve all seen the meme in our LinkedIn feed stating LinkedIn ≠ Facebook. This is very true and using it as such could result in lost customers.
If you can fit your content into the user expectations of the platform, you are less likely to disrupt their experience and more likely to grab their attention.
Step 4: Review Your Content and Identify Smaller Components
Reviewing your content is important and I’ve purposely made this the fourth step in this process because if you don’t already have an idea of platform capabilities (step 1), which platforms are used most heavily (step 2), and the personality / user expectation of each platform (step 3), then it will be hard to know what to look for when reviewing your content.
With those first three steps in mind, you can further capitalize on each individual piece of content by searching for smaller sub-components within the larger whole. Sub-components have the potential to be shared separately and link back to the original piece. Every image, video, or embedded piece of sub-content is another opportunity to gain visibility.
Every image, video, or embedded piece of sub-content is another opportunity to gain visibility.
Let’s look at some examples:
Table 3. Example Content Review Scenarios
Can you guess which social media platforms would be appropriate for each example based on this simple review? Can you envision a map of how each example could be shared?
Step 5: Map Your Content and its Sub-components to the Best Suited Social Media Platforms
Drawing from your conclusions in the last step will enable you to map your content and sub-content to the social media platform best suited to house it. The illustration below outlines the opportunities presented in an example WordPress blog article after review and how mapping the sub-content brings additional social media post opportunities to light, taking this example from a 6-7 post opportunity, to a 24-25 post opportunity.
24-25 posts across social media from one piece of content might seem like overkill, but the reality is that you have too many factors working against you to not consider maximizing these opportunities. I wouldn’t recommend going ahead and posting all 25 at the same time (effectively spamming your followers), but over the course of a week, you can create a well thought-out schedule that allows you to maximize every opportunity and gain the visibility you hoped for without annoying your followers. Curious about what works against you? Here are the heavy hitters for consideration:
- Flooded newsfeeds – your content gets buried and chances of it being seen are slim to start with
- Your audience skims – if they do see your post, they skim it. You can read more about this trend here. Carefully timed repetition reminds individuals to come back and read it.
NOTE: I want to stress, as I have done in my previous articles, you’re content should be a quality piece focused on solving a problem for followers of your brand. As long as you are doing your due diligence in creating quality content to engage your audience and create an authentic experience, maximizing post possibilities in your content should not be seen as “spamming” by your followers. In addition, scheduling allows you to set up posts in a way that would work similarly to a paid ad on social media and, in this way, should appear even less invasive or disruptive by your audience than a paid ad.
Let’s take a look at our table from step 4 and incorporate content mapping:
Table 4. Example Content Review Scenarios Applying Content Mapping Principles
For pieces resulting in less opportunities, you can include cross post pushes (e.g., post an image to Pinterest and let Pinterest push it through to Facebook again, post an image to Instagram and let Instagram post it through to Facebook and Twitter again, etc.). Utilizing post pushes across social media never hurts as long as you time them well (i.e., not all back to back on the same day, etc.).
One last opportunity for sharing, not mentioned in the table, is to add your website link into the mix. So, those pieces of content that involve posts of images linked to a blog post and then an image linked to a video, can also include an image linked to your website which can increase website traffic if that is a goal in your marketing strategy.
Step 6: Implement & Schedule
Lastly, before everything begins to go live on social media ensure that, navigationally, your posts are getting customers to desired information in the least amount of clicks possible. Strive for a goal of one click to get the user where they need to be, possibly two. Three clicks starts to lose customers. Remember, time is valuable to your audience. Additionally, as the entire content mapping process focuses on ways to expand your single piece of content into multiple social media posts by identifying hidden sub-content, you should find that the click rate is reduced organically as content mapping helps your posts get straight to the point.
Strive for a goal of one click to get the user where they need to be, possibly two. Three clicks starts to lose customers.
The somewhat down side is that you will have a robust amount of social media content to share and implementing that will require support to maintain it consistently. As mentioned previously, a calendar or schedule may help, especially to prevent a “spamming” effect. If you already have a content calendar in your marketing strategy, this process will help to fill it pretty easily. From there, add in additional posts as needed (if needed) for reminders.
Although content mapping helps to identify ways to get more mileage out of a single piece of content, ensuring you spread the postings out is also important. As with our WordPress blog illustration in step 5, if we posted all 24-25 opportunities in a single day, that would be overkill – we could bore followers or lose them. However, you could plan to complete step 1 of sharing the blog link in a single day, then sharing the video a day or two later, and again sharing the infographics a day or two after that. Here is a great piece on social media etiquette that is helpful when thinking about content scheduling across social media platforms.
Although content mapping helps to identify ways to get more mileage out of a single piece of content, ensuring you spread the postings out is also important.
Step 7: Review & Modify
Taking the time to map the path of your content is essential in creating a positive brand impression and in keeping the momentum of your brand going. Periodically review how the process is working for you and don’t be afraid to fine tune or modify the process to suit your business needs.
Remember, if you need assistance with your social media strategy or an evaluation, we’re here to help! We wish you the best of luck with your social media content marketing strategies in 2016!
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Crystal Davies is a strategic marketing consultant specializing in branding and brand identity, marketing strategy, and business solutions. Her passion is seeing how pieces of the marketing strategy puzzle come together to turn her clients dreams of business success into reality.
crystal@daviesdesigns.net
