2017 The Year of Genuinely Good Content
What does you content strategy look like for 2017? What do you expect to be your most powerful tools in your content strategy arsenal? Different brands and verticals have strategies that work better over others. What are the new measurements of success for digital content in 2017 and beyond?
Engagement Will Be A Key Measure of Success
Social content metrics and numbers reached hold value and make potential readers correlate popularity, as well as higher importance with numbers that are higher. The true measurement of content success is if users are engaging. Engagement is a much better metric of content quality which increases your brand’s standing, if users began to expect amazing content and you keep on delivering you will see continuous growth.
The better the engagement through channels like social, the better your content does. Social channels have undergone changes over time, including focusing on content quality and pushing high quality content with great engagement rates to the top of feeds, thus naturally increasing the amplification of the content you share.
I personally like to sit down and reverse engineer social reach formulas. Like with Facebook. Facebook started limiting the organic reach of your content a while ago. Now even a limited amount of your own followers end up seeing your content on a regular basis unless your engagement and other factors are continuously high. I tested organic contest posts naturally with single actions such as share a workout photo or comment with your favorite workout. After which, I tested hitting every engagement point. Asking for users to share the post, like the post, and comment when done. That alone with some other things done, we increased the total organic and viral reach by 6 times.
Facebook also has a news feed visibility formula which it uses to choose what content to show in the news feed. News feed visibility is determined by looking at who created the content, how the post performs in terms of other users, the type of post a user prefers, and how new the post is. There are many other factors which are personalized on a user level as well.
Focus on Native Content
Instead of sharing external content on social channels, add your content to social platforms, as social networks give preference to content the is hosted right on the social channel. Upload your videos to each channel separately or try recording your videos on each platform. Utilize Live video features on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Don’t forget to use Stories on Snapchat and Instagram. Use 360 images and videos on Facebook to add a more immersive experience for users. Create content which is interactive to be more appealing in terms of reach and engagement to algorithms. Boosting content doesn’t hurt either. Don’t solely depend on it because if your content is not interactive, all you will be doing is wasting money.
Whatever route you take make sure your website content addresses search intent and answers who your brand is, what they do, and what makes you different. Tell your brand’s story through your whole content strategy. Build a community and use them as content distribution mechanisms to propel your brand in 2017 and beyond.
