Social marketing has become really hard. Everyone is posting more and more content every day. And since there is so much being published now, only a tiny fraction (5%) of your posts are actually seen by your audience. In short, social media has become pretty saturated.
That’s why simply ‘being on there’ is not enough any more. Instead, you need to have a solid strategy to 1) produce quality content, and to 2) be extremely good at publishing it. Today we’re going to focus on the publishing side.
The Golden Content Ratio
You’ve probably seen a few ‘golden content ratios’. For example, the Rule of Thirds, where you divide your content into three even categories, consisting of:
Promoting your business and generating profit,
Sharing ideas and stories from thought leaders in your industry, and
Engaging personally with your followers.
Or the 60/20/20 ratio:
60% of your content should be proactive engagement with your audience,
20% should be spreading relevant content that your audience will care about, and
20% should be talking about yourself.
Ratios in Practice
To get the golden content ratio correct it’s a good idea to plan out your posts in advance. This also helps you get some regularity into what you’re posting, and when. Motivational Monday, or Throwback Thursday posts are probably the most obvious example, but you should get creative here to make it work for your business.
Here’s an example of how a travel company planned out their Facebook and Twitter pages:
Monday mornings: Today I’d rather be – simply featuring a picture of a beautiful place with a short description of the place. Aim: To build engagement.
Wednesday afternoons: Experience of the week – sharing a previous client’s or employee’s travel story. This works really well as the company is known for its excursions. Aim: To build engagement, branding.
Every other Thursday: Promotions – such as special offers and featured holidays. Aim: Profit generation.
Sunday afternoons: Blog posts. Aim: To build engagement.
In between: Own blog posts, guest content or breaking travel news.
Additionally for Twitter: 2 pieces of curated content (travel blogs) every day, 3-5 repeats of each piece of owned content.
And this is a really simple case. Most businesses post a lot more than this, particularly if Twitter is their most important platform.
However, here’s the issue: To organise their social media effectively, most people plan out their posts in a spreadsheet and then copy them into their feeds, or use social media management systems like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule them.
The problem is that doing this right can be pretty tedious. First of all, you have to schedule every single post manually. This task alone can become incredibly time-consuming, especially if social media isn’t your only job or if you’re managing multiple profiles.
It’s also pretty easy to lose that crucial golden content ratio:
- There’s no clear overview of all planned posts for each content category (for example all planned post for the ‘Today I’d rather be’ series mentioned above), meaning you can run out of content easily.
- It’s hard to keep track of what’s actually been scheduled.
A New Solution
This is what inspired the creation of SmarterQueue. It’s a brand new tool that allows you to organise all your posts really quickly. You simply create your different content categories, set a posting schedule for each of them, and then fill them up with your posts. There is no need for manual scheduling or spreadsheets because SmarterQueue makes sure that you get your golden ratio right from the beginning. It helps you follow social media best practices with a lot less effort – and you save a lot of time because you don’t ever need to schedule posts again! It’s the smartest way to do social media. Properly.
