The social media landscape is where opportunity abounds. If you’re an independent content creator aiming to expand your reach and get more eyes on your work, nothing can replace social media’s potential when it comes to connecting you with your audience.
You can make the most engaging videos or the most enthralling written content, but if you don’t coordinate that content with your social media feed and push it to the social media user base, you’re missing out on the chance to catalyze massive growth.
Co-existence with social media is almost a necessity in the modern sports media industry, but what are some ways you can actively coordinate your content with your social media feed, and maximize your imprint where your audience is most receptive and most primed to engage? Here’s a quick look.
4 Ways to Coordinate Social Media Feeds With Content
1. Promote Content Launches
The first tip is simple: Promote your content launches. This involves having a content schedule upon which you can base your social media posts and promotions. If you have an article coming out, have a post for it. And design that post so that it caters to the audience you’re trying to catch.
What that catering entails is ultimately a situational variable. If your post integrates a lot of data, you could create graphics to supplement the text and use those graphics as promotional elements. If your post is a video or podcast, you could cut clips to promote. If your post is an informational or insider piece, quotes can tantalize an audience.
Find the element that best promotes your specific post, and play up to that element on social media, while staying tuned in to your content schedule.
2. Organize Around Events
Social media isn’t just a landscape. It’s an ever-changing, ever-evolving, essentially “alive” environment. It breathes with big events, and as a content creator with a brand on social media, you can organize around those events to capitalize on reactionary moments, where your audience is most engaged and most responsive.
You can have content prepared for certain events – such as injury reports and previews for games – but to truly capitalize on social media’s event fluctuations, you have to be there in the moment when emotions are flaring at their highest. Livestreams and watches play well when you have an established base, and informationals like fantasy injury updates can funnel views out of necessity.
The bottom line for organizing around events is this: Understand ahead of time what you might be tasked with reacting to, based on your brand. And when the time comes to get to work, be fast and efficient to ride the wave.
3. Use Calls to Action and Engagement Prompts
Ask anyone who frequents social media as a content creator, and they’ll say that the engagement factor is the No. 1 biggest difference social media makes. Social media allows you to interact with your audience at a volume and expediency unmatched anywhere else. By using calls to action and engagement prompts with your content coordination, you can take advantage of this.
What makes calls to action and engagement prompts so exciting is that they’re very defined methods of sourcing audience interaction, but there are dozens of different strategies that fit within these buckets. Polls and prompt questions are more traditional examples, but you can also fit this engagement fodder around your content itself.
An example might be an NFL Mock Draft. After mocking selections for 32 first-round selections, you can create a graphic and ask fans their thoughts about their team’s selections. You can tell them to explain what they’d do if they were the general manager. You can ask them which players they’d be targeting. The possibilities number in the dozens.
Depending on what sport you cover, or what realm you’re in, your calls to action will be different – but you can pick a category and mine it for engagement fuel. And if you do it right, you not only capture the audience’s attention and interaction, but also pique interest for your content itself.
4. Identify and Mobilize on Trends Early
Lastly, ensure that you respect social media as what it is: That living, breathing environment that’s truly always changing. You can have a content schedule to coordinate with your social media profile, but the fact of the matter is, trends are constantly changing. Sometimes, social media will force you to pivot, adapt, and divert course to stay within the audience’s sight.
That’s why, while the content is at the heart of your brand, you should stay active and alert on social media, to identify trends and mobilize on them early in their lifespan. That way, you can derive your content from audience interest itself, and ensure that demand will never be an issue.
Playbook
- Promote content launches
- Organize around events
- Engage users through calls to action
- Identify and mobilize on trends
