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Get 37 Pieces of Social Media Content from One Story
June 3, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
You may have company pages for Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. You may have a corporate Twitter account and perhaps you have a blog. How are you ever going to find enough content to satisfy your followers on each of them?
It’s easier than you think.
The magic word is “re-purpose,” which we’ll come to in a moment. First you need a topic: What will your customers be interested in? In other words, what will they want to read? And even better, what will they want to share?
In this example, we’ll use a customer success story. Start off by writing down the four or five key points that need to be in this type of story: A little about the customer, a description of the problem they had, how they tried to solve it and failed, how they came to you, how you solved the problem, and how everyone lived happily ever after. Now, begin writing. Write whatever comes into your head in whatever order it comes to you. You may bounce all over the place as you remember different aspects of the story. Thats great; just go with it. Sometimes you will come up with something you didn’t expect. This column started out as one thing, but the more I wrote the more it morphed into something else. And the "something else" was a better column than my original idea.
I never write linearly. I write whatever pops into my mind on whatever topic it is that I'm working on. I usually end up with way too much (which is the opposite of the problem i started with!)
Write naturally. Don’t write to “fit” any pre-conceived length. What you may have thought was a blog post of 500 words may turn into a customer success story that’s 1,500 or 3,000 words. Write to tell the story naturally. I’ve started writing what I thought were 400-word blog posts and they turned into two-part columns of 1,500 to 2,000 words.
By the way, did you notice that we're writing a customer success story, not a white paper? White papers are stuffy, dry, intellectual documents. Customer success stories are tales of suspense with a happy ending.
Let’s say that you now have a 1,500-word success story. One option would be to put it on your website behind a landing page. That is, ask a visitor to give you their e-mail address to read it.
Now take the success story and split it into three 300 to 500 word blog posts. Space the blog posts out over two months, for example July 15, August 15, and September 15. Link the posts to the landing page with a "come on" such as “Part two will be published next month, but if you can’t wait, click here to read the whole story today." The idea here is to lead people back to your website. You always want people to get in the habit of visiting your website. Your website should be a vital reference with ongoing new and informative articles being added on a regular basis.
Next step: Write a quick two sentence teaser, link it to each blog post and put it on a different social network each week, for example, on your Facebook page July 20, on your LinkedIn company page July 27, and on your Google+ page August 3. Repeat this for the other two blog posts when they come out.
Now add Twitter. Find eight quotes from the story, or lines that can be fashioned from the quotes. This is easier than you think: “ABC company couldn’t find anyone to make their (some interesting issue) prototype boards in 18 hours or less. Here’s how they solved the problem.” Ten add the link to the blog post. Post the eight Tweets three days apart each. And take each of the eight Tweets and repeat it a week or so later at a different time of the day. And a week later at a still different time. For example, take the “ABC” Tweet above and Tweet Monday at 9:00 a.m., eight days later on Tuesday at 12:00 Noon, and eight days later on Wednesday at 4:00 p.m.
A lot of people will object and say, you’re cheating in just saying the same thing over and over. No, you're not. Your customers use different social networks for different reasons at different times of the day. You are maximizing the possibility that someone who might be interested in your success story will see that it is available to them. If you look at the Twitter streams of companies that are very good at using Twitter such as Hubspot or Forbes magazine, you will see many Tweets repeated several times through the course of a couple of weeks. The only people who look at all your Tweets are your competitors and who cares about them?
So, let’s summarize what we have:
- One customer success story (on the website);
- Three blog posts (one a month);
- Three Facebook posts (one a month);
- Three LinkedIn posts (one a month);
- Three Google + posts (one a month); and
- Twenty-four Tweets (eight tweets, each posted three times).
That’s 37 pieces of content--all from one story. And there are endless variations. For example, I could have passed on the idea of people signing up for the story on the website, but the idea is writing one good piece that takes some work and re-purposing it for all your social networks.
Benefits to this approach include:
- You've written something that your customers will appreciate;
- You've raised your visibility through multiple posts on different networks;
- You've maximized the possibility that your content will be seen; and
- You've gotten some names for your sales team to follow up with or to add to your e-mail list.
Not bad for one idea, one story, is it?
Postscript: As an example, let’s look at what I could do with this story. At just over 1,000 words (to this point!), I have something that would make a good column.
I could split it in two, maybe three, blog posts: There’s a “natural” post talking about how to write content in general, and at least one more in the mechanics of taking the story and splitting it into little content pieces for different social media.
Then I could take those two blog posts and link to them from my LinkedIn and Google+ pages (I don’t use Facebook for business). And then, because I’m pretty good at it, I would probably pull a dozen quotes, for example: “How to triple your Twitter posts and drive more engagement,” and post each of those three times.
That brings the number to 43. Not bad. It took me just under two hours to write this column. It would take another two to pull all the pieces out and and slot them into my social media. That’s a lot of content for a half-day of work.Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media and especially LinkedIn. He has over 25 years experience in high tech sales and management. He can be reached at brucej@practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.