I’ve read a million blog articles about content strategy and they are all interesting. I like the articles that teach you to appeal to the emotion of your readers if you want to get shared. That is so true. I try to appeal to the interest of people, by picking unusual points of view. But, here is a new strategy that is easy to implement, but actually a little bit complicated to do correctly.
The process of content creation & marketing
Blog writers typically brainstorm to find a great topic. Then, they will often put a lot of time into writing a great article. Next, the article will be promoted on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and a few others. It sounds very standard and predictable, and it is. The problem is that not all of the stuff you write will be appreciated by your users. I find that only 1% of my content has become super popular. 1% is better than 0%, but I would love to improve my batting average.
My little social experiment
So, I underwent an experiment. When I publish my own content on Twitter, I might average a little less than a single retweet. I wanted to see what happened when I tweeted content from the masters. Would I get retweeted a hundred times, or would it be about the same as my content? The results were surprising. I got a slightly better batting average tweeting content from the professionals which baffled me. Why is my content only a little less popular than theirs? Maybe because I am unique and original despite my poor writing skills and lack of graphics in my blog. The next thing that bamboozled me was that content that was in the top 10% of popularity on their blog didn’t do any better than their average content on my Twitter. I couldn’t figure out why.
Crowdsourcing and what matters
It is not predictable to try to understand what does well on Twitter and why. If you publish the same content twice, it rarely does as well the second time. If you use different tags, or adjust the text in the tweet a little bit, the results can change dramatically. So, the quality of the content is actually only 30% of what is important on Twitter. Subtle changes in wording, elaborations, a little punch or twist can make all the difference. What really matters is not what did well on someone else’s Twitter, but what my crowd likes! Even if the other crowd is one that is heavily engaged in business, marketing, and social media, their posts might not do well with my crowd which is also interested in social media and business (international business mostly.)
A spiritual element: crowdsourcing’s metaphysical realities
Never ignore the metaphysical element in social media marketing. There is a lot more than what time of the day you post, how good your images are, and how optimal your titles are. There is a spiritual connection you have with your followers on a deeper level. They are tuned into you in a way that they are not tuned into others. You jive with them and so does content that means something to you. If you publish something that is quality material that meets the niche requirements of your followers, but your heart isn’t in it — your followers might not like it either. If you publish something that means something to you — and is just you, you might be surprised at how well it does although it still needs to be tuned to the interests of your followers.
Identifying the best content
After posting a lot of other people’s material on several of my twitter accounts, I learned that roughly 7% of the material I published was super popular, and that was after I manually filtered out 70% of the posts I look through. So, if I had published every article I scanned, it would be only 3% that got retweeted or favorited more than five times on my account. My goal was to identify what the most popular Titles are, and then to create my own original content using similar titles and see if those blog entries would be more popular. Using topics that are winners might boost my batting average so that 20% of my blogs become super popular. Instead of quantity, I could focus on targeting.
The results
After finding out what was popular on my Twitter, I republished the material on my Google+ profile, and the content did fairly well on Google+ as well. I am going to write a few blog articles using the winning content ideas and see what happens. That will take longer. I can only identify one winning idea per day on a busy day, so my system for identifying semi-viral content is slow. The fact is that there just isn’t a lot of material out there that will do super well on Twitter! Good luck!
