My previous post about the editorial calendar is sort of related to something I read last week about developing a content strategy. The information wasn’t really suited to libraries, but there are some points that I felt I could take and run with, even at a non-profit, B2C sort of place.
1) Identify trending topics
2) Meet with marketing regularly
3) Evaluate and refine
1) I keep a pretty close eye on our web/social sites stats. I’ve noticed, over the course of the last month or so, that mentioning any sort of e-materials (our Overdrive service, e-books, iPad and Nook tutorials, etc.) makes the stats for our blog jump pretty significantly. I’ve also tried to keep an eye on what people are searching for when they come to our site. This can show me what people are interested in right now so that I can go out and solicit content from our staff on that topic. That’s how I do the identification part.
2) I work just a few feet from our PR person and we have a pretty good working relationship – so she feels free to come to me with stuff she wants emphasized on the social sites and I have no problems going to her for help with promotion of the sites themselves. It’s a symbiotic relationship – and we work on keeping those lines of communication open so that I know what is important to her and she knows what is important to me – and we can each try to focus on those things.
3) This is where I fall down – like I said, I spend a lot of time perusing stats and I use them to inform my content decisions, but I don’t do so well at going back after the fact and determining what wording worked for what program. This is something that I need to work on in the coming year. I’d like to start out by actually creating *purposefully* different texts for Twitter/Facebook/Blog posts and see which ones get more responses. That would help me create more effective posts for everything, I’m sure. It’ll go on the list of “stuff to do”…
I have a social media strategy that includes some content strategizing within it for my library, but we could use a better articulation of what sort of content we’ll be promoting as well as what kind of content we’ll be asking for from our patrons (Flickr pictures of the library and/or library events, just as an example). This is something I’ll be working on – have any of you done anything like a formal content strategy for your sites? Wanna share?? 😉
