My name is Alex. I'm an advisor within Gartner’s Marketing practice, and I focus on branding, marketing communications, social media and I spend much of my time trying to help clients make the most of social media opportunities.
A common question I get when I speak to clients is how can we create social media content quicker? So being able to produce social media content really quickly is less about driving credibility. But it's more about driving relevance and owning consumer mindshare. It's all about being able to have a conversation with the audience, because that's what it is. It's you reacting to a stimulus and back and forth and back and forth.
Oreo achieved this really nicely back at Superbowl 2013 during the blackout that took place within a matter of minutes, Oreo posted that single cash line that you can Google and we're all familiar with already. “You can still dunk in the dark”, a message that was so timely, so relevant and It felt from a consumer perspective, like a conversation.
A common misconception when it comes to being able to produce or the ability to produce social media content very quickly is that it's okay for large brands with huge marketing teams and budgets like Oreo like Apple, like many others, to be able to turn this around. But what about us? Mere mortals and for sure, big budgets and big investments can help, but we can also plan smarter to. Most conversations on Instagram on Twitter, etcetera are predictable ones. So knowing exactly, what are the right places that we want to target and to be ready with content for when it happens is the real trick. And that's how we can plan smarter.
If there is a conversation taking place out there on Twitter on Instagram on Facebook, that makes sense for us to interact with in some way, shape or form. How can we make sure we don't miss that wave? The things that brands should be doing to prepare for unplanned events is to basically plan them themselves practically speaking, operationally speaking, be creating a content repository to make sure that your ready with a whole category of content to launch when events take place.
Never before have we had a platform that gives us such an opportunity to engage with the audience in conversations that are happening right now. Social media conversations happen very fast and they end very fast.
Tactically, there are three things that brands can do to make sure they can speed up their turnaround time when it comes to creating social media content. The first is to make sure that you have a content repository, making sure that all of the content you ever created as a brand is there and is easily accessible for you to use whenever called upon.
The second is to create a in-house content production facility. Make sure that you have the ability within your own offices to be able to create content; making sure you have a team, a photographer, a studio, anything possible that you create content on the spot to speed things up.
And thirdly, making sure that we are investing the time, the resources in terms of social listening, making sure that we're not missing any relevant conversations, that we as a brand would naturally be well suited to take part in.
But the simple golden rule when it comes to being able to turn around content really quickly. Whether we're thinking tactically or in terms of preparations, it is better to create good enough content quickly, than perfect content slowly, good enough content will drive conversations.
