Astrid Haug - DIY Social Media Content Strategy

In High Noon , the famous western from 1952, Gary Cooper plays the role of Will Kane. He marries Amy Fowler, the pacifist Quaker played by Grace Kelly, and gives up his duties as sheriff to become a shopkeeper. When rumors begin to circulate that the villain Frank Miller has arrived on the noon train, the couple flees the town by carriage. Some distance outside town, Will Kane stops the horses in order to return and fight the criminals. I dont understand any of this, says Amy. Will Kane replies, I havent got time to tell you.

I feel the same way about social media. If you still doubt that it can be used for more than just small talk, then I will not try to convince you to get started. Because, as the good sheriff said, if you dont get it now, theres no time to explain it.

Instead, you get a book that presents reality in an organization after social media has become part of everyday life. During the last ten years we have not only developed our digital proficiency, we have also fundamentally changed our way of thinking about customers, communities and colleagues. We know more about customers than we used to, because we can monitor their digital behavior. At the same time, users have higher expectations of companies, organizations and public institutions to tailor communication to their specific needs.

We are past catchy buzzwords and quick fixes, because every example shows that the best results are obtained through persistent long-term effort and hard work. So from this perspective, there is nothing new here. There are no quick tricks that will take care of everything. You have to buckle down. And it helps if you make the work fun.

You can use this book when the consultants have left the building with their PowerPoint presentations and when work really needs to get done. My ambition with this book is to give you the tools to integrate social media into the organizations communication with its customers, stakeholders, employees and community members. To get there you need a content strategy for social media. A content strategy is the answer to the challenge that many small and medium-sized companies face. The usual way a company approaches social media is to choose a few platforms e.g. Facebook and Twitter and get started. But little thought is given to the type of content that will fuel this effort. How will you be relevant to your target group? And how should your content benefit your business? Typically, there is no budget set aside to produce great content. So you post what you can find here and there and you wonder why using social media has no effect. You could also ask yourself what people are supposed to share, link to or comment on if there is no relevant content. What are you supposed to advertise with or perform SEO on if not good content? A typical scenario for the way companies use social media is, therefore, as follows: The company has been on Facebook for six months. There are 815 likes, of which 200 are friends, employees, and family. Updates and engagement have ground to a halt.

This book focuses on how to create content that will fuel the companys presence on social media and on how companies can keep the conversation going on these networks. In my view, good content is the secret to succeeding on social media. If you find the formula for making good content that engages people, you will also know how to create value for the company. This requires that you dare to look at the content you currently produce through new eyes and from a user perspective. This book will help you find the answers to these questions: How do we communicate, what do we communicate, and whom do we want to communicate with on social media?

Many of the people I interviewed for this book have landed their jobs as social media managers in non-traditional ways. And they also have different job titles from Marketing Manager and Social Media Manager to Project Manager and Director. This is an indication that this is still a developing field, characterized by people who create their own jobs and who are, thus, pioneers. Their job titles are of lesser importance it is their accomplishments that make them interesting. Most of the cases in this book involve Danish companies, many of which operate internationally.

My goal for writing this book is to turn social media into something that we work with strategically, rather than reactively. The point of the book is that good, user-centered content can be used to build a strong network around your projects or brands, thus consolidating your efforts.