For self-employed editors and writers, knowing how to manage your social media content is a key ingredient for growing and maintaining your clientele. The following are some factors that need to be taken into consideration, regardless of the platform.
1. Know your audience(s)
This one is obvious. Questions start coming up when you have several different audiences, such as colleagues and clients in separate niches. In this case, you can mention the audience at the beginning of a post and/or use appropriate hashtags.
Write a list of platforms where your potential clients and colleagues spend most of their time, and join those platforms. Write a list of their commonly asked questions and pain points, and create content to address them. Ask yourself what some of the emotions are that you share. Once in a while, add content that empathizes with your audience (without abusing any emotions).
2. Balance visibility and engagement
Visibility comes from what you post, like, share or comment on. Engagement refers to your comments on other people’s relevant posts. By commenting, you are adding a perspective or expanding on a tip, which can make other readers want to know who you are and what you do. Your visibility through content positions you as a credible professional, while your engagement keeps you at the top of readers’ minds.
3. Choose the content genre(s) that you enjoy creating
Having an anchor genre is one way to stay motivated to create content, especially if you are just establishing your social media presence. The available variety of content genres is great, but if you manage your content solo (as most editors do), you will most likely choose the genre(s) that work best for you, which are ideally the ones that you enjoy creating. When you start creating content, you want to build and sustain a habit — establish consistency without overwhelming yourself
4. Reuse your existing content
Once you have amassed more content, you can repurpose it into various formats. Experiment with various ways to restate the same message for multiple channels and audiences at different times throughout the year. Track your engagement, analyze the most successful posts and try replicating them.
5. Share content often to reach more people
Many of us in self-effacing professions wonder how often it is okay to post. Marketing research says that only 10–15% of your audience will see your post at the time it is published. Social media algorithms change all the time. If you want to reach a wider audience, posting seven days a week (once a day) is perfectly reasonable. Tools like Buffer can be used to schedule posts several weeks in advance.
6. Optimize your website content that is already ranking
Most editors have small sites that are not SEO-optimized. Unless you are investing seriously in SEO, you probably have several blog posts that are getting clicks while the rest of your content is not ranking high on Google.
Instead of creating new blog posts (think about being paid 50 cents per word for a blog post, for example), check your site’s performance in Google Search Console. Pick the top-performing pages and add new sections, expand existing sections, add visuals or samples, and update “About the Author” with your most recent links to services. Tools like MarketMuse can help you discover new keywords. In other words, if your Google Search Console report tells you that a certain blog post is getting 65 clicks per month, you can probably improve that post to get even more clicks.
7. Offer a newsletter
Email marketing is one of the most efficient ways to engage your audience, because they already know, like and trust you — and want to see your updates in their mailbox. Use the newsletter to add value based on what you know about your client groups. Consider a paid LinkedIn or other social media post to launch and promote your newsletter.
Creating content is labour-intensive. If you put the time into it, think about the ways to optimize content for best results. Reusing content, repeating the same idea in various ways over the years and using your best-performing tools are some of the ways to ensure that your work on content is efficient and brings you new business.
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Previous post from Tanya Mykhaylychenko: Resumé Writing vs. Resumé Editing: What Do Resumé Writers Do?
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