Do you have a content plan?

Content planning has been at the fore front of my mind during the past few weeks.  I have been thinking about how I can improve my own content marketing and content plan as well as giving ideas to businesses of all types about the type of content they can create.

I think there are two sides to content that you share on Social Media platforms:

• Content that you have created yourself
• Content others have created that you can share

It is important to get a balance between the two.  I see many businesses who only share content created by others.  I’m not sure how this adds to the credibility of the business. Yes, it creates brand awareness but I like to see businesses I work with being able to have an original thought!  On the other hand, it is quite a bit of work to create original content so sharing content from others gives you an opportunity to associate your brand with others or promote work from your clients, business partners or associates.

When we create content, it is very easy to publish the tweet or status update and assume that everybody is going to see it and engage with it.  I know, I do it myself, I put the post out there and assume that if I don’t get any engagement, people aren’t interested.  In reality, only a fraction of your audience on each of the tools will see an update at any one time.  This is because the tool may decide not to show them the post, or they may not be looking at the time that you publish the post and it has gone off their news feed before they do actually look.

So what is the solution?  Try to reuse content.  I have started to create a document in which I can ask questions of my audience and reuse content.  For example, I have created this blog entry which will be distributed on various platforms.  I could also publish the following updates:

• How much original content do you publish and how much content do you share?
• How often do you publish content?
• Do you look at the number of people who have viewed your status updates on LinkedIn?
• Do you have a content plan?  (link to blog)
• Ideas for creating content (link to blog)
• What content curation tools do you use?
• etc.

I can publish these updates (mixed in with other updates) over a period of time, some linking to this blog entry, some linking to our online social media marketing strategy course and some with no links.

I can also look for content created around the subject by others and reshare those posts.

All of which will keep my social media profiles active and interesting.

I would love to know your thoughts.  What is your proportion of original / sharing content do you aim for?  How do you plan your content?