5 step guide to creating successful content tailored for the social audience.

Whether you’re planning weeks in advance or just have 20 minutes on the clock, here is a simple guide to help you create highly engaging holiday content for your social media audience.

Content creation isn’t rocket science, but that’s not to say it doesn’t involve just as much effort and thought most times. Back in the day when copywriters carefully crafted the headline and 100 word body copy, they poured hours and hours in to conceiving the idea and fitting it in to the painstakingly created design. Little did they know that a couple of years down the line, they’d have to do 10x the work in 1/10^th the time.

Today, brands are expected to be communicating multiple times a day on social media. It’s often forgotten that it still takes that much time to create the content, let alone measure performance! It’s a tough life being a creative team in 2015!

Enter Unmetric. We’ve put together an all-inclusive 5 step guide to creating holiday content for social media. You can now create great content and also back it up with data to make sure it performs great.

1- Weigh Resources

Start by cementing a solid plan that outlines the goals of the campaign along with type of content based on the strengths of your marketing team. Based on the time and budget you have, you can choose to create an integrated video campaign or something as simple as a plain text greeting.

Remeber to always set a goal to make your post-campaign anlaysis easier. Your goals could be as broad as spreading awareness or as specific as driving app downloads.

2 – Get Data – Inspired

Get smart when looking for inspiration and use a powerful search engine that lets you see successful content from that past that can inform your strategy. You can do a simple Google search, leverage Twitter’s advanced search or use Unmetric’s one of a kind toolkit, Discover*, that helps you find top performing content for any key word. Above content concept, also look for campaign duration and content type used by competitors.

3 – Draft & Creation

This is the crucial step in your campaign. Though creativity and ideas have no limit, you can improve performance by tweaking small elements such as image sizes, length of content etc. You can find an updated image size guide here and best practices for content length here.

Tools like Canva or Pablo help create beautiful images quickly – you won’t even be dependent on the art team. You could even create a .gif or a Vine video that can be done in-house to get the audience more involved.

4 – Distribution

Base your content distribution plan on a thorough study of previously successful content. Make sure to use the right type of content on the right network at a time when your audience is active. If you take BudLight’s tweet from 2014 as an example, you see that a simple creative greeting, when tweeted at the right time tops all engagement charts.

 

🎆🎆🎆🎆🎆🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🎆🎆🎆🎆🎆🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻 🎆🎆🎆🎆🎆🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🎆🎆🎆🎆🎆🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 #4thofJuly

— Bud Light (@budlight) July 4, 2014

When using hashtags, don’t forget that even minor variations can make a big difference. We found that #4thofJuly is almost three times as popular as #July4th and twice as popular as #IndependenceDay.

 

Spend some time in research like this. Unmetric’s Discover and Event Pulse are great tools for the purpose.

5 – Re-evaluate to improve

Measure the performance of your campaign and find out if there is opportunity to capitalize on the audience response. Take a look at influencer mentions, sentiment and other vanity metrics to get a sense of how your community likes the content. Based on post campaign analysis, you can either extend the campaign or end it by replying to community mentions.

The job of a social media manager doesn’t just end here. You’ll have to present the report to your boss (or client), simultaneously work on the next campaign while also handling multiple other projects. Unmetric’s social media analytics software makes your job a lot easier by helping you keep a tab on completion, analyzing your social media data at an incredible speed and giving you all this in a report creatable in 15 seconds. Find out more about how we can help you here or go ahead and grab our free trial.

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*Unmetric Discover is an ideation toolkit developed exclusively for brand content creators. It brings data-driven creativity to your fingertios through our database of over 320 million pieces of brand content published by 40,000 brands. It’s the first toolkit of its kind and allows you to follow trending topics, collaborate with your team and even search for keywords. Our clients use it to beat the blank page syndrome and to carry out whit space analysis.

This article was originaly published on AdWeek.