We have been discussing the book The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand by Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio. According to the authors, you must have clearly defined goals that are in alignment with key business objectives. Content planning is key to strategically developing visuals that will bring your company’s story to life. The first step to creating a road map is to define your big picture goals:
- Awareness and education
- Branding
- Competitive differentiation
- Consumer engagement
- Corporate social responsibility
- Customer retention
- Fan and community growth
- Lead generation
- Positive press
- Product launches
- Promotions
- Referral traffic
- Sales
- Thought leadership
Understand how your current efforts rate by conducting a content audit to check your efforts across all social media channels. Reference that with the overall social media conversation about your company. Evaluate your current program and create a benchmark against which to measure your future visual storytelling efforts going forward.
Analyzing and auditing are key to knowing where your company is and understanding how you want to grow as a company. Things to track include:
- Date
- Time of day
- Day of week
- Content type (ex: photo, video, text)
- Content theme (ex: promotion, thought leadership, funny)
- Engagement metrics for the platform (ex: likes, comments, shares, retweets)
- Engagement rate per post
- Post sentiment (positive, negative, neutral)
- Qualitative wins
Facebook virality=
likes + comments + shares
total impressions generated per post
Twitter engagement =
# of replies and retweets x 100
# of followers
Use a spreadsheet by social media platform, factor, and raw data for trends and themes. Evaluate these supporting components and your content’s engagement rate across all platforms. Questions to ask:
- What does my posting frequency look like?
- What does my content mix look like?
- What % of my posts by social media channel are visual?
- What topics do I post most frequently about?
- Am I posting the same content across all platforms or do I personalize it by the platform I use?
- Do these topics align back with the key business objectives I want to support with social media?
- Are there any topics I am missing?
- Is my company’s voice, personality, and corporate culture coming through in my posts?
- What social media platforms are currently performing the best and worst for my company?
- What are the characteristics of my top five to ten posts across each social media platform?
- Are any of my posts paid for? If so, what is spending, frequency, and post types?
Listen to what your customers are saying about your company online. Understand the most frequently asked questions and the general sentiment of others towards your company. Social media at its finest is a continuous two-way dialogue between your company and your customers. Use social listening to inspire relevant content ideas that prompt conversation and engagement. Summarize your top takeaways which can be translated into themes for your content calendar. The next post we will discuss content strategies.
Image by Marcus Berg of Unique Angles Photography
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