Dynamically Adapting a Changing Content Focus to Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Neal Schaffer: 0:01

Welcome to maximize your social actionable advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social, social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business. Neal Schaffer. Greetings, everybody. Neal Schaffer, maximiser. Social, you know who I am, you know what this podcast is about? I don't think I need to make any more introduction. But you know, more and more This podcast is becoming the Seth Hinze Questions and Answers podcast. Because Seth was so inspired by maximize your social and asked me so many questions that I really want to make sure I answer every single one of them. And I'm going to keep going to I do. And I encourage you all as well. If you have a question, please let me know. Let me help you maximize your social. So let's go on to the next topic that Seth had. And I will say that his questions are very short, because they were included in 140 character Twitter direct messages. So you know, excuse the brevity of what he was asking. But his next question was shifting content midstream. How do you change the course of a blog from wide ranging to focused when you've been wide ranging? And this is a great question. This is actually something that I've experienced, because my blog started with a wordpress.com blog expert answers to your LinkedIn questions, which then went to windmill networking, and it was still very LinkedIn centric, but it got a little bit broader. And now with maximize social business, it's gone extremely broad. Now, if I wanted to take that narrow, this is exactly what I think Seth is getting out. But either way, shifting content midstream is natural businesses, organizations are dynamic, the products that you carry may change your industry might change, except if you're obviously very, very well established in a very, very stable industry. But things change, right. And what's going to happen is if you create your social media strategy, as outlined and maximize your social, and you do your PDCA, and you do your checking on a regular basis, you're going to notice that there's some type of content, invariably, that's going to do better than other types of content. And therefore, in some ways, you might be shifting a little bit more narrow, because you want to emphasize that content that is really engaging. Or this is one thing I like to do at my record university class. And whenever I do a more interactive workshop, where I like to ask people questions, is if your company is aiming for, you know, in five years from now, you have a b2b and b2c product or a service. And five years from now you want to double your b2c sales over b2b, obviously, your blog content is going to change as well, because you want to emphasize more of those consumer facing products and services than the business facing ones. Right. So Seth, it's a great question, regardless of your status, or if you haven't done it before, you're gonna get to a point where you need to change content midstream. And it's not hard to do, it really comes down to those content buckets, and the weight of each of those content buckets, and the analyzing them and make sure that that weight and the names of the buckets are aligned with your strategy. And with you know, the way that blogs work, if your content buckets are organized by categories, then obviously, there's going to be a few categories where you're gonna be logging more and more and more about, and I guess there's a few different ways of looking at it, you can either, you know, if you had 10 categories now, and you're gonna go a lot more narrower, you know, you could in essence, take those other categories of content, and put them in an other's buckets. And really emphasize the two or three buckets that you plan to blog most about, you could do something similar to what I did on maximize social business, which is organize all the buckets that I have into four major buckets, four or five major buckets, right platforms, which go over all the different social networks, disciplines, which go over all the internal departments of a company, industries, write themes, and then marketing is one. So that's another way of organizing the buckets. But I don't think that you need to do anything different than what you've done. It's just blogging on certain topics more frequently than other ones. But you're going to have two issues that come up. And these are two wishes that I've had come up personally, when I went through these different changes with my blog, none of which I've regretted. And I really wouldn't do anything differently, but they are facts that you will have to deal with when you do this. Fact number one, if you have authority with Google, on certain keywords, have certain content that are not part of the focus that you have your website traffic is going to go down, you're going to take a hit. Because what's going to happen is Google is still going to send you traffic for those pieces that you already have authority for, but you're not going to be introducing any new content around those topics. And you're probably not going to go back in and you know, maintain or revise those old blog posts because they're not important your company anymore, right. So when I talk about Facebook versus LinkedIn cool quantity versus quality. It's all about for a lot of companies its quality. So be prepared to take a hit. If those keywords and Google search and other search engine visits, don't go to content that you plan to keep narrow, if they do go to content, that's part of your plans to focus on, then all the better, you're gonna get even more authority and even more traffic. So that's good. But if not, you know, understand, that's probably what's going to happen. The other thing that you need to face is that your readers are not ready for the transition, because they're used to hearing about certain sort of content from you. And I was like this as well, you know, I concentrated on LinkedIn. And my first book was really about professional networking, and an online world personal branding. You know, it wasn't about b2b sales, or marketing, or even the job hunt. And it was really in 2009. Before most companies were using LinkedIn for sales and marketing, but it was when a lot of people were using LinkedIn for the job search. So immediately, I started getting pulled into job search conversations. And there were some blog posts I wrote about that. Now, that is not relevant to me today. And I know when I first veered off that topic, and started talking about more business topics, and I started getting off the LinkedIn topic and talking about other topics, I know that I lost some of my readership. And that's okay, the content that I provided them, and that your business has provided up until now has served that audience and will continue to serve that audience in your archives, and the fact that it's indexed by Google. But really, you want to focus on that content that's going to help you achieve your business objectives. And in doing so, you're going to have to generate a new readership. So expect that engagement to go down and inspect other things to go down as you do that there's going to be a transition period. But I've got to believe that with social media and with engaging with the right people and players in any given industry and social media, and sharing your content, creating first of all great content that's shareable and sharing it in the right way, in the right mediums, and in the right networks, I would tend to believe that you're going to gain new fans, you know, I don't know if it's going to be a matter of days, weeks or months. But there's going to be this transitional period that you're going to go through from an engagement and from a website view perspective, it is something natural, that's why when you start to get more focused, you may want to write a blog post that says going forward, this is what we're going to do, because this is what we're passionate about. This is what our business is about. And this is how we can help the most people, right, I sort of came out with a similar blog post, I recommend that you do something similar and let people know, you know, going forward, this is this is the plan, this is what we're going to talk about, we look forward to engaging with you and providing you even more resourceful content. So I think that it's not something that you have to worry about, I think it's something you have to do, because your social media strategy, and what you blog about is all driven by those business objectives. And if they change, you need to change with them. So instead of tracking, you know, metrics that are irrelevant, because the traffic you're generating is not converting, because the content that you're dangling out there is irrelevant to what your business does now, you know, get into that focus, and get those metrics going. And you may have to do a reset on your baseline metrics, because your baseline metrics may have been determined by contents or engagement in a bigger space or on a broader range of topics. And now it's going to get more narrower, and that might not happen. So almost doing a reset, I think in most cases is going to be the best scenario. But nevertheless, when you shift content midstream, you shift you let people know, you still keep giving great content, if you really want to make it apparent, you can redo your social profiles, I don't really recommend you do it, but at least redo your bios and the keywords to reflect you know what you're going to be tweeting about or what have you, or sharing in social media, that will also help lessen that blow that I think you're gonna get to. So, Seth, I hope that advice helped you. I think it's something that a lot of companies have gone through and will continue to go through. And therefore I thought it was a great topic. And hopefully, if it hasn't hit you yet, it's going to be something that's going to be helpful for you in the future. Hey, I hope you enjoyed this podcast, listening to this podcast. Whether you're on a trampoline somewhere in the world, as some of you are when you listen, you're in your car, you're at the gym, wherever you might be. I really appreciate all your support would appreciate if you shared the iTunes SoundCloud, Stitcher maximize your social.com length with your friends. Give it some good ratings, if you think it's recommendable, and let me know if you have any questions you'd like me to talk about. That's the closest we can get to a one on one conversation right. Until then, wherever you're on the world. Make it a great day. Bye bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on the show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at meal at maximize your social.com Thanks for listening and have a great day.