When and how often you should produce content

After you have decided on a work flow that distributes tasks appropriately among team members, you should aim to create a content calender, with deadlines and tasks outlined for each project.

Your teams overall goal should be to produce great content as often as you can, with the resources you currently have. That said, the social media world is always changing. So resist the urge to cling to a six-month old strategy that's not working, or conversely, to abandon ship on a social media project that has not yet existed long enough to gather useful metrics on user response and ROI.

Instead, aim or a middle ground, in which your team develops a social media strategy that has:

• Deadlines that will challenge your staff and keep content timely, without making unreasonable demands on their time or energy.
• A work flow that allows enough time to properly complete each step of the process
• Regular meetings to review upcoming projects and user response to past projects
• A set beginning and end date for your strategy, after which your team will evaluate ROI and make any necessary changes to work flow and calender

Here's an example of how a content calender might address work flow. Say your company's working on a new promotional video. Your content calender will outline:

• Who will create the video from start to finish
• Who will post about the video on Facebook and Twitter
• Who will respond to comments about the video
• Who will generate reports about the traffic and response to the video
• Deadlines for each task

Testing...

Once your team has settled on a suitable task list ad work flow process, it is recommended that you create several pieces of test content using your new system, place them in mockups as they will appear to users, and critique them with your company stakeholders and social media team. Not only does this ensure that you'll find leaks in the system, but it will also help you to create a content stable to pull from in the future,  when news ma be slow. For this reason, you should choose topics that will always be relevant to users. News editors call this evergreen content. Examples of evergreen content might be lists of tips or resources that may be useful to your users, engaging interviews or profiles.

• As you test your content, your team should consider these questions:
• Does your work flow allow plenty of time for each person to do their best work?
• Is every person comfortable with his or her assigned role in the process?
• Does your our content have a unified tone and voice that is engaging and in line with the company brand?
• Can we consistently create content with the same quality and tone?
• Are we creating content that we or our friends would like to read and share?

After the launch: maintaining your strategy

After you launch your social media strategy, you and your team will still have important work to do. You will need to monitor the following:

• Is your team staying on-message and true to its goals of the project?
• Is your social media team too small to execute these goals? Too big?
• Are the outlets you've chosen the right places for this content, based on reader response?
• Is the content you're creating consistently getting done, to the best of your teams abilities?
• Is your work flow sustainable?
• Are you producing content frequently enough to make a timely impact on the social media conversation around your brand?

Gathering information about the above across multiple social media platforms can be difficult. A software program may help you to obtain solid numbers so you can make adjustments and evaluate progress.

Evaluate your social media strategy

So now, its been a few months and your team has (hopefully) been having fun exploring the world of social media. You've encountered some new information sources that have deepened your understanding of what your company has to offer, and in turn, your team has added valuable content and perspective to the social media space. Its time for you tema to evaluate your strategy.

Your team should reassess the issues you discussed in the beginning:

• Did your team stay on -message and true to the goals of the project?
• Is it time to make changes to your team roster?
• Should (and could) you expand your listening and content creation strategies to include new social media outlets?
• What was the overall response to your content? Did users like it? Interact with it? How could it be improved?
• Did everyone understand their roles in the project? Did work get completed?
• In the future, could you post more frequently? Respond more quickly?

Again, you will want to come to this conversation armed with hard numbers and keep focus on specific goals accomplished and ideas for refinement. Social media is still in its infancy, but thanks to constant improvements in technology and user savvy, this new frontier is quickly becoming an established and measurable method for increasing business, buzz, and even job satisfaction. In fact, you may be surprised at the creativity, and flexibility or your team when it comes to executing your social media strategy.

Now, all you have to do is keep the momentum going.

This concludes the 6 part series on Starting and managing a social media campaign for your company. I do hope that you found this information helpful and are able to implement some of these methods.

Thanks for reading.