Content and social media are two different marketing disciplines with a common problem: they both require producing compelling content within limited time and funding.
Social media is essential for consistent, immediate engagement and brand building. Content marketing is essential for SEO and long-term relationships that lead to repeat sales.
We need both and It is resource intensive.
Combining the two into a single workflow can reduce the demands on each.
Deadline confusion
An e-commerce business might need to post at least six times a day and post four videos on TikTok and Instagram to build a following on X or Threads.
Assuming they maintain this schedule every day, their marketers would be faced with over 200 social media deadlines each week.
Meanwhile, your team must attract shoppers elsewhere through blog posts, articles, podcasts, videos and landing pages, boosting search engine rankings and building lasting customer relationships.
There’s a lot of content.
The hardest part is developing content ideas, producing them, and measuring the results.
Flywheel
a Business Flywheel It’s a cyclical process where each step leads to the next.
The concept has been around for decades. Jeff Bezos famously Using a flywheel To explain Amazon’s business model. Author Jim Collins wrote a book on the subject, and many businesses have started adopting it in their daily operations.
When you apply the flywheel to social media and content marketing, you focus on three steps:
- Content ideas,
- Content creation,
- measurement.
As an example, let’s develop a flywheel of articles and social media posts. We’ll focus on two of the three steps: content ideas and measurement.
Let’s assume we are working Content and Commerce A company that sells licensed sci-fi themed products drives potential customers to their website through content that includes related products that can be purchased.
Here are the steps:
1. Post to X
Take a topic idea and create X number of posts. Add a measurable call to action to your posts, such as “Sign up to our email list,” “Request a sample,” “Leave a comment,” etc. Record your posts in a spreadsheet.
Repeat this procedure six times a day.
Take X number of posts and record them in a spreadsheet and record how they performed. The most successful post here was about a transporter failure. Click on image to enlarge.
2. Measure performance
On the seventh day after publishing, measure the results of each post to identify topics that are popular with humans and X’s algorithm. Add the metrics to a spreadsheet.
3. Expand successful post X into an article
Repurpose X’s highest performing posts or topics into longer-form articles on your site. Optimize each one. Organic Search Keywords.
For example, a successful X-post about Star Trek Transporter Deaths might lead to an article titled “Star Trek Transporter Deaths and Other Issues.”
Record your articles in a spreadsheet and set goals for each one, like site traffic or email subscriptions.
The topics of successful X posts are expanded into articles.
4. Measure article performance
30 days after publication, track the performance of your articles against your goals with the goal of identifying your best performing articles.
5. Offshoots and forks of successful articles
For each successful article, identify at least five “branching” topics and five “branching” topics. Branching topics can stem from subheadings, and branches can be parallel concepts.
A branching topic for an article called “The Death of Star Trek’s Transporter and Other Issues” might be something like “Star Trek’s Transporter Creates an Existential Identity Crisis.” Use each branch or idea from the branch for X posts.
This closes the flywheel from the X-post to the field article and vice versa.
We started with an idea, created X posts, repurposed them into blog posts, and spawned X new posts.
There’s no content creation in this example, but the pattern is similar – you could add “content creation” steps to “Publish posts to X” and “Expand successful X posts into blog posts”.
The flywheel starts with an idea for X post, expands it into an article, and generates new ideas for X post.
