Content strategy

Module day 5 at **The Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic** (Photo: Filip Staněk)

Strategic thinking

When you’ve decided on the platform, it’s time to start thinking about your content strategy. The simplest way to approach a content strategy is to consider what you are setting out to do: before creating a social media post, think about what you want it to achieve. Each post you make should have an aim or a goal: getting the audience to buy a ticket to your show, subscribing to your social media profile, checking out your content on another platform, visiting your website and so on.

Note that this isn’t an easy task! Each post will stir some kind of emotion in the person seeing it. They might find it interesting, boring, funny, emotional, amazing, annoying, touching… In most cases you’ll of course want to bring up positive feelings that make the recipient want to see more of your content and work. This is also an ongoing process, and you’ll want to keep your audience engaged.

This means that you should also be prepared to post the same content several times, preferably with new visuals, some new information etc. – not just the exact same post multiple times! The reason is that when a person sees, for example, a post that promotes your show that you want them to buy a ticket to, they might be interested but see it at a bad time and be unable to follow the sale link. If they never see it again, they might forget the entire thing, but if they see a reminder at a better time, it could lead to a sale.

Know your platform

Examples on what kind of content works on which platform:

Selling tickets to events: Facebook – the possibility to create FB events promoting your work
Building your personal brand: Instagram – best platform for high quality photo content
Reaching a very large audience: TikTok – the content on the platform moves fast and has the best possibility of going viral
Leading audience to another site, e.g. your website: Facebook – many other platforms don’t support direct linking to other websites, at least not as easily, since they want to keep the users on their platform
Longer videos showcasing your work: Youtube or Vimeo – on other platforms short video clips are preferable as people rarely want to watch a video longer than a few minutes (on Facebook or Instagram) and even that might be too long, but for longer or even full-length shows you’ll want to use a dedicated video platform

But again, note that these are only examples. New features that are constantly introduced on the platforms (or more likely copied from another one) might bring new opportunities – but also force new limitations on the users.

Different platforms also have different metrics for measuring “success” – what success means in this context also depends on what you are aiming for. But in a general sense it can be said that on Youtube and TikTok the most important metric is watch time, on Facebook comments and on Instagram shares and post saves. If a post is performing well on these indicators, it is more likely that the algorithm will recommend it to people possibly even outside your circle of established followers, depending again on the platform.