3 Content Management Tips for Social Media Marketers

As a social media marketer, content is everything. If you want to build a successful business, you have to create high-quality content that moves the needle for your brand. But it goes beyond content creation. You also have to think about systemization, security, and other important elements that happen behind the scenes.

3 Content Management Tips for Success

Anyone can zoom out, look at the big picture of content creation and publishing, and easily see that content management must be strategic. But the success is often in the details. Day-to-day content management has to be strategic, too. In other words, it has to be carefully documented, intentionally executed, and carefully aligned with the overall content strategy.

Research from Content Marketing Institute shows 78 percent of organizations take a strategic approach to content management. And those who don’t? Roughly 63 percent of them blame it on a lack of processes.

The point is clear: If you want to take a more strategic approach to content management as a social media marketer, you need to get organized and develop processes that put you in a position to be more successful.

Here are several tips:

1. Get Organized

Organization and systematization are at the heart of good content management. But with the velocity and volume of content that your business creates, it’s not an easy task. Thus, it’s imperative for you to figure out a way to wrap your arms around all of your content so that you can focus on all of the important aspects of executing.

One important step you can take is running regular content audits to keep detailed inventory of each piece of content you have in your organization. Content should be inventoried, organized, and clearly tagged within your system so that you can measure the effectiveness of each aspect of your content strategy.

It’s also smart to map out content as it aligns with the different stages in the customer journey. This ensures your content team isn’t just randomly producing content and throwing it against the wall to see what sticks. Instead, they can create intentional pieces of content that tie back to the end goal for each buyer persona.

Finally, work with your content creation team to develop a specific editorial calendar with all key dates of production, publication, and promotion.

2. Have a Plan for Unstructured Content

In the IT world, you’ll hear professionals discuss data in terms of “structured” and “unstructured.” And in the world of content, we also have structured and unstructured content.

Structured content is anything that can fit into a spreadsheet and has a URL attached to it. This is content that you can easily organize and track the analytics around. Unstructured content is all of the other content that doesn’t fit into columns and rows. This includes presentations, internal documents, PDFs, audio files, and even some video content.

In order to win with content management, you must have a plan for all content – including the unstructured variety. (IDC predicts 80 percent of all data and content will be unstructured within the next three years.)

The best way to organize your unstructured content alongside your structured content is to use a content management platform like Box. This allows you to proactively organize and ensure compliance over all content (structured or otherwise). And because it’s all organized in one platform, you never have to chase anything down.

3. Include the Entire Team

The biggest mistake social media marketers make with content management is operating in a silo. If you want your content management strategy to be effective, you have to include the entire team. This means gathering input from content creators, folks who run the paid advertising campaigns, the website developers, senior leadership, etc. You don’t have to act on every bit of feedback they give you, but you should at least take their pulse and consider their thoughts.

Master Content Management

In order to master content management as a social media marketer, you have to approach it from a strategic point of view. The creativity, glitz, and glam of content can be left to the creators – it’s your job to keep things organized, systematic, and secure.

And while the creators might get more of the praise and attention, you’re the one keeping the engine humming.