Have you ever had some great content of which you were really proud? Have you ever done everything you could to promote content only to have it fall flat with your audience? Did you send the content out into the community only to hear the sound of crickets?
Nothing is more frustrating to me than releasing great content only to have it get very little attention. When this does happen, I start to question my strategy, my content, and even if I actually hit my target audience. All of these are valid things to question, but they don’t solve my issue.
Today, I want share three methods with you that will make sure that this situation doesn’t happen with your content. Each method approaches the problem differently, but they all have the same result when applied properly: they keep your content from getting lost. Here are the three methods.
- Slice up your content. – This may seem like an odd statement to make, but sometimes your content can be so much that it gets lost. Your content may simply not be the right size for social media. Content that needs slicing can be a video or article that’s too long or a graphic with too much information.
The simplest way to solve this is problem is slicing up your content. Breaking up your content into smaller chunks can be really helpful. For example, instead of putting your entire sermon online, take the sermon and find the three best 90-second clips, and then put those on YouTube. You could even have someone transcribe the sermon and break that transcription into smaller blog posts.
How small should you make your content? Small enough that it still contains enough value that will make your audience want to consume the content. Too short with no value and you will be wasting their time.
- Rerun your content. – Sometimes your content gets lost because it just wasn’t the right time to post it. You can have the best content in the world, but if you lack the right timing then all your hard work will go to waste. So how do you avoid mistiming your content?
First, realize that your content isn’t just promoted once and then never again. You can always re-promote content throughout the year. Think of it like TV reruns. Sure, you may have seen that episode of the Big Bang Theory before, but you’ll watch it again if you enjoyed it the first time. If you haven’t seen that episode, you’ll stick around and watch it. Think of your content in the same manner. Don’t assume that just because you promoted something once on social media means that everyone who wants to see it already looked at it.
Second, think of your content in the same terms that you would for #throwbackthursday (#throwbackthursday or #tbt is when you post something on social media that is from the past, usually for nostalgic reasons). There are probably plenty of people in your church who love reminiscing about the past, so this is a chance to give them what they want.
Finally, you can also replay old content when you have new content that’s related to it. For example, let’s say you’re doing a series on Faith, and you’ve also done a series on Hebrews 11. When you’re promoting the Faith series, find any content from the Hebrews 11 series that relates to the new series.
- Empower your staff. – You have great content, but people just aren’t sharing. You wrote a clever headline, loaded up on your channels, but you can’t get any traction. Well, the problem may not be your content but who’s distributing it.
A key thing to remember is that people are more likely to follow ministers than they are ministries. For example, my pastor’s Twitter will always outperform our church’s Twitter. Why? People want to make a human connection.
So, how you do get people to connect with your content? One effective way to do this is to encourage your ministers to share the content. You’ll be surprised how willing they will be to share your content. The trick is to make it very simple to share!
To make it simple for your staff, write up a variety of tweets and Facebook posts with links to your content. Then, send an email to your staff letting them know about the content that you would like them to promote. Tell them that all they have to do is cut and paste the content as it’s laid out in the email!
Just think, with one small email you’ve gone from sharing the content from your church account to your entire staff sharing the content on their personal accounts. I think you’ll find this method pretty effective!
Don’t let your best content get lost in the noise of social media. Take some of the actions above and make sure your audience sees your content.
What do you do to make sure content doesn’t get lost? Click here and share below.