Getting your content release schedule right
Conventional wisdom tells us that regularity and consistency is the key to building online audiences. YouTube itself advises that a regular video release schedule, along the ‘hero, hub, hygiene’ model, is the way to go. It’s tried and tested, and it works.
But the need to churn out a constant stream of content can be a challenge for social media managers and producers working with small teams (or, more often, alone!), very small budgets, and competing priorities. Is it better to just get something out to avoid radio silence on your accounts, or take time to craft better posts at the expense of that regular stream we know brings in the followers we crave?
Less is more
Obviously there’s a balance to be struck, but my advice, in short, is: go for quality, not quantity. The online landscape is now so overwhelmed by content and the platforms are dramatically filtering what’s shown to which followers. The rewards of constant posting are diminishing. To make the most of your limited resources, you need to compete on quality and depth, not just volume. Adding to the noise can only bring you so much benefit. And I’d apply this at every level. Instead planning in 5 tweets for the day, spend that same amount of time on 2 perfectly written (and re-written and edited) nuggets of gold. Don’t try to get out one video every week; aim for every other week or every month, or whatever you can handle, and give yourself time to create, and proper time to promote.
This was the direction that most of the producers I spoke to are moving in. It’s a trend you can see across lots of the finest science YouTubers, as in an increasingly crowded marketplace they seek to stand out by producing better, less frequent videos.
So does that mean everything has to have glorious production values?
No. But it might mean that you should care about them more than you currently are. As access to good recording equipment has dramatically widened, people have learnt to expect more than they once did. What cut it in 2013 doesn’t really any more. Don’t use ‘it’s social media, everyone is making and sharing stuff on their phone’ as an excuse. You can make brilliant content with a phone. Not every Snap has to be a work of photographic fine art, but hold yourself to a standard — ask of every post whether it represents science in the right way and reflects the quality you want your organisation to embody. If it doesn’t, simply don’t post it. No great loss.
But don’t lose perspective; know when it’s ok to drop the production values
Obviously, there’s a balance to be struck. You can’t spend days on every Instagram story. So think about what will most benefit from the extra time. For example, Erin Chapman produces the excellent Shelf Life for AMNH, and each episode can take months to get right. But she knows that Facebook Lives don’t benefit from anything like that time investment.
I’ve often held up this example from NPR’s Skunk Bear as the finest example of what’s possible with the ‘Live’ format: it is inventive, has carefully planned segments, a fun way to interact with the audience… But when I asked Adam Cole about it, he was decidedly downbeat. It took days to prepare, and the response they got wasn’t at all what they’d hoped for.
So develop an awareness of what ‘quality’ means for different formats, and make a conscious decision about what you’re shooting for each time. Not ‘that’ll do’, when you run out of time, but plan realistically. Anna Rothschild’s excellent approach to this is to ‘embrace your personal brand of crummy’ — there’s a real art to owning your imperfections and developing a style that you can recreate easily and quickly.
But if in doubt, shoot for the moon. Wouldn’t you rather be known for creating the best in any format, rather than for just being present?
Playing to the algorithm
A key question that’s wrapped up inside this balancing act is what format to use when. In an ideal world, you should think about the message you want to share and story you want to tell, then decide the medium. But when you’re working with limited budget and resources, you often don’t have the luxury of picking the perfect format. You need to take advantage of anything you can.
And that’s fine. You can be pragmatic (ie, if Facebook is massively favouring Lives, by all means run with those), but still maintain a commitment to your tone and your standards. Have confidence in your organisation’s identity, and only jump on the bandwagon if that wagon is going in the right direction.
You’re not selling clothes or fast food — you’re educating, probably building a community, and trying to impact people’s lives with the value your organisation can bring. We’re competing on platforms optimised for and perfected by large commercial companies — if you’re a small team trying to be heard and have an impact, you probably can’t compete by just being like them. Know what you can offer better than anyone else, and commit to that.
Spend more time on promotion and engagement
The single best piece of advice I can give you (but that 99% of us won’t follow), is to put all the resources you were planning to put into your next big piece of content into publicising your best content from the last couple of years. Most educational content is pretty much evergreen, but once a project is complete we tend to leave the content to slowly trickle down our feeds into distant obscurity.
It’s clear why this happens. Nobody wants to fund promotion of old pieces, and internally there’s always pressure to create something new and exciting. But find your best work, perhaps some that didn’t get the attention it deserved at the time, and spend time and money to help it find a new audience. Repost it, contact press or influencers about it, tweak it slightly to make it topical, or shift the emphasis to make it relevant to people’s lives from a different angle.
One nice example of this comes again from Skunk Bear. This video detailing the horse vs human marathon was first released a couple of years ago on YouTube and has accumulated some healthy viewing figures. But when they recently shared it on Facebook and tied it to the New York marathon, specifically pointing it to joggers, it found a whole new life.
What about you? Do you think it’s better to be consistent than sporadically spectacular? Join in the comments below!
This post forms part of the publication, ‘Communicating Science with Social Media’, which is the product of a 2017 Winston Churchill Fellowship. Read more about the project here, and for more about me, including examples of my own work, visit anthony-lewis.com.
