Social Media Content Creation
Crafting Social Media Content for Luxury Footwear Brand Cobbler Union
As part of the NC State Global Luxury Management Social Media class I’m instructing, we’ve been developing a framework for social media marketing engagement. Beginning with baselining, students have been working on understanding audience composition and quality as a starting point for social media marketing. Next, they are learning how to develop and source content for various sources.
This week’s assignment is to create three sample pieces of content for a luxury brand of their choosing with the objective of bring the brand to life on a social channel in an engaging way and to create a Medium post about the process and experience. As an example, I’ve chosen an excitng new luxury footwear brand I’ve become a recent fan of, Cobbler Union.
Many brands are discovering that successful social media marketing requires a massive amount of content to drive consumer engagement. Naturally, content is not enough, with ever-increasing competition for attention across social channels, the quality and variety of content becomes imperative. To manage this new media paradigm, a resourceful approach that combines many types and sources of content to feed the constant demand for fresh media is required.
Some brands are struggling to create enough quality content for even a couple of primary social channels like Facebook or Twitter. Many brands post or engage less than once a day, however, most studies show that without regular engagement, fans and followers atrophy quickly and engagement falters. Content needs can be simply derived by determining overall reach and engagement metrics, just like any other media. For instance, if a brand is seeking to drive 100,000 monthly engagements, it could calculate its content need by looking at its current audience size and engagement rates. It could then program content to meet its needs. For example, a brand with a total audience of 250,000 with an average engagement rate of 2% would need on average 20 pieces of content monthly per channel long with dedicated community management to reach 100,000 engagements. This is for organic engagement and could easily be achieved with less content by mixing paid engagement but its a relatively good rule of thumb.
Social content can be derived from multiple inputs including:
- Curated — Content found on digital channels that is relevant, interesting, helpful and/or valuable to an audience
- Agency — Professionally produced content created for social media channels by an advertising, marketing, PR agency etc.
- Internal — Professionally produced content created by an internal creative team
- UGC — Content produced by consumers of a brand or category
- Advocate — Media generated by brand fans and passionates
- Influencer — Content created by social media influencers and multi-channel network stars
- Community Manager — Content developed by professional community managers
- Participative — Media created by active engagement in forums, comments, etc.
This is certainly not an exhaustive list and perhaps one of the most interesting is some of the evolving automated and machine derived content platforms such as Automated Insights that can create stories and other types of media from data sources. Scaled content generation and management is still in its infancy for many brands but beginning to become a central part of many marketing plans with a wide range of approaches.
For Cobbler Union, I’ve already created several pieces of original content during my brand discovery and first product order cycle. First, I shared the original article I read about about the company that Ifound via my daily google alert for Luxury brands. Sharing is likely one of the most frequently used forms of content creation. Many social media content creators are prolific sharers and create engagement and build audience using this form of content. Brands can used curated content to begin fill in part if their content calendar. News articles, category related media, inspirational and informational post can be shared via brand and related channels. By actively interacting and engaging with curated media and the creators and producers also builds community and audience which is a key success driver in using curated media.
As with all social media, participation is critical for success. One way communication is simply not social media, its only messaging and not an effective use of the channel as engagement rates will attest. One highly effective brand content source is forums. Engagement is key and engaging platforms can be good ways for brands to connect with passionate consumers. Forums like Reddit can often offer more engagement than other kinds of social channels. For Cobbler Union, men’s fashion boards like styleforum are a good place to connect with key target consumers. Here’s a consumer seeking community advice about the brand and others sharing their experience. Answering questions and helping consumers is a frequently overlooked for of branded media. I created a simple Pinterest post as a fresh piece of content from one of the UGC posts from the site. As with all good relationships, social media is not about you, its about others. Engaging with fans, community and category content is critical to grown organic engagement. Paid media is a critical part of a complete media plan but can’t carry the load.
Finally, I used Photofy to create a piece of visual content using some photos I had taken of some Cobbler Union shoes I ordered. Using the Photofy mobile editing platform I was able to easily create a piece of media and publish on Instagram with auto-syndication on Facebook and Twitter. All in, my simplistic content creations have gained over 1000 impressions in the less than 24 hours without optimizing distribution through departing or paid media. My total social media audience is in the 30K range so this would equate to a 3% impression delivery on my audience. I’ll syndicate this content for the next four days and evaluate its reach during Thursday evening’s class.
Using these techniques, Cobbler Union could build a robust social media marketing platform that would grow their audience and create value as an engagement and conversion driver.
disclosure: This post is part of NC State’s Global Luxury Management Social Media Class — GLM590. I am the instructor of the class. I am also an advisory board member of Photofy. All opinions and insights are my own.
