Having a social presence isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity to drive sales, brand awareness, and reach. However, the process of growing your brand’s social media presence is much easier said than done. Most social platforms are over-saturated with cluttered news feeds, algorithms that prioritize channels with extensive advertising budgets, and ineffective content publishing that produces lackluster results.
There are many factors that influence the results of a brand’s social presence. Of course, your content must be top notch, that goes without saying. Your content must also accurately reflect your brand image and values. Well-planned and executed content almost always leads to better results.
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However, an often overlooked element in your social media growth strategy is cadence. The idea may initially seem trite to those who are unfamiliar with its importance, but the cadence of your social content holds value in a multitude of ways.
What is a Content Cadence?
A content cadence is exactly what it sounds like – a consistent schedule or “cadence” in which a brand or creator publishes content across its social platforms. It establishes regular and semi-predictable timing to your posting habits, one in which your audience comes to expect. This practice helps ensure that your brand remains relevant and top-of-feed on social platforms that are increasingly difficult to establish visibility on these days. But this isn’t the only benefit of a strong content cadence.
A consistent content cadence also helps your audience connect with who you are; it humanizes a brand, company, or business. It is also the storytelling vessel of your brand as a whole, connecting a piece of content (and others) with your customers or audience.
5 Tips to Establish Your Brand’s Optimal Content Cadence
Establishing a strong content cadence is essential for keeping your brand top-of-mind and consistently engaging with your audience. These five tips will help you create a rhythm that drives results and builds lasting connections.
1. Create a Content Schedule
Seems simple enough right? Perhaps, but this concept is often underutilized in many organizations. Brands don’t just fly by the seat of their pants when they are strategizing their next big launch or deciding on who to partner with for their next campaign. It’s carefully thought out and well-planned in order to create the best chance of success.
The same efforts should be applied to your content strategy. Putting together a schedule that both correlates with your brand voice and aligns with news and current events connected to your brand, industry, or business is a great first step. Planning out your content publishing also helps to keep your organization accountable and focused on communicating a clear message in your content and media, also serving as a system of record for your data-driven decisions within the organization.
Tools like Monday.com and SproutSocial are great for helping brands organize and schedule their content. Monday.com offers organizations customizable workflows that users can implement to plan and collaborate on content, as well as track the progress of their social campaigns. Organizations looking for increased capabilities can turn to SproutSocial, which offers users a number of additional features including advanced scheduling features and analytics. These features allow brands to evaluate the performance of their social posts, empowering them in their decision making to optimize the results of their social campaigns.
2. Consider the ‘411’ Rule when Creating Your Cadence
This rule refers to an industry standard that was popularized by Andrew Davis of Tippingpoint Labs and Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute. Their suggested practice revolved around the ratio of sharing content on social media. The premise of the standard is essentially this: Publish four educational and/or entertaining posts for every one “soft promotion” and every one “hard promotion.” This isn’t a template or plug-and-play approach, but rather a guide that has been adopted by many brands and companies throughout the world.
Duolingo is a brand that does this well, sandwiching their promotional materials and “hard sells” between an array of educational and entertaining content.
The objective is to customize this approach around your brand voice and values, tweaking these elements to fit your esthetic and desired cadence. The idea revolves around book-ending your promotional posts with content that is not sales driven in its intent, while also engaging your audience with content that appeals to them. You then can begin to build a deeper relationship with your audience and establish trust, so those promotional pieces of content are both well received and increasingly effective with consumers.
3. Know your Audience and Their Availability and Expectations
Knowing your audience and core demographic is important in almost every facet of your business. This is especially true in how you establish your content cadence. Are you posting content when your audience is actively online? Are you finding your ideal social media post times based on data and metrics calculated within your organization?
It’s simple – you need to post your content on your social accounts during periods when your target consumer is online and browsing their feed. For some organizations, that means different post copy may have different intended targets. Each type of media should serve its desired demographic with this timing in mind. You want to get the most juice for the squeeze and to do that, you need your content to be consumed by the right people at the right time.
Platforms like Instagram Insights, Facebook Insights, LinkedIn Analytics, and Twitter Analytics give brands access to a treasure trove of valuable data. You can easily see who your audience is, break down their demographics, and figure out the best times to post based on peak engagement periods.
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4. Automation is Your Ally
No, we are not saying that the creative element behind your content strategy should be deeply rooted in automation. That statement infers a standardized approach to the creation of the content itself, and that is almost never the right approach to achieving social growth. In fact, it’s usually quite the contrary.
But utilizing automation in your distribution strategy offers many benefits. We outlined above how your content calendar can offer both a structure and a system of record. The same can be said about automation, except that automation also relieves you of some of the tedious grunt work that comes along with implementing your social strategy.
We discussed tools like Monday.com and SproutSocial earlier for scheduling your content. But tools like SproutSocial can do even more than that, including automating your content to post on specific days and times with unique copy. This process can both maximize effectiveness and save you and your organization valuable time– which can be used to brainstorm and create new content for your archives. Utilizing automation ensures that you are building more data points to effectively analyze the performance of your content.
5. Model your Cadence Around the Practices of Brands you Admire
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness”. Whether you strive to be a professional athlete, a superstar musician, or whatever your dream may be…we all start by imitating our idols. For some, that means grabbing your hairbrush and using it as a microphone in the bathroom mirror or sticking your tongue out like Michael Jordan during your jump shot. But the same idea should be applied to your content cadence.
Who are your favorite brands, and how are they excelling on social media? What are they doing that is setting them apart? How often are they posting, and when? These are the types of questions worth asking, using the answers to help establish a model for your cadence.
This is not a suggestion to copy the stylings of your admired rivals. Brands rely on their UVP, or Unique Value Proposition, to help establish themselves in competitive fields, so uniqueness is both encouraged and rewarded when creating and cultivating a brand of any kind. Utilizing information from organizations that embody certain elements or esthetics and align with your brand can help stimulate ideas and direction behind determining best practices. And we all need a little inspiration sometimes!
The Long-Term Value of Consistent Content Cadence on Social Media
Establishing your brand on social media is more important than ever before, and it’s a critical element to the success of any brand in the modern world.
When organizations deliver consistent, high-quality content to their audience, they establish trust with their audience and keep themselves top-of-mind with consumers.
Increasing your digital footprint and establishing relevance among your target audience is a surefire way to accelerate your growth and extract the value of social media to grow your business.
