Maximising Engagement with Category-Based Posting
Next week, we’re going to take a break from GPT and think about using categories to help break up our social media content. I’ll answer questions like What’s evergreen content and is it applicable to me as well as How often should I talk about our services/product.
This week’s newsletter is all about categories, and types of content. A few people have asked me what evergreen content is, and how they can use it to their advantage… which got me thinking…
I’m a big advocate of SocialBee and their category-based scheduling platform, and it’s worth understanding the differences, if you’re planning on creating content that drives real engagement for your audience.
So, What Are the Options Here?
Manual Posting
Lots of folks prefer this – and it’s ideal for those of you who have the time. Creating one post at a time, and posting, based on current events, or batch creating content and scheduling it out. Unfortunately, unless you’ve created an overall content plan, this can become time-consuming, and unwieldy… it means you have to carve out that time each day to be there – and whilst most of us would love to (and it DOES drive the best outcomes) – it’s not always possible.
Lastly, although the LinkedIn scheduling option has become quite useful, it still doesn’t allow for editing in the queue, rearranging posts, and it’s not easily accessible. For many, this is a big fat no.
Queue-based Posting
Like many others, I started out using tools like Buffer. They offer the opportunity to hook up your business page, your personal account, and other platforms for other social media, all in one place. It’s based on the idea that you can schedule like a calendar, all the content you want for the coming month, or drop it into the queue to be posted, and rearrange that queue to your heart’s content.
Personally, I struggled with this, without being full-time on the case… and if you’re posting for multiple accounts, it becomes confusing, and it’s hard to see what each post is about from the calendar queue. It’s very easy to end up with multiple posts on the same day, and repetition across accounts.
That being said, these platforms are generally a bit cheaper than the alternatives, and give you access to posting across multiple socials from one place.
Category-based Posting
This, in my opinion, is the easiest, and best way to post across your socials – even if you’re only posting from one or two LinkedIn accounts. The downside is it takes a little more setting up.
The main difference here, is you are required to split your content into categories such as Educational, Promotional, Thought Provoking, Humorous etc. Then, set up which days you’d like to post these categories on your social accounts, at what time, or whether you want to pick from random categories to keep the audience guessing what is coming next.
You can imagine some possibilities here – it’s possible to create seasonal campaigns in advance, and turn off the category once the critical date has passed ie Christmas/Easter, or a sale event you might be having.
The beauty of this, is you can dump the content into the categories, and let it do its thing, without your content ever getting stale from an audience side of things. It’s also fairly easy to build up a large volume of content, and re-use posts, with slight wording tweaks to update them. For this, I’d always recommend SocialBee – You can see their software HERE. It’s relatively inexpensive, boasts some powerful features such as AI prompts built in, the ability to add variations of posts, as well as post the same post to multiple social accounts, and their analytics really are exceptional.
For more on creating compelling profiles, refer to Revamp Your LinkedIn Profile to Convert Leads.
Lastly – I Promised I’d Cover Evergreen Content
This is the stuff that you want to get out to your audience that doesn’t really change much over time. It’s usually your products, services, testimonials, and similar. Whilst you don’t want to ram it down your audience’s throat every five minutes, it’s the sort of stuff you want to build a good library of, and make sure your audience sees regularly. So create these categories, and select for SocialBee to re-queue post. You can stipulate how many times it’s posted before it gets retired, or indefinitely re-post (just remember to review these categories on occasion, in case they need updating).
For additional tips on maintaining quality, check out How Passionate Content Converts Viewers to Customers.
So there you have it! Now you’ve got options, and if you’re anything like me, you’re super excited to give it all a try.
Remember that this ISN’T against the LinkedIn ToS (they provide an API to allow 3rd party platforms to post remotely), but that also doesn’t mean it’s the best fit for everyone. Give it a try, let me know how you get on with it, and reach out for any SocialBee or content-related questions – I’d be happy to see how I can help you!
For additional tips, refer to Master Your Setup: Enhancing Video and Audio Quality.
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