Full service digital strategy planning and implementation.
April 14 2011
When the World Wide Web first appeared, adding content to your site was a blissfully uncomplicated matter. You added a page, and wrote your bit. Done. Ah, the innocent simplicity of it all. But those days are past now. Today, we have content, news, blogs and tweets, decks and discussions. The wide range of content platforms can sometimes be a little overwhelming. So, when you have something to say, which content platform is the right one to use?
The various types of content are all generally different points on a sliding scale, so there is always a fair amount of grey area and overlap when choosing the right content platform, but we can identify four basic forms of content:
These represent permanent articles on your website. They are designed to present information in a durable, professional way, and must represent your brand and company philosophy. This content should be well researched, carefully thought out and written with care.
News articles are still part of your site, but are more transient and topical. Readers expect a news article from last year to contain information that is no longer relevant or accurate, whereas website content written last year should still be valid today. The article is part of your site, so it still represents your brand, but readers will be more lenient in judgement of a badly written news article than they will of permanent content.
A blog (or weblog) is a separate site that is designed to allow a person to write about their experiences. It is not 'part' of your site so the content doesn’t have to be quite as professional and representative of the company philosophy. Readers perceive the blog post as something written by a person, expressing their personal views about the business, rather than an official company channel of communication. In many cases, this is not true anymore, but the perception persists. Blog posts can be used to keep interested parties (eg: customers) up to date with the goings-on in the company using a personal touch that may be inappropriate on the website itself. In fact, customers often turn to blogs and social networks precisely for this sense of 'personal' communication.
Social networks, of which FaceBook and Twitter are the two perhaps best known, are platforms for throwing out sound bites of information. Posts (or “tweets” on Twitter) will usually be very short, and often simply be used to inform ‘fans’ that something has occurred, or to share links to other sites that feature information your subscribers may find interesting. If something important has happened in your company (eg: an AGM), there will usually be a blog post or news article about it, and the social networking post will simply be used to link to that post or article.
Note: the features, functions and uses of social networking tools vary as widely as the range of tools themselves. Each one is designed with a whole toolbox of neat features, and the ways in which companies are leveraging those to improve their communication with their customers is evolving all the time. The above description may be grossly over-simplified, but it is intended to highlight the contrast between social networking content and the other three forms of content, and not as an accurate definition of social networking.
The difference between a Tweet and a composed website article may seem blatantly obvious, but the grey areas between blog posts and news articles are more difficult to define. Basically, the four types of content represent points on a sliding scale. Or, more accurately, three scales:
The frequency with which the content is produced is an important factor in deciding which platform to use. Website content that is released twice a day is unlikely to be written carefully or researched well, unless you have a large and dedicated content creation team. On the other hand, content released twice a year shouldn’t be handled with a tweet.
There is no hard-and-fast rule for exactly how often you should issue each type of content. The frequency you adopt will depend on your circumstances and your capacity. Whatever frequency you choose, however, should generally follow the scale above; news should be more frequent than website content, blog posts more frequent than news, and social networking posts more frequent than blog posts.
Similarly, a carefully crafted article will be long and exhaustive, while a Facebook wall post will usually be no more than two lines. This reflects not only the available space of the platform, but also the time we expect to spend composing the content, and the level of accuracy we expect from it.
I am making myself a liar here with this post and many of my others, but this just goes to show that these are guidelines, and not definitive rules.
Website content directly represents your brand and company, and must be written in a formal, professional style. The care used to compose the work should be obvious, and facts should be checked, and accurate. Badly written content on your website will give a very bad impression to your customers. On the other hand, blog and social networking posts are seen as being from individuals, not the actual company, so the recipients are far more forgiving of spelling, grammar and other minor mistakes (which is not an excuse – you should always use a spell-checker at the very least).
All of them, unless you have a reason not to use one. It is a bad idea to choose just one method of communication, and ignore all the others. The combination of these four platforms will give you a well rounded communication strategy, and keep your customers well informed using the channels they prefer.
You should, however, be realistic. It is important to look into what your actual, realistic capacity for content creation is, and design a content distribution strategy accordingly. One of the major issues we see every day is that of companies who bite off more than they can chew. They create many communication channels, and commit to ambitious release schedules because, at the beginning of this project, everyone is very excited about it. Three months later, the tweets have dried up, only one blog post has been issued in the last two weeks, and the news section of the site still only has two articles.
This is a little sad, and setting up all the channels was a terrible waste of money, but there are far worse consequences. In their gung-ho attack on the communication world, these companies will have made promises to their customers about the communication they would provide, and they have failed, and broken those promises in a very obvious and visual way. At best, their customers will simply forget about them. At worst, they have now created a negative impression that will be extremely difficult to overcome.
So, we’d recommend starting slowly and building up a communication strategy over time. Issue only the content you can manage, and make sure you have the resources to maintain what you produce. You should see the benefits of maintaining contact and communications with your customers very quickly, and this will encourage you to do more, and explore other channels even further.
Actually, we’d recommend you get professionals (that would be us) to manage your communication for you. We do have the resources to produce all the content you need, to write it well, and to release it properly, using all our experience to squeeze the most benefit from each of the platforms. But of course we’d recommend that.
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