What is the Life of a Tweet?

18-20 minutes. It that it? Well here’s a long answer to a short question, which starts with an anecdote.  

Yesterday, our amazing NYU Professor, Jeanne McPhillips, took us for a site visit to what was personally for me, Disneyland! It was the office of NewsCred, a company that helps brands create content. Now being a writer, you can understand how my heart lies within this world of content. And now, as a budding marketing professional, my impetus is content marketing! So hearing all these amazing people talk so passionately about this field was not just insightful, but inspiring for me.

Till a few years ago, content was looked something that was meant to be there to communicate your call to action. And content marketing was somewhere in the corner of all the marketing conversations. But today things have changed rapidly. Not only are all brands realizing the importance of being publishers, there are big bucks being allocated just for content marketing strategies. 

With this growing spotlight on content, and social media being THE channel to communicate content, brands are jumping onto the wagon of building social and content strategies. But how many do you think know what good content really is? And even more importantly, how do you communicate it effectively?

A lot goes on behind the implementation of a successful content strategy. There are a few best practices that can be established form success stories.

Curate content. Creating content is much more difficult that curating relevant content. Not only is it expensive and time consuming, but also by the time the created content reaches final stages, it has become irrelevant. At least 60% of content created by marketers never sees the light of day.

Maintain a schedule. Having an editorial calendar is what will allow you to visualize your content as a story. Providing an outline for your strategy, will allow you to clearly articulate cadence.

Be your customer. Focus on what they want, when they want it, how they want it, and why they want it.

Measure up. It’s all about using the right metrics to determine ROI, and those can vary massively in the content world.

There are a number of ways to put content out there, especially in today’s digital age, where there are more communication channels than ever before. The challenge here is to optimize each channel, and adopt only those you can do justice to. Therefore, prioritize. Keep the goal of your content strategy in mind at every step of the way.

Anyone who says, we should make content that will go viral, should be fired! The truth is, content that was created with the intention of going viral, probably never did. So stop running behind buzz words, and act on really providing value through content.

Content marketing is becoming a more and more essential strategy for brands today, especially noisy advertising world, where we are subjected to hundreds of ads a day. It’s like Times Square in your head all the time!

And therefore, to be successful at content marketing, we need to adopt the right tools and softwares that will aid us in this process. Enter NewsCred. (I promise you’ll love their work. Just check out their case studies.)

Coming back to the life span of a tweet. Yes it is only 18-20 minutes. But that’s probably all you need if you have the tools to communicate the right content targeted to your right market. That’s how you earn the dollars anyway!

Spoken like a true content junkie right?