Keeping Your Content Fresh

The biggest challenge for any company in any industry is content production. It’s the most time consuming, the most difficult and the most daunting. It’s the reason that most social pages become stagnant once they’ve launched, and it’s because the company has failed to setup a content repository or stream that continuously populates your editorial calendar.

The most common mistake we see within the fitness industry is not getting the most from your content. We spend so much time on content production, editing and posting that we forget our most valuable asset — the content itself. In fact, with how quickly the industry moves, and how quickly social turns over, we forget that our content’s half-life is really only relevant that day.

Here are some tips for getting the most out of your content.

• Pull old editorial calendars and apply a category to them: evergreen, seasonal or timely. Use these to identify which content can be shared at any time, which is seasonal or relevant to a particular time frame, and the last for which needs to be published by a specific date. All three will have the ability to be republished, but some might need more work than others.

• Take the evergreen content and re-share it to your social platforms — giving the content at least a month’s worth of time between posting it again. Rework your content approach and talk about the content you are sharing differently to freshen it up.

• Take the seasonal content and freshen it up and fill in your editorial calendar with timely information. The content is still applicable, and your ideas are still strong. Don’t let your effort go to waste — utilize this again for holiday seasons to come.

• Take timely content and change your viewpoint. For example, was the content talking about a particular community event or competition that your company took part in? What were the results? Can you share that information again as a way to incentivize a new contest?

If you don’t have an editorial calendar, it is easy enough. You can download a free content marking template now. Pull Post Level Date from your Facebook insights page for up to 180 days and the Post Level Date from your Twitter insights page for the same period of time. This will give you the full content/post so that you can start to dig through your previous efforts to maximize your content.