Content Rules summary

Before you go on a Facebook posting spree, you’ll need to consider your brand’s unique voice and how your business can help customers live better lives – because by creating an individual company identity your business can speak to customers as if they were a single, real person.

How?

So now you’ve got a brand identity. You’ve identified your customer and you know how to improve their lives. It’s time to start publishing.

It’s easiest to start small by publishing and sharing easily made content, while simultaneously eliciting responses from your audience. It’s easy to start a blog with a program such as Wordpress, TypePad or Squarespace, and equally easy to create a Facebook, Twitter or Yelp account, and once you’ve established these social platforms, you can use them to do a whole lot.

Ok, so you’ve produced some compelling content that engages your audience. Now it’s time to get people to share it – because sharing content not only promotes your business but also keeps your audience engaged and interested. So how can you get shares?

The first step is to prominently feature your social-media share buttons on websites and blogs. Doing this makes it easy for anyone who enjoyed your post to share it on their own account. You can make sharing easy with sites like ShareThis.com, which lets you place a single share button that links to multiple social networks. But before you share your content, make sure to license it and set rules for how people can use it. Consider whether you mind others changing your content? What about using it for commercial purposes?

You know how personal calendars are essential to remembering meetings, birthdays and other important events, while also serving the crucial function of preventing overbooking? Well, calendars are equally crucial for content publishing. Because if you want to succeed, you need to keep track of all the media you publish.

To coordinate and manage your different media platforms, you’ll need a systematized schedule called an editorial calendar. Try assigning a Chief Content Officer, or CCO, to manage your editorial calendar and keep track of your content agenda and strategy. Your CCO should set daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly content schedules that detail what you want to publish and review.

As you might have realized from the editorial schedule, content publishing is a non-stop endeavor. It’s therefore key to accurately evaluate your performance and use web-based tools to improve weak spots. Here’s how to get started:

Begin by setting quantifiable goals and follow-ups in your editorial calendar. By tracking your content’s performance you can constantly update and improve it. For instance, you might aim to produce a video that gets 1,000 views in a month. Or you could endeavor to get 10 bloggers to post positively about your company. As you set and attempt to achieve goals, keep track of your successes, but don’t lose sight of your failures – because when you don’t succeed, it’s necessary to know why.

The core principles you’ve learned so far apply to creating content for all businesses, regardless of size and industry, but if your company specializes in business-to-business (B2B) commerce, there are a few specifics to keep in mind.

Why?