01 Dec Content Atomization and Social Media Strategy
Expanding Your Impact with Content Atomization
Your social media strategy should include creating content to showcase your business and increase awareness around your product offerings can be time-consuming and stressful. If you spend valuable time and effort creating content for your social media feeds, it should do the most work for you it can. This is where content atomization can empower your social media strategy.
What is content atomization?
Content atomization is the process of breaking down a large piece of content into smaller pieces of content. Often, the process of content atomization creates more concentrated content. The content may be smaller, but it feels more focused.
The central concept is not to necessarily repurpose content, but rather to think about different ways to conceptualize a large, overarching theme, then break that theme down into smaller foci to create targeted narratives.
Why should I atomize content as part of a social media strategy?
More is more
With content, the more you have, the better. If you can take a single, broad theme or idea and break it down into smaller content pieces, you have more content to offer. It’s about working smarter, not harder. Rather than presenting several valuable ideas with one piece of content, you’re creating a potential calendar of cohesive content to spread across a month or more of social media activity. It’s more efficient and will save you time in the long run.
It Improves SEO
This is a subset of the “more is more” philosophy. The more pieces of content you put out, the more chances your content has of being ranked highly in search engine results. Also, with several smaller pieces of content focused around a theme, your appearance in more search results will also position your business as a potential expert around these atomized topics and themes.
Opportunities for Recycling
Repurposing content isn’t a bad thing if you’re smart about it. Once you have an idea to atomize, you could take the original pieces of content—say, a series of blog posts— and repurpose them into a series of YouTube videos, podcast episodes, or graphics-laden Instagram Reels. Pull quotes from the blogs and create static graphics using the quotes as text-on-screen. Group those static graphics as a series of Instagram Stories and add them to a Highlights Reel on your Instagram page. Create polls asking opinions on the topic from your social media audience. Draft a series of newsletters with highlights covering the topic, then link to the blogs, podcasts, or YouTube videos that cover it in greater detail. Create a cheat sheet or infographic with tips on the topic. Keep drilling down into your theme to create as many pieces of content as you can!
How do I get started with content atomization in social media strategy?
Think Broad
The first step in atomizing content is to think of a broad topic or theme. Once you have a topic, think of ways to atomize it. Atomizing a broad theme might mean:
- Creating a series of blog posts exploring the theme
- Filming instructional YouTube videos related to the theme
- Writing a series of automated emails for daily coverage of the theme
- Posting infographics to Facebook and/or Instagram several times across a week or month
If you’re having trouble coming up with a topic, start thinking of the types of questions you receive from your customers and audience on social media. Are there questions you’ve been asking repeatedly? The likelihood is you could create a great series of informative content pieces around specific FAQs.
Find the Pain Points
Once you have a broad theme, start asking yourself what your customer’s pain points are around that theme. For example, let’s say your theme is “gauge.” The pain points might be: how do I get the right gauge? What happens if I can’t get the right gauge? Why is gauge important? What is gauge? Again, return to the FAQs you hear most and craft your content based on the answers you would give.
Backlink Everything
When you create your content pieces, remember to have those content pieces link back to one another when it makes sense to do so. For example, with a series on gauge, each blog exploring the different aspects of gauge should link back to the first “What is Gauge?” blog post. However a customer may find your atomized piece of content, you want to be sure it’s easy for them to dig deeper into that content via the other pieces you’ve created.
Want help creating atomized content as part of your social media strategy? Contact us today to get started!
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