9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 6 - Where Will Your Material Come From?

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 6 - Where Will Your Material Come From?

Once you have listed the topics you are going to post, you should identify the experts that are both outside and inside of your organization, that have the best, most immediate experience access to your topics. They might be clients, staff, suppliers, industry experts, media, staff bloggers, or guest bloggers.

An excellent source for material is experts from outside of your organization who are not seen as competitors to your products or services, but are seen as someone who shares information on topics important to your online purpose. For example, if you are a theatre company, and you have certain performers coming to your theatre, you can share or retweet their appropriate posts to help grow the excitement toward them coming to your location, therefore creating buzz. Strive to spend 15 minutes daily, or at least once a week looking for sources of information.  If you are a retailer, often those who you buy you merchandise from have materials you can use to promote your products, however, remember, the best photos and posts are those right from your retail store, capturing the buzz in the store and the personalities of your staff.  

Another great tool for finding great content for your organization is through different news feeds. One of my favourite news feeds to use for this purpose is Mashable. This website finds the latest and trending internet stories for you, often times before they go viral. You can search stories based on your industry using the search tool, to find interesting articles to use on your social media!  


Contributors are typically subject-matter experts; your employees that have specific mandates or passions. As a part of your strategy, your next step will be to decide if your contributors are going to give their materials to your Social Media co-ordinator to post, or simply post it themselves

Image Source:
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/rise-millennials-infographic?ref=popular_posts

The staff contributor is hands-on, feet-on-the-street, in the middle of the action; either with clients or creating your products. For their social efforts to be sustainable, it needs to be an extension of their current role.

What are they contributing:  They can be sharing updates, videos photos of experiences with clients or the creation of products.

Why are they contributing:  To help deliver on their departmental overall social goals.

Criteria:  They need to be trained with which voice to speak in, and what type of material to collect, and how to distribute it.

If they themselves are going to post, instead of giving the material to a central Social Media co-ordinator, they need to be aware of what the agreed to Measures of Success are.