Content Promotion ·

How to Repurpose SEO Content for Social by Camille Trent (Dooly)

Bernard Huang

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This week, we hosted Camille Trent, Head of Content Marketing at Dooly. She walked us through how she reupurposes SEO content for social.

Camille kicked off with, “You should know how you’re going to repurpose content and the channels it’s going to live on before you start writing.”

She’s a big fan of including charts and graphs.

If you could only take away one strategy, it’d be BLUF (“bottom line up front”). Don’t bury your lede. Tell them what they need to know first to pull them down the post.

Watch the full webinar

And check out the resources Camille shared below:

Check out Camille's slide deck here.

About Camille Trent:

Camille is the Head of Content Marketing at Dooly. When she's not planning content, she's repurposing it. When she's not repurposing content, she's hanging out with her pup and two favorite redheads. Or she's trying to coach the Portland Trail Blazers to victory from her couch. (unsuccessfully)

Follow Camille on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camillehansentrent/

Follow Dooly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dooly/

Read the transcript

Travis:

We're definitely excited to have Camille joining us today. She's allowed to share around repurposing SEO content for social media, and definitely is a pro at this as she walks to talk with what she's doing at Dooly, and then also with her personal brand on LinkedIn. Camille has offered to answer all her questions throughout the webinar, and at the end, just make sure you drop them in Zoom's QA box. If you can't find the QA box, chat is fine. But they do get lost in chat, so we'd prefer if you put them in the QA box. It makes it a little easier. But we can go ahead and jump right in. Camille is the head of content marketing at Dooly. When she's not planning content she's repurposing it, and when she's not repurposing content she's hanging out with her pup and two favorite redheads. Or she's trying to coach the Portland Trailblazers to victory from her couch, and she mentioned unsuccessfully. Camille, welcome again, the floor is yours if you want to go ahead and share your screen.

Camille:

Okay, well we'll just jump right into it then. This one, I'm specifically going to try and cover repurposing SEO content. I don't think this is talked about as much, it's usually either you're doing SEO or you're doing social. It's really kind of challenging to do both, but I think it's possible. I'm going to just go into it here. Build your distribution before you start writing. You should know how you're going to repurpose this piece of content, the different channels that it's going to live on before you even start writing. Knowing that will just help you operationally move faster.

For instance, a good example of an operations thing to think about at the very beginning when you're doing SEO content is what channels am I hitting? Where is my audience currently and how can I get the most out of this piece? What I like to do is go to Miro and plan this out as a flow chart. Just starting with my seed pillar content, and then branching that out. Just seeing it visually and doing it that way is the best for planning a distribution strategy.

Then once those channels and where your audience is, thinking about for that header image or the images within the piece, what sizes am I going to need, and can I just ask for those sizes all at once instead of saying, "Okay, here's the images that I need for the blog?" You're sending that to a freelancer, you're sending it to someone in-house. Now you're thinking about it ahead of time. You're saying, "Okay, I know I'm going to need a 1080 by 1080 version of this for social. I can use that on Instagram, I can use that on LinkedIn. I know I'm going to need the standard 1280 size for a blog. I know that I'm going to need a... What is it? 1920 by 1080 for an Instagram story, maybe TikTok." Thinking through those sizes, and then just bulk asking for all of those things all at once, that's going to help you operationally.

The other things as you're going through, and now you're in the writing phase. As you're going through the writing, I like to highlight or comment on all of the post worthy quotes. If you're doing SEO right, you're using subject matter experts. You should have some mic drop quotes in there that are perfect social fodder. As you're writing, if you're thinking about social and you're thinking about distribution in advance, then you're highlighting those quotes and you're saying, "Okay, here are all of the quotes." If you're moving really fast, sometimes what I'll do is I'll tag in the designer and say, "Hey, these are all of the quotes that I want in that card format that you've already set up."

You should have a card format that's a picture of the person branded in your brand, and you have some of these templates already set up for these situations, and so he knows to just put that right into that format. I'll highlight those things and say, "These are the ones that we want to repurpose for social." Comment also works too if you want to work right out of the dock, so it just depends on your process. But that's a little bit of an ad hoc way to do it.

Then brand and optimized charts and graphs for social. This is something that we did a lot at marketer hire, so shout out to Tracy for knowing to do this and doing this in the past. We often would work with Statista. We had a subscription there, so pretty much any stat that existed in the world, you could find on Statista. You would take that and then you would rebrand it in your name. You'd still give the source, the original source on there. I don't want to say plagiarize or anything, so put that source on there.

But even if you don't own the data or it's not your research, you can find the research and then you can rebrand it in a way that is appealing. Once you have those, I can talk a little bit about how you might use those for social. But I think just creating those makes you feel like a media company. Makes the blog feel yours, instead of just hacked together. Part of it is just creating the right pillar content up front, doing a lot of the work upfront is going to make all of this easier to repurpose.

All right, so BLUFs. All of this comes down to bottom line up front. This is a term used in the military. When you're sending out a memo, you want to see what's the point of this right away. They don't have time to dilly dally. There's this process of give me the bottom line up front. What's the purpose of this? That's the way you think should be thinking about all content anytime, but especially when you're repurposing. If you're doing it right, the point of the article should be in the headline, should be in the intro. If you're doing that, again, it's going to make it easier to repurpose. You're literally just taking the headline and that becomes the ad, or that becomes the social posts. Thinking about bottom line up front, am I burying the lead or is it obvious what this is about?

Then again, once you're doing the SEO content, is it scannable enough? This will give you an idea of whether or not it can be repurposed, whether or not it's ready to be repurposed for social. If it's a block of text, it's going to be harder to repurpose because you haven't done the work of making the original piece editable, or edible and scannable for your audience. You're making them do the editing for you. What I mean by this is, if you're turning those mic drop quotes into actual pull quotes, and you're turning those images into easily digestible insights? Not just the data, but again, you're putting that bottom line up front and you're saying in the headline of that graphic, this is what this graphic is showing. All of those things combined making the article very scannable from the get-go are going to make it easy for you to pull out those graphics and those quotes for social.

All right. Just a good rule of thumb is to include at least one chart or graphic in every piece that you do. A good way to think about this is B2B content. Make me better at my job at lifestyle content, B2C, D2C might be a different story. You can get away with just being inspirational, or just being funny. But for B2B, I'm really looking to be better at my job. The ways that I do that is benchmarks. Tell me where I stack up against everyone else. Tell me where I'm at now so that I know that there's a problem or I know I'm doing well. Give me examples. Give me examples of other companies that are doing it right. I think a good way of thinking about this is tear down, so we'll get to that later.

But an example of a well written email, an example of a poorly written email, and then breaking it down, doing the work of breaking it down. Why is it good? Why is it bad? Then frameworks. Think about this as templates, like a plug-and-play. Get me to square one, so that I can get to two. It's a lot easier to go from one to two than zero to one. If you can get somebody to one, we really admire or value that type of content in a B2B.

All right, so a couple tactical things. Because again, I know B2B marketers and content marketers like hacks and tricks. A pro tip is the Pinterest Chrome extension, and also adding Google Drive to your desktop is just going to make it easier for you to easily find and download images as you go. Here's an example of how this might work is this is a blog that we did. To break down the process of repurposing is start it as a report. We had a PDF report, we did the work of designing out each of the slides in that report. Then it was just a matter of exporting certain slides as graphics within this blog. We took certain slides, turned them into graphics for this blog. Didn't have to redesign or anything, this is literally the slide, and this is in a blog. Then with that Pinterest Chrome extension, you can see that I can easily save these images. Hopefully these images will already be saved to your Google Drive for desktop so that they are properly named, so you're optimizing the alt tags, all of that.

But let's assume that you also want your sales team, or someone else on your team to just be able to easily pull information from the blog. If you have something like this, Pinterest Chrome extension, now I can start curating some of this content. I can put it in a specific board, so I've started making boards for either different parts of our product or different categories, different problems that we solve. For instance, we might have something about forecasting, and then another thing about note taking specifically. You'd have different categories that you can start building out for community marketing and for sales. Thinking about curating some of that bite sized content. Those are two hacks to get that done.

Organic and paid social aren't that different. I don't know if this is a hot take or not, but I've just noticed that this is the case. For instance, this is actually that same report. Actually, two different reports in here. But for paid ads, you see a lot of those download this ebook and it's a picture of the ebook. Instead of doing that, and again, you can AV test this and see which one works better for you. But give me the most valuable part of the content upfront, so going back to that BLUF mentality of bottom line up front.

This on the right, this was the most compelling stat from that report of 41% of the sales workday isn't spent selling. Then there was another part of this too, of reps said that with that extra time, if they had that time back, they think that they could make 38% more revenue for their business. That was also in that headline, and could also make a compelling stat here. But using that in an actual ad, those ads performed better than when we dangled the carrot and we just said, "Give us your email and we'll give you this ebook, and then you can dig into it and you're definitely going to read the whole thing, and you're definitely going to convert after that." Just not assuming that they're going to do anything, and just giving them the most compelling part of the argument or the most compelling stat upfront is going to be a win-win.

Then same thing over here. This is an example of a organic post that I think could perform just as well in paid. The insights that you can take from organic, and you can do it both ways. You can start with paid, get those insights faster, and take all the best stuff and use it for organic. Or you can start with organic and see the traction or the comments that you're getting from it, and maybe put that into paid. Those are ways that these might work in tandem to test and to iterate as you go. But for instance, this same format. I've seen it in ad forms, and it inspired me to start using and testing those types of things in ads based on the response that I would get in organic. Using those things in tandem, I haven't seen that done as much, but it's something that we're starting to do more of.

Again, going back to that Pinterest example, and curating some of this content for yourself and for your sales reps. Yeah, Pinterest, because it's so visual, this has been one of the better tools that I've found for trying to do this. Because I can drag and drop all of these directly to desktop. Not every app lets you do that, so that part is helpful. Then this is a combination of things from our report, which again as we were going through the report, I was commenting on the report and saying, "These are the ones that I want in bite size format in 1080 by 1080." Pulling out some of the best stats from a report, and then also pulling out some of the best quotes or things from customer stories, from blogs and starting to curate them into different boards based on the categories.

This is something that we've shared with the sales team, and so they can either share this whole board with prospects or they can take the bite size pieces out, they can post them themselves on social. LinkedIn recently came out with a new feature, where you can curate posts on your company page for your employees. I could curate all of these, for instance, on the Dooly page, and then they can edit the text itself. If I put a little bit of a description text, they could edit that. But they would have all of these queued up on the company page for them to share. It helps with the employee advocacy as well.

All right. Then again, another example for sales, because we talked a little bit about how you might share these things on social, but then there's also repurposing for social DMs, or repurposing for social selling. How do you do that? One of the ways is we actually looked at some of our best performing memes, and what we sometimes call product-led memes. They all lead back to our product in terms of we're talking about the pains within taking notes, or the pains within updating your pipeline, or the pains with the sales process. Then I started splitting out some of the categories accordingly, so we have folders for memes and what I'm calling conversation starting memes.

An effective form of outbound is just being personal, just being a human. Adding just a quick meme, or GIF or a video clip to your outbound helps start those conversations. We started taking our best performers and essentially turning them into a form of sales enablement. That might be generous for what this is. Well, this is something that we could repurpose for our own social. Let's repurpose some of the stuff that we did last year for this year. If you look at our last post that got 6,000 likes yesterday, that was one that we'd already used on a partner channel. We took some of the insights from there, we're starting to repurpose some of that stuff for our own channel.

This other one, highlights from our sales forecasting, this article. It's an example of an SEO article that I went over with sales yesterday, pulled out some of the more compelling stats. Again, a way that you can see how it turned any of these things into social cards that I could post, or just fodder that the sales team can use in outbound. Thinking about how we can use this for sales enablement, how we can use it for social, and just how it can be a little more evergreen.

Then this is an interesting thing I've been digging into recently, is whether or not you can add a link to social. I know Amanda from spark tour recently covered this with zero click content, and I'm big on that in general. I think that's what a lot of this has been about, is how do you take the best part of your blog or of your report and just put that in front of people and just don't assume that they're going to click? By doing that, they're actually more likely to click. They're more likely to dig into the why behind that stat or behind that insight. Why is zero click content? Where did the stat come from about the 41%? Knowing that's how it works and human psychology helps with this.

But if you are going to make me click, at least make it feel native. Again, going back to bottom line up front, I thought these were all great examples of this. These are all articles, and it's really hard to do articles right now on LinkedIn. It's really hard to do them anywhere on social. Social platforms want to keep you on social. If you are going to do them, making it feel native. These are all examples where I wouldn't expect the featured image or the open graph to be an actual graph. But in these examples, the open graph that they're using here is a chart. It is a graph. I think this is a really interesting way of doing this, of setting that as your featured image for the article so that it feels like native content. Even though this is actually technically a link, this one is a newsletter but still a link to that newsletter, which for whatever reason LinkedIn doesn't support their own newsletter and their articles as much as their native content.

Knowing that these are pretty good numbers with these things, and I think a lot of it has to do with just giving that data up front and making it feel like native content. Then this obviously is not a graph, but it was the same concept of making it feel like native content, because I'm using pop culture, or I'm using a GIF a lot of times for our articles that we'll post on LinkedIn. We will use some sort of a GIF as the open graph as the featured image. Knowing this, knowing that how people think and if it feels native to the platform, if I'm getting value directly from the post without clicking, I'm more likely to actually click.

All right, so how to stay top of mind in communities and conversations. I'm still working on how to exactly operationalize this better, but a couple ways that I've done this in the past pretty effectively is setting up alerts for the influencers within your target market. There's a few people that top of mind in the sales space, in the marketing space, who when they post it's going to get 1,000 likes, there's going to be a lot of comments. It's worth checking those things daily, weekly, to see if the things that you're talking about or articles that you've recently done... If you have insights from those that you can add to the conversation.

The best way I think to add those, is to have a few of those summary graphics from the article. It could be a pull stat, it could be a chart, it could be a Venn diagram. Whatever it is that distills that insight, having those downloaded to your phone or downloaded to your computer and then ready to go to attach to some of these comments so that you're ready to just add value. Again, natively. Adding value natively, by attaching this comment of, "Hey, we actually recently covered this, and here's some data from it, and if you're interested, here's the link." As long as I add value, I actually don't mind dropping a link in there too. Often, people will click it.

Setting up alerts for topics. I leverage this one less and less, but the idea behind it is if someone's talking about sales enablement, if they're talking about sales influencers? Whatever it is that you do, and setting up alerts for those topics so that you can jump on... For me for instance, it would be something like content. Content strategy, content marketing. Those are topics that I could follow, and then see in my feed so that I can jump in on those conversations.

Tweet deck. This is something, again, that I did more at MarketerHire. I think MarketerHire is a good example, because they have different roles, different marketing roles that we could help people fill. I would set up feeds for each one of those roles. If someone was looking for a growth marketer, if they were looking for a content marketer, every different type of marketer, oftentimes people are posting those on social, of "We're looking for AEs, we're looking for BDRs." Setting up those different feeds for those things helped jump in on those types of conversations. A way to think about social as a form of performance marketing, if you will. Again, that's maybe a smart thing to set up with your BDR team on what that would look like, and if they have bandwidth to take something like that on to scrape for people already looking for your solution.

Then comment. Yeah, when you have something new to add. If you're wondering when I should comment, when I should not comment, comment when you have something new to add to the conversation. This is where some of these things help, of flagging different conversations where you think you might be able to be helpful for those. Also, just being in communities and checking the conversations that are happening in your communities, and then having some of those graphics, some of those insights ready to go so it's not like, "Hey, check out this article," or it's... No, you're adding value directly to the community and directly to the feed natively, and then maybe I'll click on your link. But if you're not giving me value right now, why should I trust you to click your link? You're just plugging your product. Also, have compelling graphics handy to have in the comment, so we talked about that a little bit.

Here is another example of how I would do this. I was trying to look for an example of when I've actually commented before. But the way that LinkedIn is set up, I'd have to go through a lot of comments to find something like that. This is, I think a pretty good example though, of... This is a podcast example, but this would work well for a blog too. Let's say you wrote a blog on content strategy. You should be able to distill everything from that blog, from that 2,000 word blog or whatever it is to okay, but how does it work? Give me the one, two, three, four step to this.

This is basically a four step process that I put into a graphic that's just ultra simple so people get it right away. I think this is a good example of something that you can have handy on your phone, have handy on your desktop, and then when somebody is talking about content, or content strategy or even marketing strategy, if it makes sense, then I can go in there with my comment about needing a point of view to start for instance, or making sure that you always have a subject matter expert, and then I would attach this image to really get the point across. This is, I think, a good example of the type of images that you'd want to have handy.

All right, so this is coming up toward the end here, and I just wanted to give some actionable formats that you might want to think about when you're repurposing that blog content. I actually do like sharing the full article, the full link, even though that's frowned upon, but just to see who's interested in going directly to the blog. I do think it's worth sharing that link. I would try and add some sort of open graph that makes it native. Whether it's a graph, whether it is a GIF. It depends on the type of content obviously that you're sharing, but try to add value directly to the feed when you're adding those links.

But I would do that first, and then the follow-up one, I might do that from the company page. Then if I was the author, I would also share on my personal. But in the personal post, I would probably do a recap. A recap of exactly what I'm talking about in the full article without any links, it would just be a text post. Then within the comment, I would add the link to the blog for anyone interested. I would do a couple different forms of recap post.

Other ones to consider are the deck, so you can break this down into a deck. For instance, thinking about this deck right here. If this came from an article and there were five different headings in there, then that's what I would've used to create this five step deck. A deck or an image, so I think that last image that I showed you is a good example of a summary image of the post. Think about this as a slightly expanded table of contents. You can literally start with your table of contents for a recap post. Think about how you'd make that into a Twitter thread or how you'd make that into a LinkedIn post.

The roundup. Think about this exactly like you'd think about blog roundups that you do. You're going to different subject matter experts, you're asking for their opinion. You're creating a blog around those different insights of what would be 10 insights from top content marketers about content strategies for 2022. That's a terrible title, but you get the idea. You'd take those, and you'd tag all of those people in a post, and you'd have one quote from each of them, of one thing I learned from each of these people. That's one way to do it. Then the feature. Same idea, but you'd just feature one person. You'd create a quote card for the one person, and you'd pull out their mic drop quote or commentary on that subject, and it would be more of a feature.

Then the tweet. I call this one the tweet, but if you go into Twitter, this is exactly how every Twitter thread is positioned as you're going to see something that says, "I did insert impressive number of things." For instance, it would be something like, "Gong is a good example of... We analyzed 102,342 calls." That's a lot, that's way more than I'm going to have time to go through. That's like, "Hey, here's what I've learned from it." They've done the work of sifting through a bunch of different calls, a bunch of different examples. I think hairy dry from marketing examples is a good example of this as well. He did the work of sifting through the internet, finding the best examples and saying, "Hey, I looked through and found the best copy examples on the internet. Here's what I learned from it." Or, "Here are the five things every good landing page has." That's a good example of a tweet format that can really work for LinkedIn or any social platform.

Other ones are the insight. What is the one light bulb moment that you want to highlight from the post. Inspiration. Usually the quote, the mic drop. The mic drop moment. The tear down. A good example here that I've covered up is I took a screenshot of a good outbound email that I got. I posted that on my personal. When that did well, I highlighted different parts of the email and I broke it down. I was like, "Here's what they did for the intro, here's what they did for the body and here's what they did for the CTA," and then I used it on our company page. That's an example of a tear down of give me the example. You probably have an example section of your SEO blog if it's a how-to. You have a how-to, and you have an example section in there. I know you do. Take some of those examples, and put them in social. That's what people love, is give me an example. How does this work in the wild? Then the last thing is the data. Taking out those poll stats or graphics and give me those upfront.

Again, summarizing this all again. Bottom line up front is a good way to think about repurposing content, and it's actually just a good way to think about structuring your long form content. If you're making it scannable, if you're servicing the best parts to that title, the best parts to the actual featured image or the open graph image that I'm going to see in social, I'm going to be more likely to read the full thing.

Yeah, and that's pretty much it. What's the one thing that you want me to know? Lead with that. Don't assume that they're going to keep reading, don't bury your best stuff like you would do with your best employee. You want to promote that stuff, so promote it to the top. That's actually the thing that's going to keep me reading. It's not the carrot dangle, and it's not the double spacing in a LinkedIn post. You actually have to provide value up front. That is all.

Travis:

Awesome. Yeah, I like that last part. Great stuff. We did have a couple questions, and you can keep putting your questions in the Zoom Q&A box. But to kick it off, do you ever repurpose content into short native videos?

Camille:

Let me think about this. I'm trying to think of an example where we repurposed it into video. We're talking about doing that now, of taking decks and putting those into videos is something that you can do. A good example that we're working on right now is how does Dooly work? If you have that on your homepage? Actually, this is an interesting example of repurposing. If you have a homepage, there's an easy way that you can take that homepage, break it into sections, take those sections, break that into slides in a deck. Then if you have slides in a deck, you basically have a storyboard, and then you take that storyboard and you make it into a video. I think that's probably the best way that I think about it, is if you have a story, then you can break it up into sections. If you have sections, you have a storyboard. Yes, that's how you could do it.

I haven't done a lot of repurposing this way, it's usually the other way around. I'll start with the video from a webinar like this. For instance, we did a fire talk the other day, and there's one killer clip. You take that clip, and I've used clips from webinars in ads and in social content before.

Travis:

Awesome. Then [inaudible 00:33:22], how would you prioritize this if you were a one person marketing team?

Camille:

Yeah. The way that I would prioritize it, and something that I've done in the past is focus on the one pillar page that would make a big difference. Two examples would be, we did this big report on sales productivity, on sales happiness. Put a lot of effort into that report itself, and again, designing all of those pages and making sure they're good enough to just be exported as images. We didn't have to worry about making the images for a blog post. It was just take that report, export all of those, add them directly to the blog and really to answer your question, it's spend a lot more time than you want to on the pillar piece. Spend your time there, and it just makes everything downhill easier. If you take the time to create that long form report or survey that you create into a report.

Another actually good way that we've done this is create quizzes. Those are kind of easier in some ways to put together and more compelling for people to actually take. You can get the data faster, and it serves a lot of different purposes. It can serve lead gen up front. That's a cheat that... a shout out to Diego on our team for working on this. But quizzes or surveys, get the data, turn those into a report, turn that into at least one blog that talks about here's the point of that report. Then it just makes everything easier downhill. You have all of the images that you can use in social. Then I would try and allocate... If it's a one person team, I would try and allocate an hour a day that you're spending in communities, and trying to distribute for the week or two after you've created that content.

Again, I guess a shout out to Amanda from SparkToro of... Watch how she promoted the one click content piece. She took the time, she did a really nice deep dive piece about that. She turned it into a Twitter thread, she turned it into a LinkedIn post. I think probably several LinkedIn posts. Then I got on email the other day that they're doing a webinar on specifically that topic. Thinking through the big piece, what you want people to get out of it. Summarizing that, also taking the time to summarize that into one image. What's that key frame image that you can be sharing everywhere that you can bring up in DMs, you can bring up in comments? But to me, and I always try and get around this too. But it always comes back to taking the time to do the long form piece well.

Travis:

Awesome. Yeah, it's a great example of that. Then what are your thoughts on publishing articles to LinkedIn articles, and what do you think about syndicating articles to Medium?

Camille:

Yeah. Medium is good, because it has the option to check that you've already posted this somewhere else, if that makes sense. You can make sure that it doesn't mess up your SEO, essentially. There's a little box that's like, "Hey, this has already been published on this site, and please don't prioritize it in Google," and so you can make sure that it's going to rank number two if it does rank. Yeah, I'm a fan of repurposing for Medium, I think that's fine. I wouldn't waste a lot of money on other types of syndication.

I think partly what it comes down to is that nobody cares about your content like you do. You're going to be the best person. Whoever wrote the post, or if it's part of your department, you're going to be the best person to promote that content. Simply because you know the content better, you know how to repurpose it better. Yeah, you just care about it more than a partner or any type of content syndication platform. Those typically get buried, because a media company is going to be paid on volume in a lot of ways. I wouldn't waste a lot of time there. I would go deep in a couple channels, or even one channel to start.

Travis:

Awesome. I know you mentioned using frameworks for creating these assets. But do you use structured templates for a LinkedIn post or a Twitter post that's more of a plug and play by content type? Or do you just have a framework like AIDA, attention, interest, desire, action? How do you formulate that?

Camille:

Yeah, that's a good question. Earlier on in creating, I did... I'd have to go back to some of my posts. But I just started posting, and then after I had enough volume I was like, "Okay, what's working and what's not working?" I analyzed things that were working, things that were not working, and those are some of these headline options that I brought up or content formats that I brought up in here. It's based on what's worked well for me in the past. Now it's a little bit more automatic, of I have a good sense of what's going to work and what's not going to work. Sorry, there's a dump truck I think going back in the background.

Now I have a better sense of what's going to work and what's not going to work. I don't plug something into a formula every time that I post on social. But there are frameworks, I suppose, that I follow in terms of those first two lines especially. I think about the first two or three lines for LinkedIn, because that's the preview text. That's the idea of bottom line up front. I think a good way to think about it though is, what's my point and what's my point of view on it? That's sometimes how I think about those first two lines is... Sometimes, I can flip them to have a provocative first line. But I think it's a matter of what am I talking... Do I know right away what I'm going to be talking about, and then what my take is on it? Then that makes for a compelling format for social.

Travis:

Awesome, super helpful. Then you mentioned this, but do you advocate for the entire team sharing on their personal socials around company content? How do you assist with that?

Camille:

Yeah. It's a popular topic right now, because everybody likes the idea of leveraging their entire team and turning it into an army.

Travis:

Yeah, that's fair.

Camille:

I have seen other companies... Yeah, turning into Drift. That can go wrong if you really actually are forcing people, and you have walks of shame for not posting on social, which I've heard of it getting that far. You're celebrating the people that are posting, and giving demerits to people that aren't. Obviously you want to stay away from that type of culture. I've found that the best two things that you can do, maybe three things that you can do are do it yourself. From the leadership level, if you're a CEO and VPs of marketing and all these people? If they're posting, that's going to be the thing that's going to get the rest of the company to post more than anything else if they see success from it within the company. If they see that leadership value is that type of work, they don't want to see it as slacking off or something that's outside of their job. If they see leadership celebrating and doing those things themselves, that's going to be more effective than really anything else you can do. That's number one.

I think some of the other things are enablement, so I'll break this up into two different parts of some sort of... I really don't want to call it training, but more just a free course. If you think about giving your team a free crash course on hey, here's how social works, and breaking down some of these frameworks. How you can be successful there, and where to get started and how to optimize your profile and things. Again, getting them those early wins and saying, "This is how I did it. Maybe it works for you, maybe it doesn't work for you." But don't make it so formulaic that it's like, "Here's how you make sure that it all ties back to Dooly."

No, it's ultimately about... People are going to post what they want to post about and what they care about, and so just helping them be successful is what you should do as a company anyways. There's that. Then I think the other part of this is just make it easy. How can you make it easier? I think a couple ways that we've done this is when we do have a big company initiative. Let's say it's a report, let's say it's a new product release. Something that everyone actually is pretty excited about and willing to share about, it's on the marketing team to make that easy for people to spread the word. Ways you can do that are using the company advocacy option within the company page, so there's an option to add all those images. To even curate the posts for people, and have them edit it. That's one way.

Then before that, what we would do is we basically made a social kit. We'd do a Google doc, and we would link out to all the images that existed for that campaign basically. There would be a bottom line up front of here's the campaign, here's what we're trying to say. Here are some valuable stats from it, here's all the images, and videos and stuff that you can use for it. Some sort of campaign doc. We're able to bypass that for this last one for instance. The last release that we did, we just uploaded everything to LinkedIn and then just made a Loom video making it very obvious of how it worked. But enablement, just content enablement.

Travis:

Awesome. Yeah, it's super helpful. This is actually the last question. Do you have a target number of assets that you want to create per article for a channel when you're thinking of that article when you're producing it?

Camille:

Yeah. I think for me, it's when you run out of things to say. I'm more looking for what's valuable in this? If you have a quota of I need 10 things from this article, but you're looking through it and you're saying, "There's really only five summary pieces. Obviously the whole article should be valuable, but there are really only five things that I think are going to hit well for social." Then just do those five things. Try not to give yourself a quota. I've seen some things about you should be able to get 30 posts out of every blog, and things like that. That's creating more work for yourself, and you know that 20 of those are not going to be effective. You know that there's probably only five really valuable stats, or quotes or things. You learn more of this as you go. But to me when I'm looking through things, I'm like, "These two quotes are killer, these are ones that we're going to use. These two graphics are good." That's it, and so just stopping when you run out of things to say.

Travis:

Oh, that's great. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Camille, and taking a lot of time out of your day.


Written by
Bernard Huang
Co-founder of Clearscope

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