Content Consistency Is Key to Your Social Media
You probably understand what people mean when they say content is king—Content, after all, is the best method you have of engaging people who are following you online, demonstrating your value to them and ultimately converting them to customers. That content is also good for keeping their attention and turning one-time customers into returning customers.
But here’s an important piece of advice you should keep in mind about all content: You need your content to be consistent. Consistency when it comes to your content is what turns an ineffective social media presence into a successful one.
Think about all of the different forms of content that your company puts out:
Do you create posts for social media?
Do you write a blog?
Do you respond with comments on customer reviews?
Do you send out email blasts?
It’s important that you’re consistent with all of this content. Now, if you’re asking what it means to be consistent, that’s a good question. Consistency takes a few different forms when it comes to content.
Consistency of style
It’s important that all of your content has the same feel to it so people recognize it as undeniably you. Does all of your written material have the same voice and tone to it? It should use the same type of language, the same sentence structure, and even the same expressions. Similarly, any visual elements that your content has, such as the graphics you include with your social media posts or the layout of your email newsletters, should all have similar colors, fonts, even patterns.
Consistency of schedule
It’s also important that all your content is put out there with some level of regularity. You aren’t surprising your followers with more content that they’re used to seeing, or you’re not leaving them with long stretches of nothing that will make them wonder whether your company folded.
Why Is Consistency So Important?
Being consistent about your content is a mark of professionalism. Being lackadaisical or unreliable in the content you put out just makes you look sloppy as if you don’t actually know what you’re doing. When you are consistent, you’re sending your followers the message that you're reliable and they know what they can always expect from you.
Bear in mind that consistency isn’t going to look the same for every brand. While some companies have reason to post multiple times a day to social media or send out an email blast three times a week, another business might need no more than one social media post a week and an email blast once a month.
Along those same lines, consistency isn’t going to be the same for every mode of content. Just because your social media posts have a certain look to them and go out on a certain schedule, that doesn’t mean your blog posts need to align on the same schedule.
How to Be Consistent In Your Schedule
Now that you understand the importance of consistency, it’s time to implement it. If you’re working on drawing up a social media schedule, use analytics to determine when your followers are most active—both in terms of the days and the times. Publish your content during those specific times of day and see how they perform.
Don’t be afraid to flex your schedule and adjust accordingly. If you see your followers are active around 2:00 PM but your posts seem to perform better when they go live at 8:00 PM, then don’t be afraid to make 8:00 PM your regular posting time.
How to Be Consistent in Your Style
You might not have one single person creating all of your content. Sometimes it’s a whole team of people, and sometimes those people will rotate depending on everyone’s schedule. The person who’s writing your blog posts might be different from the person who’s writing your social media captions.
You can ensure consistency by coming up with a style guide spelling out exactly what your brand voice and brand images are. You could also consider having one person in charge of overseeing all of it, so that person is able to tweak any copy or any graphics to fit your brand.
Remember: Consistency is important, but don’t be so focused on the consistency that you neglect to pay attention to quality. Perfectly times social media posts put out with unrelenting regularity still won’t do well if people don’t appreciate it and enjoy it. It’s just as important that your content is something people will want to come back to again and again.