Creating evergreen content for your organization or brand sometimes feels out of reach. We often find ourselves in a constant state of keeping up, instead of going forth! In today’s post, we are going to unpack how to break out of that cycle and start creating evergreen content.
Determine the lifetime of your content.
When we start writing, designing or generally creating content for our brand we like to first consider if the information related to the brand will be relevant to our connectors in 2, 3, 6 months or longer? This is important because knowing its relevance will help you determine where it should live, how to promote it, and how much traction it might make.
To figure out the life of your post, blog or newsletter you might want to consider if you are presenting time specific information (i.e. holidays, promotions, events.) Whether what you are sharing is based on a trend/algorithm and could change in the future. Or if it is something that helps improve your brand connectors for the long term, for example, information about your brand’s mission/vision.
Now you may be tempted to think that the only worthwhile content is the last one because it lasts the longest, however, being relevant and up-to-date with your industry’s latest news and resources can be very helpful in keeping the interest of your connectors and providing value to them.
How you package it matters.
Once you have determined the lifespan of your “content”, you can then figure out the best way(s) to package it! Researchers have found that the lifespan of a social media post can be as short as 15 minutes vs a blog which is over a year.
- Twitter: 15 minutes
- TikTok & Snapchat: Start decaying immediately unless viral
- Facebook: 6 hours
- Instagram: 48 hours
- LinkedIn: 24 hours
- YouTube: 20 days or more
- Pinterest: 4 months
- Blog Post: Over a year
As you might guess, a lot of frustration can come from putting a lot of effort into packaging evergreen content in the wrong way. If we aren’t careful, we will find ourselves creating packaging and forgetting the substance. It’s OK to package your brand in something trendy or engaging like a reel, but make sure you aren’t just posting something that is entertaining for a moment and won’t build your brand. (Unless entertainment is your ultimate goal.)
Dig deep before spreading wide.
If you are wanting to get off the hamster wheel of creating content purely for visibility, then start to dig deeper. Take time to dig into your brand strategy, identity, vision and mission. Start to unpack who you are and then where you want to go. Once you have a grasp on where you are headed, then you will start to make each platform work for you + your goals instead of the other way around.
By making the vision + mission plain, you can start to create content from the bottom up. First start by creating a foundation of information…a flower bed of sorts. This is the thing you are dying to share with the world; offering it through courses, consultations and long form writing/audio. From that healthy place, you can start to propagate smaller buds into blogs, newsletters and freebies! Hello overflow.
Warning you may start to realize how much you have to offer. You have already done the hard work of researching and writing for the longer form, and from there, you can begin multi-purposing and picking out those bite-size pieces of information. We will call this the fruit of your labor. 😉 This, this is the moment you can start to go wide and begin sharing your brand/organization with the rest of the online community, through posting etc.
**Keep the main thing, the main thing.**
There you have it, it is never about creating more, doing more, or producing more. It is all about finding depth in what you already do and sharing from a place of abundance. That is where we find our stride and our work has ease. Let us know in the comments if you found this helpful!
Source: Refinery.com
