Finding the right tool can help solve both these problems to some extent. Let's give that a shot.
Content production is only one part of the story as figuring out the right strategy to get your content in front of the right audience, is just as important.
Understandingly so, any tool that can help me with research or in identifying the right channels for amplification are always welcome. EpicBeat is one such tool that was launched recently. Read on to find out how this tool can help you with your content goals.
Content Strategy: What to write?
EpicBeat gives you the content, trends and influencers that are trending for a particular topic over the span of a month.
Considering I’ve taken to eating healthy and have been doing my fair share of reading about the topic, I decided to use EpicBeat to see if I could find anything interesting.
A quick search on ‘health food’ reveals quite a bit about the kind of content that works for the topic. Facebook has a considerable lead over other networks in terms of engagement. What is interesting to note is that interest in the topic is pretty even across the week with a slight dip only on weekends.
Not surprisingly, those who are interested in health food are consistent about it!
As is common for most topics nowadays, listicles are the most popular format of content. I also discovered some new sites that I can go to for curation in the future, as it gives the top domains that publish content around health food and the level of engagement their posts have been generating.
Influencer strategy: Who to talk to?
A big part of getting your content noticed is about getting it spotted by the influencers in the community. A nod of agreement or an appreciative ‘share’ from them can go a long way in making your content successful. A peek at the ‘community insights’ tab shows that the most influential persona for ‘health food’ are responders, so clearly this is an area with high levels of engagement. Their tweets are largely made up of replies- a whopping 68.4%.
Epicbeat not only gives you the top influencers for the category, a little snooping around can even give you hints on how you can become an influencer yourself. The community and influencer insights show that majority of the tweets contain links and don’t have rich media.
Engagement levels are pretty high in this area and accordingly, the ideal number of tweets per day are greater than 5. We already know that ‘Responders’ are the most popular type of influencers.
Put all that together and being an influencer here could mean sending out 10 tweets per day where most of the tweets are replies and retweets with links to external content, without rich media.
Amplification strategy: Where to post?
The concept of healthy eating is something that has clearly gained prominence in recent times. The insights reflect this to a large extent as it appears to be a topic with high levels of engagement. Since Facebook leads the pack, being the channel with highest levels of engagement- it is the obvious favorite here. But if you’re bored of Facebook and are looking for a newer and lesser known platform, ‘StumbleUpon’ seems to be quite a worthwhile place to start too.
If we’re to look at ‘shares’ alone, then Pinterest isn’t far behind Facebook. The photo sharing site has come a long way in the last couple of years and is another popular choice among healthy eaters, looking for information.
Bonus tip: The site really helps in content curation as it allows you to share directly from the site without having to leave the page. But what is even cooler, is that it allows you to share an entire search query with someone else. So if there’s a page with more than one article that appeals to you- share the entire query instead of laboriously sending out each article!
So there you go, three steps to creating and distributing your content using EpicBeat. Do check out the tool, and let me know if it helped cut down your research time too. And if there is another tool that makes your content discovery easy, drop a comment and spread the good word!