Keep Your Brand Voice Topical

Unlike us social media coordinators, the internet never sleeps. Trends, national news coverage, even relevant memes come and go in hours.

So, how do you match topicality and make your brand relevant to current events consistently?

For the sake of your sanity, we should hope you at least do some content scheduling. Our agency uses Buffer, which helps you choose optimal time slots, and put items in a “queue”. The advantage of using a queue over a direct time schedule is if there is a new piece of content that arises due to a trending topic, you can post that, and not have to reschedule everything.

Looking through all the content I wrote for May, I noticed the top performing posts in terms of reach and had the highest engagement rates were posts written last minute. Being in Nashville, a large part of this had to do with the timeliness of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. With the Nashville Predators making a cinderella-esque run to the Final, writing copy surrounding the games was all that our audience wanted to engage with. It didn’t matter if it was 2-4-1 night, or if trivia was still going on, all that mattered was our brand’s posts made some sort of commentary on the Predators.

This is not limited to sporting events, or other entertainment events. If your brand is inclined to post political commentary, Donald Trump’s supposed typo of “covfefe” became huge for brands for a 48-hour news cycle.

A week later, this is no longer relevant. The ship has sailed, we’ve moved on.

The above tweet is the perfect example of political commentary for a brand. A week, or even a day later, this would not receive the engagement it would in this lightning fast cycle.

So, what’s the perfect balance? Writing a new post every single day, making commentary on a singular event is not time-effective, nor does it lead to a healthy work-life balance. In addition, your brand may not receive any extra benefit for this type of brand voice. Especially when it comes to politics, don’t rock the boat if your brand voice wouldn’t normally do so. Here’s an example of using a timely-meme in a non-political commentary.

Why should you care if your posts are receiving more likes or not? Does it matter if your post is being shared even if it’s not necessarily valuable information for your consumers?

After all, copywriting has one purpose: to convert. Here’s why you should care about being topical.

Facebook allows you to retarget based on post engagement, which is different than their billable engagements. A billable engagement (what Facebook charges you for engagement ads) is simply someone viewing, or mildly interacting with your post. This may be spending only a second in view of your ad. A re-targetable engagement is a post reaction, comment, or share. So, if you run billed engagement ads, or if your post naturally is shared a lot, you can build your audience by running re-targeting ads in a saved audience. This helps reach people you’ve never reached before, or can help establish brand rapport and relevancy with a new audience. Even having your copy end with “hit like if you think the Predators will win tonight” incorporates relevant events into your brand’s content and has a strong enough call to action to gain re-targetable engagements on many people who don’t already like your page.

Most brands can benefit from the re-targetable engagement feature from Facebook. It’s up to you to decide how to use it appropriately.

That’s what makes our job fun, using our discretion to interact with people the best way we can.

Want to learn more about incorporating relevant, timely content into your brand’s social profiles?