Marketing practice, written small
Practice 05
Most social publishing is scheduled before it is decided. A calendar is filled, then material is found to fill it, and the resulting posts are answers to the question of what day it is. Read as units, they are hard to fault individually and hard to defend collectively.
The alternative is not to publish less or more often, but to publish against questions the audience is actually holding. The calendar then records when the answers went out rather than deciding what they were about.
They come from the same source as the journey map: the decisions a reader is making. A file of questions, added to whenever one is encountered, is more useful than a content pillar diagram, because each entry is a thing someone actually wanted to know rather than a category someone invented to organise the wanting.
A question of fact wants a short definitive answer. A question of judgement wants reasoning shown. A question of procedure wants order and completeness. Choosing format first — deciding this week is a video week — forces every question into one shape, and the questions that do not fit get answered badly or not at all.
Repetition is not a failure on social surfaces, because the audience present at any moment is a different sample. The failure is repetition of phrasing rather than of subject: the same answer restated is useful, the same sentence reposted reads as an automated schedule and is generally correct in doing so.
Response counts measure circulation. They are worth watching for direction and are close to useless for judging whether a question was answered well, since the most-circulated answers are systematically the most agreeable rather than the most complete. A file of questions with the answers that resolved them is a slower record and a better one.