Do you use reactive content?
Normally, you’d create and schedule content that is carefully thought out to target your audience using a content plan.
While proactive content is undeniably the best way to grow organic traffic and social followings, it doesn’t always cut through the other noise on the internet. For example, you may spend hours planning an engaging piece of multimedia content. Then, on the day of publishing, a breaking news story floods the feeds and your content gets lost.
While this can be frustrating, it’s important to note the value of reactive content and how you can use it to your advantage.
Reactive content; explained
Reactive content can be described as anything that relates to trending news, topics and hashtags.
In order to make the most of this type of content, you need to be fast – really fast. You need to identify a trend or news story early and generate content just as quickly. This enables you to be at the forefront of the trend and further your chances of exposure. Within a few hours of a reactive story, there will be hundreds of thousands of other businesses and individuals writing about it online.
Of course, not all reactive content needs to be created at lightning speed. Sometimes it can come from trending memes or current affairs. Take Marmite, for example, who capitalised on the Brexit debate with this pun-heavy tweet:
How to spot reactive content
Sometimes, it can be hard to spot something that would be good for reactive content. After all, a lot of it relies on breaking news. The best way to get on top of it is to regularly check your social media accounts at the trending topics. Try to follow accounts relevant to your sector and read what they are writing about. Often, you will be able to spot a story before it hits the headlines if you’re listening to the media landscape.
This doesn’t mean you need to be sat refreshing your feeds every 10 seconds. Rather, check in every hour or so and see if there is anything new. If not, don’t worry about it – even popular outlets have slow news days.
Making it relevant to your business
It’s all well and good posting reactive content but if it’s not relevant to your business or brand, there isn’t much point. You want your content to feel like its coming from you, not just something you threw together in 20 minutes for the sake of it.
Once you’ve spotted a potential story for some reactive content brainstorm how you can relate this back to your business. If you can’t, don’t bother. Your followers are following you because they like your brand and anything that’s off-key won’t perform well.
Don’t forget about seasonal content
If you don’t have the capacity to dedicate your time to breaking news stories, there are other ways of using reactive content. For example, seasonal content. This is quite simply content that is related to seasonal events, holidays or occasions. This could be Easter, Bank Holidays, Christmas and so on. Planning for this type of reactive content leaves you longer creation times and means the execution tends to be better.
If you’d like to find out more or want to know how to start content marketing, get in touch with us on team@modo25.com.
