It’s All Connected: Harmonizing Content and Context

Since everything we post on social media automatically becomes a part of our brand, it’s important to select that content carefully to stay at the top of our game. However, it’s crucial to create and publish the content for our customers, not for ourselves. Nobody wants to read our journal entries. Now what can be tough to manage is how to harmonize content intended for customers with our brand’s goals. Because even though we’re doing it for others, it must be business-oriented and connected with our field of interest.

Before producing content, we definitely should analyse our visitors and their behaviour on the Internet.

In other words, we need to have a clear vision of how our target audiences look and act like while browsing the Web and what kind of content drives them to engage more. Another thing we should take into consideration is whether they’re engaging with the content via their desktop computer, laptop or a smartphone. Only when we get the answers to these questions, we can start thinking about how to fulfill their desires with interesting content.

On the other hand, there’s the complex problem of making the same content relevant for different users. Let’s say you want to talk about some new tech gadget on the market. The first users that come to your mind would probably be tech lovers, geeks and experts, but how can you readapt that same content to be interesting to non-experts and newbies?

Will the professional/expert terminology and approach mean anything to lay users? And who is your target audience?

Your content means nothing without the context in which it is consumed. Of course, there is an unimaginable number of contexts in the universe and it is impossible to think of every single one, but you should cover the most probable ones.

Except for the audience, it’s important to adapt the content for different platforms and social networks. Something may work for Facebook, but that same thing will not work for Twitter or Instagram. Because we can’t transfer one message through different channels in the same format and expect it to have the same impact and results.

And on top of all this comes localization as a device of adapting the content and its context to the environment of the foreign markets, which is another contextual arena with divisions and subdivisions of its own.

It seems like the conclusion here is obvious – content cannot exist without context, or it can, but it will inevitably lose a lot of its juice (or worse) if taken out of context. And while it may be seemingly easy to create content, it definitely takes deeper thinking and more resources to make it relevant for different customers and platforms. Which means it also takes continuous readaption and improvement.

So don’t be stingy with creativity and more importantly – don’t be afraid of the change.