Making Social Media Work for Your Insurance Brokerage – Part Four

By now you should have some idea of the metrics you are going to use to support your insurance brokerage’s social media marketing; so it’s time to look at how to start generating some of those metrics. This week we’ll be looking at your social media content strategy.

Developing a Content Strategy

The first thing you need to decide is where are you going to get your content from?

These are your main options:

Original Content – This can be created either in-house if you have the expertise or it can be outsourced. Outsourcing can often be the best option if you’re not ready to hire a dedicated resource for online marketing. We’d recommend Elance as one of the best places to outsource your content development. If you do go this route, it’s best to choose (and pay a little premium for) writers with some experience in the insurance field rather than a generic writer.

Reproduced Content – Some of the more successful social media strategies are based around a concept known as content curation. Instead of writing and developing your own content you can use tools like WordPress’s “reblog” option to aggregate a lot of content relevant to your industry. The disadvantage of this strategy is that it also serves your competition. Reproducing content normally involves offering a couple of paragraphs of the original (plus perhaps some opinion on that content) and a link to the original. Content curation is often a mainstay of a Pinterest marketing strategy.

Blended Content – The best strategies use a mixture of these two options. You might for example track the consumer press for information about burglaries if domestic insurance is your forte and reproduce this with a little opinion. You might reproduce some quotes on safety from industry experts. At the same time you might create your own original pieces around improving home security. This reduces the overall effort required to deliver regular content whilst maximising the value of your own content.

There are also many different types of content you might offer:

Blog Posts – A blog is normally at the heart of every social media campaign. It’s where you can bring you biggest, brightest and best ideas to the fore in a place that’s completely secure from your competition and where you have the most control over your messages.

Social Media PostsLinkedIn, Facebook, and most other social networks offer you some space to create content. This content is normally tighter than a blog post due to space constraints and at least some of your effort in this sphere is normally spent linking back to your blog posts.

TweetsTwitter offers absolute brevity as the only option. Even hyperlinks are abbreviated to help you make the most of 160 character posts. Twitter’s big advantage over most other social platforms is its’ immediacy. If you have something relevant to say on a “trending topic” you can win over a large audience very quickly.

VideosYoutube and other video networks offer you the chance to create dynamic content with a stronger chance of going “viral”. It costs more to create this kind of content than written content and is often a “special event” part of a marketing strategy rather than a daily event.

Photographs – Photo content can bring large volumes of hits from search engines and social networking sites like Flickr that specialize in photo content can be a good source of traffic too.

In our next part of this series we’ll look at how you can bring these options together to form a coherent content strategy and we’ll also be looking at some tools that can cut down on the workload involved in managing social media efforts.

Finally, we’d like to wish all Riskheads’ readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We look forward to seeing you all again in what we hope will be a prosperous and exciting 2013 for everyone.

Snowman Insurance Broker

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