How Often You Should Publish Content
This is a question a lot of marketers and small business owners have.
The short answer is: not as much as you’d like to. What kind of content should we publish? Blog articles? Podcasts? Social media posts? Well, let’s talk about all types of content.
If we read reports from different analytics tools they all have diverse answers: you should publish 4 times a week, you should post on social media between 19:00 and 20:00 on Thursdays, you should publish four videos per day on TikTok, you should do this, and that.
But what they are not saying and asking is the most important question: is your content interesting? Is your content valuable? And is your content aesthetically pleasing?
Because let’s say you might have the most interesting guest on your podcast but if the quality is not there nobody is going to listen to it because it makes it hard for our brains to follow.
We have to remember that our brain is constantly trying to preserve energy to survive. So if something is hard to understand or has low quality it will avoid it because it takes more mental energy to focus.
It’s not just making something nice and attractive, it’s making something interesting.
I’m doing a storytelling course in a school here in Holborn and last week the teacher was explaining the importance of having different shots in a video to show your story.
One example that she showed us had 14 shots within the first sixty seconds of a documentary introduction.
I asked her if it’s really that important to have so many shots. She told me it’s not important if you don’t want to keep the audience watching and engaged. I was a bit hesitant as I think it’s too much.
She went on and explained to me that 40 years ago you could get away with one or two shots, or not putting that much effort into creating good documentaries.
But now you can’t get away with it because humans’ attention span has been dramatically decreased because of different social media sites. As well as this, the expectation of quality content has increased dramatically.
We consume content through Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube and many other channels and influencers are uploading entertainment every second.
So if we want to keep the attention of our audience, keep them engaged and build trust we have to put in the time, the energy and the resources to create high quality content.
Then I asked her, what about the person that is telling a very interesting story. She told me that it doesn’t matter how interesting the story is, it’s hard to keep people’s attention. She said that what she says in class is very valuable and interesting but that doesn’t stop Mike from nearly falling asleep.
There was a video that I showed her for feedback and she told me within 3 seconds that the dogs playing in the background were way more interesting than what the person was saying in the camera because the framing was wrong.
The same goes with writing an article, using sentences, using the right words to paint the picture that we want. Otherwise the person is not going to consume the piece of content. Or even if they do, they are not going to relate to us or believe us.
What happens when people don’t consume our content? It means we can’t build rapport, never mind trust and an emotional connection.
But what is interesting and valuable to the audience?
What you might find interesting might not necessarily be what your audience finds interesting.
We can all agree that nobody likes being sold to. Nobody likes promotions. There is a clever way to sell something but then again, we don’t really go on social media to see what new promotions there are.
Creating interesting content is hard.
Anybody can hire a videographer and shoot nice videos of the mountains, seaside or dogs running. But the hard part is creating interesting content that adds value to people.
Then the second part is to make the content you create align with the brand. There is this word in marketing that we use called ‘on-brand’. You can spot when something was created on brand.
How does that piece of content connect with the story or with the brand you are trying to promote? For example, you can see clearly when Gymbox creates a piece of content. Even without having their logo on the artwork you can see from the quirkiness and the way it connects with their tagline.
Then we have long form content, podcasts and long YouTube videos. There is a podcast that I follow that publishes a new episode every month — I listen to it because it’s interesting.
Some other podcasts publish their episodes very frequently but they might not be interesting because you can feel that something is off.
And in the podcast sphere you can see a huge difference between podcasts that have an executive producer and podcasts that don’t. The numbers never lie.
Another example with YouTube videos — yesterday I saw a mate who published a video on YouTube called “Why I Disappeared”. It was 14 minutes long, I watched 1 minute and 10 seconds. As much as I would like to know why (well I kinda know) the video wasn’t interesting enough — it was one static shot, no B-ROLLS, just him speaking to the camera. Maybe interesting but boring framing and editing.
It’s like Casey Neistat once said in an interview: that at some point after doing a video vlog every day on YouTube for 534 consecutive days (at the highest quality) he ran out of things to vlog about.
He was reading some comments on YouTube that said he is just redoing some older vlogs. That was the moment he realized it’s time to stop because the interesting part of the vlogs started to fade away.
Then we have social media. If you listen to Gary Vee he is preaching that you need to be publishing 10 pieces of content a day. Publish, publish, publish. Then he will tell you that’s what he does. I fell into that trap as well but then I thought to myself, I have a business to run, then create content, then edit and then publish, and yes get some sleep and go for a run.
Then I noticed a small, a minor difference. Gary Vee has a team of 15 people working only on his brand — so basically 15 people that do content for him: videographers that shoot content constantly, editors that edit content constantly, copywriters that create copy, engagement managers that engage with people, an ads manager that run ads and a brand director to oversee the brand.
His agency, VaynerMedia, has 500 team members and they create content for some large corporations. It’s a huge difference from our small agency.
For smaller companies it all depends on how much value they can provide. So here’s an interesting post from Nike Running: it’s short, snappy, interesting and valuable. If you run you will find this interesting. Their content strategy from what we can see online is to educate, entertain and sell. The selling part is only 10% but when they do it, they do it in a creative way so you don’t feel that they are selling something to you.
I believe we should post as much as we can at the highest quality we can. We should be answering questions in a creative way that help our customers and our audience.
If you think that the content you publish every day is valuable and people respond to that, that’s great. If you think publishing a podcast a day/week at the highest quality is valuable you should do that.
Perhaps consider testing different strategies and seeing what works better. For smaller companies sometimes it’s a struggle to see the quality objectively because they think it’s okay if the quality is not good enough. But think about what if a potential client sees a piece of content that is of bad quality, and then consider (consciously and subconsciously) do you cut corners in your product line? Do you use expired ingredients in your pizza? Do you clean your kitchen? Do you hire the cheapest, untrained staff?
We have to remember that a brand is NOT what we say, a brand is what others say about our brand. And all we can do is help influence that perception by doing the things we can control.
