Content
Estimated time to audit your content: 2 - 4 Hours
The process of auditing your content will reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your activity across social media channels. You'll be able to identify the effective content your audience engages with, a landscape of effective content from other governments to take inspiration from, and what's not working across the board.
Review content
Depending on how much content you've created and shared, this can be viewed in two ways:
Native Platform: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networks have a quick view of your best performing content. Each channel organizes it differently, whereas some provide more insights and others provide less. Facebook gives you the most and Twitter gives you the least. If you frequently post on Facebook, you can download an XLS file and dig a lot deeper through the data.
Third Party Analytics: As mentioned in the previous Audit page, there's a range of third party tools that range from free to expensive solutions. Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Sprinklr, Social Bakers, Talk Walker, Tubular Labs, Shareablee and Brandswatch are just some of the tools.
Organize content
As you browse through the native platform or a third party tool, I'd recommend taking screenshots or creating a spreadsheet to create a database of the content so you can differentiate between the most, and least, engaging content. Using PowerPoint slides are a simple way to highlight and share your insights. For each piece of content, you want to do the following:
Write down 2-3 key takeaways that might be obvious but could also be context driven.
Categorize the content with one or two keywords. Later in the communication strategy, we suggest categories we've used for other cities.
The analysis of your own content will highlight media or ideas that are obvious or maybe hidden that will help you generate more engagement. For example, the graphic below was one of the most engaged posts. The idea was to ceate an iteration of the characters from the original concept.
Organize & Review Inspirational Governments
We've created this list of trusted resources for inspiration and guidance on what's worked well for the governments that are limiting the spread of COVID-19.Look for governments that can serve as inspiration for content. New Zealand has done an excellent job at containing COVID-19. Other governments that are doing better than most include Germany, Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand. While certain cities, states or countries had an early major spread, they took the steps needed to flatten the curve and develop habits through instilling new behaviors with their citizens. Of course, certain countries have political environments, scientific rigor, cultural behaviors or geographical constraints that make it easier to keep COVID-19 contained. The common thread with all the governments that have contained COVID-19 better than the rest of the world has to do with their communication strategy through public service announcements, online and offline.
As an action item for this section, repeat the steps above by organizing and reviewing inspirational government content across your targeted channels to help develop your communication and content strategy.
Internal & External Hashtags
Whether you're building your own hashtags or joining the conversation across others, it's important to have an idea of their engagement. When creating your own, it's good to understand if another brand is using it so you don't mix messages up. When jumping in on a conversation, you have less influence on the actual conversation but can potentially get more reach and visibility around your content.
Here is a list of hashtags from the City of Boston's exploration phase:
If you need help with a content audit, let's run a workshop. Sign-up here.
Last updated
