Soapbox Engage Blog

Are you getting the most of out your organization's communications megaphone?

Review these three quick content pointers - and grab our free Soapbox Communication Planner to help you plan the publishing of that content for maximum effect.

When running an online campaign, it is critical that your content is:

1. Timely and ties into the news cycle: If your content isn't tying into what is going on in the rest of the community and the wider world, it is less likely that your stakeholders will pay attention, comment, like or share.
   
   
   Think: What is trending right now on Facebook and Twitter? How can my organization make our content relevant to those themes?
2. Part of a larger message or story: If each post or tweet that your organization creates is just a one-off message it will be a lot harder to maintain engagement with your stakeholders.
   
   
   Think: If my blog post was an episode of Lost, would it tie into the overall storyline of the show aka my organization?.
3. Relevant to your audience: Even if your content is telling a great story and following all of the latest trends on Facebook, it still might not be effective if you aren't keeping in mind exactly who your stakeholders are and what they care about..
   
   
   Think: "YOLO" is trending right now on Facebook. Is that something my organization's stakeholders would get excited about?

Now, it may be hard to keep track of what is going on from day to day and trending in your community and the world in order to plan your content accordingly. If you're one of the many organization's that can't afford a robust (but expensive) social media monitoring tool like radian6 you are in luck! We have created a simple spreadsheet to help your organization track external trends and plan your content on a week by week or month by month basis.

Check out the Soapbox Communication Planner now »

It's a Google Doc, so all you have to do is:

• make a copy for your organization
• start filling in the weekly and monthly external channel trends
• start planning your internal channel content

Photo credit: garryknight, on Flickr