Creating a content driven social media strategy is critical to increasing your presence and engagement with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.

How do you develop a strategy and what does that strategy look like?

It starts with a simple question, what do you do? What are you creating and why do people care?

Every business creates and shares knowledge, documenting that knowledge and experience is the foundation of your social media strategy. The magic is documenting that knowledge in a way that’s shareable. This is the difference between advertisements and social media content.

Generally we define shareable as funny, sexy and education. Funny and sexy have high return value, but come with increased risk. For every video like the equinox video that has hit, there are one million videos that are just inappropriate. Your tolerance level for risk vs. reward is what determines which road you take. Education is always safe and the rewards can be even bigger. The “how to” section of YouTube is huge—we are a people that want to learn more.

If you’re a yoga studio, the answer to what you do appears simple, you teach classes.

As we all know, a lot more happens at a yoga studio—from teacher training to assisting to workshops to cleanses and classes on anatomy, nutrition, philosophy, meditation and asana. That’s a lot of content being created daily. What’s missing??? Documentation.

Documentation is the start of developing content for your content driven strategy. How much is too much? There’s no such thing. The Greatful Dead recorded every show they ever played. Even those hippies, high as a kite, knew that what they were doing needed to be documented. Decades later these shows are being sold through the internet.

Bikers are using social apps such as Strava to record their routes with times (famously depicted in the valentines day commercial this year of biking a heart shaped route in San Francisco). Why are they documenting their routes? So they can track their improvement, share their ride and see how they are performing with their friends.

What is your yoga studio recording? How many pictures do you take of every class? Have you captured the physical and mental transformations going on in your studio? Does it really matter if you make money off of this content or can you see that we’re all going to need as much content as we can create?

Okay—you get my point. You have to start documenting your content. If you’re low budget it may be podcasting with a cheap TASCAM or zoom recorder. If your budget is a little bigger, you have a photographer taking pictures, from once a month to every day/week. If you actually have a budget, we’re talking video—from once a year to every single class. No budget, you’re blogging—anybody can create text anytime.

If you aren’t documenting your creative content, you are wasting your most precious resource—your knowledge.

This knowledge/content is the foundation of your social media strategy.

Is a flyer social media? In the old days yes. We create these flyers and hand them out to people (socializing our content) to remind them to come to our events. We even post them on Facebook, wondering why so few people clicked Like on our advertisement. The flyer is educational, true. But is it interesting and engaging? Is it the best use of our natural resources (trees) or budget (printing in color is expensive). The flyer is dead, long live a community that talks!

“One must maintain a little bit of summer, even in the middle of winter.” ~ Henry David Thoreau.

Continuing to run with traditional ads in magazines and flyers is why you keep looking out the window and thinking it is winter, you need to find a little summer. Your summer is waiting for you on Facebook.

Try an experiment. Post your flyer advertising you workshop on Facebook and see how many people like it. Post a picture of yourself in wheel and give an instructional point—then tell people about the workshop where they’ll learn more about wheel. See how many people Like that, maybe if you inspire people they will even share your post. Then compare the content and results, try the experiment again with different content. This will help you figure out what content your community wants to see and empower you to develop that content.

What makes your pictures and video shareable?

Education and inspiration. This is what you’re looking for as you look at your company or yoga studio. If you see the opportunity for education or inspiration you’re sitting on a gold mine. The secret to harvesting or mining that gold is to start documenting and sharing, creating content consistently. It starts with knowing what content you can create. Build a strong foundation, just like you do in your yoga practice, then spread your wings and find the full expression in everything you do.

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Ed: Lynn Hasselberger