choosing your content platform(s)

Brian Solis' conversation prism shows social media relationships

Brian Solis’s latest Conversation Prism illustrates the increasing complexity of Social Media content management.

conversation prism displays social media relationships

Brian Solis recently updated his hugely popular Conversation Social Prism which charts the best known channels in the social media spectrum.

Dozens of major social channels have been categorized under 26 distinct headings representing social’s broad range of interests. The list includes the best known, not every social channel on the web.

It’s an eye-opening experience trying to comprehend the near limitless opportunities he presents while deciding on priorities. To get an idea of how far digital media has come, you might want to compare his prism to my web universe sketched only four years ago.

how successful your rank is depends a lot on where you publish

The two most popular platforms for individualized content publishing are brand-here-dot-com websites and/or blogs.

Blogs are dynamic, while publishing as a straight html web page tends to be more cumbersome even though it allows greater flexibility. It’s a trade-off that should be considered with an eye towards time management, creative skills, and frequency.

Social sites are also widely used for content, but are restricted in one form or another as to length and type of content. To put all your eggs in one basket, i.e. Facebook, places the cart before the horse. Pinterest, SlideShare, YouTube, Behance, and others offer a wide variety of options as well as optimized content management. But none offer the overall flexibility of a native domain. Further, crawling and indexing social sites may not be as optimal as a dedicated site.

using only social media has its limitations

Publishing Content Management System (CMS) web site or blog usually means a one-look theme that’s template based. I publish to both platforms: HTML material to my site, and this blog for short updates like this. What this means is that my dot-com web platform maintains a consistent look with the option of inserting one-off pages if desired.

Most small businesses should find blogging only very well suited to establishing a reputation for customized content, especially if that blog is self-hosted.

Once you’ve decided on a workflow and have begun publishing, the next step is promoting that quality content. Today, that means social media and email.

While it’s obviously impossible to cover the entire spectrum of social media, the trick is to focus on a half-dozen or fewer sites and make sure they’re well integrated into your prime channel.