Have you thought about whether your social media content is seasonal or ever green? Before you post anything on social media for your brand, you should have an understanding of what you want to achieve with the piece of content. A few goals some brands may have surrounded their content could be to create brand awareness or product awareness, engage with the audience or even build community around the brand.
Some brands may also have goals such as creating thought leadership which is normally done through educational posts. Before you post on social media for your business, you should ask why you are posting and what the content can do for your brand (and audience).
Once you are clear on what you want each piece of content to do, you will have more insight on whether you need to post more seasonal content or ever green content.
Definition of the two
Seasonal content is considered to be seasonal as it is time or event based. The content is only relevant during a specific period. Content around holidays will only be relevant before the holiday and shortly after; and content that follows a trend will only be relevant during the time that the topic is trending.
The same applies for events such as conferences, festivals, product launches, and so forth. A brand mentioning a topic that was “hot” two months before may result in the viewer not wanting to engage with the content as they may consider it to be irrelevant and not adding value to their current position.
Evergreen content is not time sensitive and can be assumed to remain relevant for years to come. Evergreen content is normally centered around common issues people tend to have and will continue to look for solutions for.
An example of this would be content surrounding challenges faced by new entrepreneurs — as long as people start businesses, they will need to navigate learning how to manage several moving parts, as well as learn more about business modeling, funding, and how to sustainably build a team.
This means that if a brand posts a blog on any of these topics, people will continue to find value in the information as they start new business.
So, how do you decide on whether to post more evergreen content or seasonal content in your social media marketing strategy?
Here are four factors to consider:
Lifespan of the content:
Evergreen content remains relevant for longer periods. Posting this type of content will result in traffic to the content increasing over time as people might come back to a blog, podcast or video as new people might discover the content months after it has been published.
Each online platform also has a content life span. This would be the number of hours or days that the platform will show new users the content without you having to spend money for you reach more people.
Knowing the content lifespan on each platform you use for social media for business will help you decide on which platforms to focus on for your evergreen content and which to post more seasonal content on.
Long form content platforms tend to work well for evergreen content. YouTube videos, podcasts, blogs and articles are easier for people to find as they tend to be more searchable. Consider how you would find information on a topic you are interested in – if you learn through video, you would likely search for the topic on YouTube, if you prefer to read you might do a Google search or search for blogs through Pinterest, and if you prefer to listen to information, you would look for a podcast on the topic.
Social media platforms such as Instagram, X and Facebook encourage users to make use of the hashtag function to improve post searchability but searching for information on them isn’t yet as effective.
Time to create and publish
Good content takes time to produce and time is one of your most valuable resources. When you create evergreen content you create a post, article, podcast or video that you can continue to refer to, and repurpose all year round.
I have found that evergreen content published on my podcast two or even three years ago continues to receive ‘listens’ while Instagram posts published during the same month and year no longer get attention.
Content that remains valuable for extended periods needs you to dedicate time to research and production.
This can be worth your while for seasonal content if you are looking to join a trending conversation and show you are relevant, which may be not be as attractive to a team working with a smaller marketing budget.
Seasonal content requires you to churn out content quickly as it is time sensitive, and once the season has ended, it may only become relevant again after a year if it's an annual event or it was a trending topic, it may be considered completely out dated.
Appetite for continuous improvement
If you value continuous improvement then this factor is one you will want to come back to. You should be able to take stock of your content and take time to understand what worked and what didn’t work.
Your assigned social media manager should be able to tell you what type of content gets more engagement and whether they tried to post similar content to see if the result would be the same.
Your digital marketing strategy should not only work for your brand, but for your intended audience.
With evergreen content it’s easier to improve on your content overtime as you can refer to past blogs, articles and podcasts looking at the both quantitative and qualitative insights.
You might realize that your audience prefers you to post content that goes deeper into a topic instead of broad content that tells encompasses more but remains shallow on each point.
You would only be able to pick this up after posting several pieces of content, looking at the numbers and looking for things that would have been consistent in the pieces that would have done well.
The needs of your audience
Social media platforms create room for two-way communication between the brand and its audience.
A billboard or an advert in a magazine would require the viewer to capture the businesses details and then email or call to communicate with the brand, while the viewer can like a post, save it, share or even comment. Brands can listen to their audience to understand what kind of content they would like to see more of.
This can be done by looking at both verbal and non-verbal communication where verbal communication can be comments, direct messages or even posts about the brand and non-verbal communication may be likes, number of follows after posting, number of saves, etc.
The verbal ones will show you whether the content is received well and whether there any information gaps while the non-verbal ones may require you to dig deeper to understand why a piece of content worked or did not work well with your audience.
At this point, you might be asking whether you should have more evergreen or seasonal content in your digital marketing strategy and the answer to that is; it depends:
Are you conscious about the lifespan of your content?
How much time are able to allocate to producing content that may only be relevant for a short period?
Are you looking to learn more about your audience from the content that you publish on your online platforms?
What do the people you are publishing content for want more of?
Remember that brand is about perception and when considering brand, the most important people are your target audience.
Social listening entails searching for what people are saying about your brand online and there are numerous (free and paid) tools that can help you with this. It will help you know what kind of questions people are asking about your brand and products as well as any thing good or bad people have to say about your brand.
For example, your audience might be asking the same questions for months, at a time or suddenly commenting on a product line upon its introduction — this would call for evergreen content to respond to questions through content you can continue to refer new members of your audience to, and for you to quickly address any concerns surrounding a new product line through content that would be considered seasonal once the product line has been phased out.
Your content is an opportunity to respond to the information you find and educate, inform or start the conversation.
Does your audience prefer evergreen or seasonal content?
- Chikumba is a digital and brand strategist working with people and organisations looking to leverage the online space. She educates on brand online marketing fundamentals and is host on the podcast Building African Brands. She works with entrepreneurs to solve African challenges, and creative to shift the African narratives. These weekly New Horizon articles, published in the Zimbabwe Independent, are coordinated by Lovemore Kadenge, an independent consultant, managing consultant of Zawale Consultants (Pvt) Ltd, past president of the Zimbabwe Economics Society and past president of the Chartered Governance & Accountancy Institute in Zimbabwe (CGI Zimbabwe). — [email protected] or mobile: +263 772 382 852.
