Photo Credit: Flickr

(This blog post brought to you by friend, content strategist and speaker at this years SXSW Festival, Margot Bloomstein. You can find her on Twitter at @mbloomstein)

What’s the connection between social media and content strategy? Well, for one, you can’t have social media strategy without content strategy.

Nope, this isn’t a way to carve up more of the project budget; in fact, content strategy may just help your social media budget stretch further by reducing rework and unsuccessful campaigns.

Let’s back up to some definitions:

Content strategy is planning for the creation, aggregation, governance, and expiration of useful, usable, and appropriate content within an experience. It stems from a message architecture, or hierarchy of key communication goals. Moving forward, it comes to life through

Content audit-what do we have and how well is it working?
Prescriptive content matrix -what do we need, how much, in what structure, who will create or find it, and at what frequency?
Editorial style guidelines-what’s the appropriate style and tone to convey the message architecture?
Editorial calendar- to coordinate all the moving parts in a predictable, manageable way.

Notice how I didn’t mention copywriting? Though you’ll need copy to express your ideas, it’s just one small and tactical component of your strategy–which may also address user-generated content, imagery, and sound.

So back to social media–you know, the line item more and more businesses are prioritizing as they see the benefits their competitors experience. Positive interactions between brands and their target audiences drive loyalty, purchasing, donations, involvement, and visibility. So how can you ensure the time and money you invest in social media will result in those positive interactions? A social media strategy can ensure you’re using different channels–e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogs, online forums–to their respective benefits. Strategy can also help you address consistency and frequency of interactions–two necessary components to ensure your brand is creating positive experiences across all its touchpoints, not undermining its own work, and building something worthwhile, not embarrassing. You know those CEO blogs that boast only one or two posts–and the last one was six months ago and didn’t receive any comments anyhow? That’s embarrassing. And depending on your industry, it may be more embarrassing than the keg stand pictures also featuring your CEO.

So where do content strategy and social media strategy intersect to benefit each other, and the clients they serve?

As content strategy first addresses the most important topics to communicate–documenting them in the message architecture–it can directly answer the elephant-in-the-room question of most social media campaigns: what should we blog/tweet/post, anyhow? As a content strategist, I often work with social media strategists (or wear that hat myself) to prioritize blog/tweet/Facebook topics and help writers evoke brand voice in an editorial style that consistently supports those themes. If it’s most important for your brand to communicate its innovation, long sentences laced with passive voice will undercut that goal. Style matters–even in the 140-character world of Twitter. I counsel my clients on how to create a unique, brand-appropriate voice they can “translate” between Twitter, Facebook, and longer-form blog posts. I’ll also explore tools like an editorial calendar to help them synchronize themes across social media channels.

In short, partnership between content strategy and social media strategy answers a lot of questions: done right, no one should ever ask “Wait–what should I be writing about, and for when?!” again.