One of my guilty TV pleasures is watching celebrity entertainment news shows. You know the genre; it includes Entertainment Tonight, The Insider, and TMZ. Nothing to be proud of relative to TV watching, but they are a very efficient way to feed what remains of my once fervent interest in all things pop culture.
While watching The Insider late one night, it struck me how masterfully the celebrity entertainment news shows exploit a relatively small amount of real pop culture content. Through a variety of storytelling and content curation techniques, they stretch and morph the content they compile to fill 30 minutes of air time on a daily basis.
Hmmm. What content creation activities might you be involved in where there’s an expectation of daily content where stretching out the content you have would be beneficial? Blogging and managing a social media content effort, perhaps?
5 Strategies from Celebrity Entertainment News Shows
Here are five ways to translate strategies TV celebrity entertainment news shows use to make social media activities more entertaining and manageable:
1. Shoot and run lots of video interviews
Video interviews with employees and customers can be easy ways to add new voices and increase audience time spent on your site. If you’re at an event, use it as an opportunity to video multiple short interviews. You can also video quick reactions to other stories you’re covering.
2. Repackage previous material
When it makes sense with your editorial calendar, repackage previously published material in new combinations. You can feature it again for new audience members and as a refresher for regular readers who haven’t seen it in a while.
3. Tease stories before they run
No need to make the daily blog post a surprise. Let the audience know in advance what’s coming up in future posts by sharing a snippet of content, getting anticipation and discussion started in advance. Another variation on the tease is to announce one topic, then start with a completely different one first.
4. Space stories over multiple days
Take a story, tease it one day, and then serialize the post over multiple days. Each daily post does not have to be unique – you can re-run a snippet of what you published previously to re-set the background for the piece.
5. Take the discussion to Facebook and Twitter
Repackage blog content in platform-appropriate ways for sharing in other social media channels, making content work harder for you. You can do this in reverse also, using status updates and comments created elsewhere and curating them to use in a blog.
What Ideas Do You Have?
Will you admit to watching Entertainment Tonight, TMZ, The Insider and other shows in this genre? If you do, what other ideas do you have for how their strategies can help your social media effort? - Mike Brown
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