Sustaining a social media strategy means finding the enthusiasm, motivation and stamina to continually feed the content monster. Part of feeding the content monster comes from idea generation and creativity – which will come from your team either within your social media department, if you have one, or from a handful of people around the organisation.

Keeping up the steam of enthusiasm

It is very important to ensure that you are nourishing the enthusiasm in your team, because that will ripple out to your social media audience and impact engagement, reach and of course, in the end…your results.

Schedule time for refreshing the brain

The brain is a muscle and needs exercise. To stay creative, your brain needs exercising frequently. My advice is to make sure that you are scheduling enough time in your 12 month period, to find opportunities to refresh your social media team and ensure that their ideas and creativity are being fed the ripe fruit to keep it going.

What you could do…

Take them away from the office – give them exercises, challenges and activities to do that bolster the out-of-the-4-walls thinking. This way you may find out:

• How your core messages could be delivered in new and inspiring ways (through video, competitions, quizzes and other campaigns)
• What your customers are asking about or thinking about right now – so you have fresh ways of giving them what they want and need

Make sure you are conscious of the different learning styles of the people in your team and structure your brain refreshing activities in a balance way (I wrote a bit more about this in my post called: “How to put your social media training together”).

How often to do it…

I would say try and allow for about 3 to 4 sessions through out the year. These are outside of the regular meetings you will be having each week or month for them to know what’s going on in the organisation.

Get input from across the organisation

It is important to train as many people as possible across the organisation (read: “Who you should train on Social Media in the business”). This will ensure that the stories used for your content strategy will come from around your whole organisation and truly match the voice of your organisation.

By involving more people in providing you with content means that your customer’s journey will be a lot more fluid from your contact with them by phone, email and also through social media.

Need a “refresh” session?

We have run some refreshing sessions for social media teams to help get their ideas flowing. If you need some ideas on what kinds of activities you could do – then just ask!

Have you run some successful sessions with your team, or found things to do if you are the social media manager that really help to invigorate your content? Please do share – I’d love to hear them.