How to prepare content for social media?

RADAAR: Hello to everyone! Welcome to RADAAR: Talks, where we discuss digital marketing issues. I am Ayşegül from Radaar. Our guest today is Öznur Doğan. We will have a conversation with Öznur Hanım on creating content for social media. First of all, RADAAR: Thank you very much to Talks for our guest, Mrs. Öznur. How are you doing? Is everything okay?

Öznur Doğan: I'm fine, thank you very much. How are you?

RADAAR: We're fine too, thank you. I want to get to know you a little closer. How was your education life? What did you do before Publishme? Shall we listen a little?

Öznur Doğan: Ok, of course. My education life and my working life are not exactly connected; but I think I numbed him very well. I graduated from Istanbul University American Culture and Literature, I graduated in 2013. But before I graduated, I somehow entered the digital industry as I started working in agencies. I started in Clockwork before, as my first agency. I have been there for about 1.5 years. Then I found an opportunity to work in one of Turkey's best-known agencies like 4129. Later, after working in different places such as Yemeksepeti, Mynet and Milliyet, I started looking for this agency excitement again. For the first time, I went back to Clockwork where I started working, and after managing the team there for 1 year, I am now in Publishme, where I am in the game industry. There is such a long study journey.

RADAAR: How great! Then I want to get to my main topic immediately. What is the content? Why is content important for brands, organizations, or why should it be important? Let's listen to you.

Öznur Doğan: All right. In fact, this is basically what we call content, a very comprehensive concept that includes everything we listen to and watch, and everything we consume is of course a content. Here, we can say that what kind of content should brands produce or what to do, the point will change completely depending on which brand the brand is. For example, when we work with game companies here, the content we recommend for them is more video-oriented because I want to “promote” or advertise video games or mobile games. But at a different point, if I am doing a promotion of a book, if I want to highlight a book, maybe I should present it to the users with beautiful visuals. Or maybe I should make an audio version of this and reach users via a different medium. As I said content, whatever we want to promote, something that can vary according to our lives.

RADAAR: Peki içerik üretmeye nereden ve nasıl başlanmalıdır?

Öznur Doğan: One of the most basic things to do to start creating content is to really start writing and not to set your own goals too high here. At first, we need to get into the habit of writing daily, small articles, perhaps just keeping your notes, keeping the notes organized. After that, as time passed and now "Hah! When we come to the point "I can write content on a subject", we can already feel ourselves in such a competence. Then we get towards those long blog posts or the version where we can really make money out of it. Therefore, one of the things that must be done at the starting point is to write what we want to write and not to get stuck in the boundaries.

RADAAR: Yes… Well, let's say we are a B2C SME. How would we determine our content strategy for social media?

Öznur Doğan: B2C is actually a type that can be communicated much easier, especially for people working on social media, and even though this brand is at the SME level, what it needs to do is to know what its target audience is and accordingly, to determine how it wants to highlight its products. Knowing the target audience very well, knowing your own products very well, and using the feedback you receive from the target audience, or more precisely, the people who touch your products, as a point of sharing, as a point of return to users, you can take much better, strategic steps.

RADAAR: So what do you think makes a quality content? We are curious about the tricks of creating quality and understandable content.

Öznur Doğan: One of the biggest trademarks of a quality content is that it is really user-oriented because the content we encounter in many places, especially the texts, are written solely for SEO, to make them appear faster. But on the other hand, one of the most basic things that will separate the contents is that the content that the user really enjoys to read. Having content that he would enjoy watching or listening to… At the same time, being in a real structure such as introduction-development-result makes that content more quality and consumable.

RADAAR: So how can a brand know its followers best and maximize its engagement?

Öznur Doğan: One of the biggest indicators on our side is to look at their interactions in order to recognize the brand followers. "How does he leave comments, what is he talking about in private messages, at what stages in a journey of purchasing or experiencing a product, does he notify us of this, or do they feel the same as we are progressing step by step towards creating a 'lovemark'?" As such, the reactions of the users and the point they lead us become important. Later, when we get this "insight", when I can say: "Yes, my users and followers interact more with me when I post the X post." then I am able to use it as an interaction bait. Naturally, it is necessary to go to the level of feeding them first with what I do to listen to the community and then with the data I get when I listen to the community.

RADAAR: So what does it mean for a brand to be a social media language and how should we create this language?

Öznur Doğan: While creating the language, what was the promise of the brand and how does the brand position itself? We need to know these two questions very clearly. Does our brand want to be completely differentiated in the sector with its quality, or does it differ with its products being available much faster? Just specifying this will change our promote voice. For example, we will see that a brand that stands out with its quality does not make very unfamiliar posts. In fact, even if he will make an unbuttoned post, he will do it in a way that makes him feel a touch of quality. But if we have a brand that appeals to wider communities, like much faster consumer products, we can of course embrace a tone that can appeal to everyone, with a little excitement, and a funny tone. This is all about our brand promise and differentiation points.

RADAAR: So, do the days and hours of our posts on social media really have a big effect on the interaction?

Öznur Doğan: There is. Yes. But we need to be looking at the metric here a little more and talking about the data. Since I mostly post in the evening hours, for example, I may get more interaction in the evening again; because the first hours I meet my users will be in the evening. The remaining hours of the day are actually a much more gradual distribution. After all, when we share the first post, we get a higher reach, but here it is also necessary to try this: Am I not getting it when I post it at noon of the day? How often have I tried this? Does it happen the same way every day or was it something special for a single day? This is something that can be completely experimental but generally users - Of course, we are not in that universe right now due to the pandemic, we are currently in the office, but very few people are at the office. The majority of our team continues from home. For example, currently users do not have a "drive time". This is how we work right now, and when we switch to bedtime, we seem to be looking a little more. It is also necessary to observe it well.

RADAAR: Today, brands are more accessible to their audiences. People shared their feelings directly and became a big part of the interaction with question and answer logic. Do you think a brand should get everyone a feedback from their social media accounts? In other words, to what extent should each positive or negative comment be taken into consideration?

Öznur Doğan: Brands should actually turn to as many comments and messages as they can, because this is one of the most fundamental ways we can create a community and show that we are in contact with them and that we value them. Naturally, we have to respond at the maximum level. In positive and negative comments, there is a situation like this: Yes, we already love positive comments, we love them, even we put them in our presentations and reports, saying that they are very nice comments. However, the most important point on our part, and the point that I think is more valuable, is to be able to turn negative comments into positive. A customer communication that we can do there, the management we will carry out here is much more valuable, especially because if we can drag him from a bad experience to a good experience, his connection to us will increase much more. And you know, normally it's quite easy to get a new user, but much harder to keep the existing user. That's why we need to be able to keep those existing users in our own system.

RADAAR: A customer communication that we can do there, the management we will carry out here is much more valuable, especially because if we can drag him from a bad experience to a good experience, his connection to us will increase much more. And you know, normally it's quite easy to get a new user, but much harder to keep the existing user. That's why we need to be able to keep those existing users in our own system.

Öznur Doğan: It must be used. I haven't touched social media for about a year now. In other words, I do not manage it directly. My teams do these things, but what I want there is of course, time is the most valuable thing for us. On the one hand, we sell both our experience and our time to companies. In return for this, we get paid. Naturally, we should be using "tools" in a way that we can spend our time in the best way. For example, we can use "tools" such as Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule content.

In order to look at their performances, we can also reduce our report time by using different "tools" such as Social Blade, Minter.io. At the same time, if we want to answer, we can use one of Tiktak Boom's "products" like Monitera or Boomsonar. The important thing here is to minimize our operational time and to allow ourselves time to think about quality “content” and quality content. Otherwise, it turns into a huge chaos and suddenly you start to feel very dull. This is usually one of the reasons.

RADAAR: So, do you think doing "clickbait" works in the content created? If it works, to what extent this method gives the healthiest result?

Öznur Doğan: "Clickbait" works and in fact, even Cumhuriyet Newspaper on Twitter makes "clickbait" because it is after certain goals. We have traffic targets, we have targets for "likes", likes and followers. We can do "clickbait" for these goals, but I think it is necessary to customize and change the "clickbait" a little more. Especially when bloggers are writing these content, instead of giving a title like "It was such a thing ...", it can sometimes be a "clickbait" to move a text into the title in a cause-effect relationship or from an opposite corner that no one expected. "Clickbait" works and in fact, even Cumhuriyet Newspaper on Twitter makes "clickbait" because it is after certain goals. We have traffic targets, we have targets for "likes", likes and followers. We can do "clickbait" for these goals, but I think it is necessary to customize and change the "clickbait" a little more. Especially when bloggers are writing these content, instead of giving a title like "It was such a thing ...", it can sometimes be a "clickbait" to move a text into the title in a cause-effect relationship or from an opposite corner that no one expected.

RADAAR: So, when we want to evaluate the performance of the prepared content, which metrics can we reach the real result by choosing?

Öznur Doğan: This of course depends on what kind of content we are talking about. For example, if we are talking about an Instagram post, I think one of the things that should be followed in particular is recording. So it's not just "like, comment", it's recorded and sending it to your friends. Because that really means the next level interaction of that user for me. For example, I would definitely like to look at this. Or at the same time, if we are talking about a "text" content of a content, that is, if we are talking about a content we write on a website, instead of just looking at how many people have arrived, how long have it been in this content like "Time on Site" It is much more important to look at the bounce rate. Because it is one of the things we make the most mistakes while evaluating the contents and preparing these reports - I say this very comfortably as I work both on the corporate side and on the agency side. On the corporate side, these are requested by managers, and in the agency, the numbers are printed as they are printed to inflate this demand. And there we only see "1 million accesses" in front of us at a time. Yes, 1 million accesses can be an excellent access, but we see reports that we do not see any compensation for this and that we are far from a more qualitative level. So, "quality", following the metrics that will keep the quality a little more in the middle, is what affects the real value in my opinion.

RADAAR: As someone in this profession for many years, have you had an interesting experience that you have encountered in a job you have done on content that you can share with us?

Öznur Doğan: Yes it's okay. So, when I first started writing content, when I opened my own blog, after each blog post, which publisher - I was reviewing the book by the way. I was reviewing books and movies on my blog. Whichever publisher's book was, I was definitely sharing them on Twitter by "mentioning" them. Then one day, someone from Yapı Kredi Publications invited me to the headquarters of Yapı Kredi Publications. He invited him to his building in Taksim. If I remember correctly, Raşit Çavaş was supposed to be the Editor-in-Chief of Yapı Kredi Publications at that time. Since I wrote a lot of content like that, read too many books, I suddenly didn't remember myself as the General Manager or Director, I was in college for a while, but I found myself in his room. He thanked me for reading a lot of books and for loving Yapı Kredi Publishing, and there was a huge library behind it. He said something to me: "My Öznur, you can buy any book you wish here." I got out of there with tons of books in my hand, but it's almost too much to carry. The thing is very good, you cannot predict where the content, any content you create, will take you. It can also create such sweet memories, but of course, if you write articles at political and political levels, for example, these can also lead to different reasons.

RADAAR: We are also curious about Publishme, by the way. What is publishme, what does it do? What are some of your future goals? Can you share with us?

Öznur Doğan: Of course. Publishme is actually a "publishing" agency. We are "publishing" We understand it if we say the agency: "Publisher" s we said, the activities in Turkey of the companies engaged in the distribution of games, and even not only in Turkey, we determine its activities in the MENA region. We carry out all the marketing work, localization work, everything you can think of about the game and marketing within the agency. Of course, our focus is entirely on 99.9% gaming level. Such as mobile games, desktop games, video-games… Naturally, we are not an agency that enables these games to reach players and brands. At the same time, while we are carrying out these transactions, we also cross our paths with brands while carrying out these marketing activities. We combine games and players with different brands. In doing so, we enable it to reach more people by using tournaments, influencers, and different tools. Naturally, we can say that we are not an agency that brings games and players together.

RADAAR: Thank you very much, Ms. Öznur, for taking the time for us and being the guest of RADAAR: Talks. It was a very pleasant conversation for us. We hope you enjoyed it too. It was very enjoyable to get to know you closely and talk about social media content. We thank you.

Öznur Doğan: Thank you.

RADAAR: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of RADAAR: Talks. I hope you, those who watched and listened, enjoyed it too. You can access other sections from applications such as Youtube or Spotify, iTunes. Do not hesitate to contact us for your suggestions. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel and like our video. See you in the next episode. Goodbye!