Value: If the content you are posting is not of value to your community, then it’s not worth posting at all. Likely, if it doesn’t have value to your community, it’s probably something only YOU care about. The content doesn’t have to have an impact on everyone in your community, but definitely for a large portion. Be educational, be insightful, share insider tips, and provide exclusive content that only your community can access.

Varied: Change up your content all the time. Putting out the same type of content, like special offers or posts about only one subject, will make you predictable and boring. It just takes some consideration of what your community really wants to know, and asking why they are following or liking you. Did you promise content that you aren’t delivering? There’s a good chance you have content in your arsenal that you haven’t considered posting. You can even come up with weekly posts around the same subject, like Tuesday Tips for Teeth (if you’re a dentist).

Viral: Does your content have good potential to be spread out beyond your community? Ideally, there are friends and followers of the people in your community who haven’t discovered you, and that viral content can catch their attention if shared by members of your community. It just needs to have  the legs to move 2, 3, 4 degrees out beyond your peeps. Videos are great viral content, as are how-to’s and special offers to community members. I will caution you not to be focused on making ALL of your content viral. Doing so will cause your content to lean too far to the promotional angle, which is okay in small doses, but not constantly.

Most of all, as social content managers, you want to share your expertise, information, and tips from which you have a unique perspective to share. You want your community to always be paying attention, and to do so you need those followers and fans to expect value, to see varied topics and content, and to see occasional posts that your community members can share with their friends in order to share that value.

To that criticism, I would first say that perhaps those who suffer from social overload do not yet have a clearly-defined objective in their social media program. Perhaps they don’t have a “program” at all, but instead dabble in a few tweets a week or post and respond to interesting things on Facebook. That, my friends, may be where the gaping hole exists… between you and your targeted community of followers and friends who are your potential buyers and brand advocates.

Have you ever considered launching a direct mail campaign with no clear objective, just sending out random postcards in hopes you hit one person who may be interested in what you’re selling? Probably not. I would pose a similar question to you about your social media activity. Why do you only participate just enough to wave your little flag and say, “Yeah, I am here, but I have nothing important to say, so I’ll be back next week and maybe I’ll have something to say then.” In no other marketing you do for your company would that “fly”… would it?

So, I’ll save the more in-depth discussion of how to get started with a social media program for a future post, but for today, give your social media activity some real thought before you toss it aside as something only to do when you have downtime. I started this post by pointing to the frequent criticism that there’s too much “fluff” going on in social networking to pay attention for the content that does matter to you. Well, I suppose if you are not providing interesting, relevant content yourself, how can you complain?