Everywhere you look is content. Everyone is making content and posting content. Some great, some not so great. The thing with content is that content creation isn’t instant and clients, brands and businesses need to understand that.
Yes everyone seems to be yearning for content from social media posts to email blasts to blog posts. Content encompasses so much these days and its being churned out at such a fast rate that many people feel that creating content is fast and easy and it’s not.
Clients and brands only want content that performs well and drives traffic and engagement. What they fail to realize is that content creation isn’t instant. There is a lot of research that needs to go into things. Is this blog topic something our clients want? Will this video bring us new customers? Will this tweet go viral? When is a good time to post this?
We assume that the creatives, the writers, photographers, graphic designers etc., can just flip a switch and content is automatically created and the finished product is good to go. It doesn’t work that way. There is a lot of prep and planning and sometimes what looks good on paper doesn’t translate well in the final product. Not to mention the number of revisions and back and forth with stakeholders that occur all while being on a constant time crunch.
There is a lot of burnout in the content creation community. They face unrealistic expectations from people who don’t understand the content creation process and are made to feel like failures when the expected reach or engagement of that content doesn’t meet those unrealistic expectations. With so many brands and businesses putting out content daily sometimes it easy to have your content get lost in the endless mix of posts, blogs or videos.
We’re told by algorithms that we need to be posting several times a day in order for our content to have a desired reach. That is just not sustainable. In order to post that much, a lot of content needs to be created and in a quick fashion as well. So what ends up happening in order to comply with these outlandish algorithms is that a lot of brands and businesses just put out essentially white noise as content. Not their best or most engaging work. Just something to post for the sake of posting.
Brands and businesses feel enslaved by these algorithms and their lofty demands for content. A good question to ask is, “What if businesses created content for their audience and not for algorithms designed by these social media companies to pad their stats and wallets?” If content was created just for their audience, creators would have the time to create content that would get the desired results of the stake holders and clients. But when you have to create to feed into the algorithm monster your best work goes out the door for the sake of pushing out content several times a day.
Creative people want to be creative with the content they’re creating. They want to take bold chances. They want to push the envelope. They also want the time and flexibility to try new things. They want to feel proud of the work they produce not just feel like a factory line worker just pushing out the same content day after day.
Content creation isn’t easy. It isn’t instant. And until brands and businesses understand this about content creating, they will continue to push out subpar content just to appease algorithms.