"Kondo" Your Social Media Closets and Find What Sparks Joy

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The increasingly-heavy content demands of social media have led some brands to have what I’d call, “untidy” content archives filled with years of posts and videos—and maybe even some clutter. Maybe it’s time brands take a page from organizational phenom Marie Kondo and consider tidying up their crowded content closets to find what’s truly moving and worth embracing.

Step One: Make a pile

Start with an easy topic or pick one product. Then pull out all your image posts that have gone on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest in the last three years.  If you can load jpegs of them all onto a single doc, that’s great, or take the time to print them—color—and literally spread them on a the largest table you can find.

Now pick them, one by one and ask yourself: Why did we do this? Do we love how it looks? Did our followers embrace it? As you sort through this archive, while embracing and disposing of posts one by one, themes will appear that are often lost in the monthly performance reports.  Old posts will feel fresh and ready for revival and gaps will also show themselves.

In the rush to embrace new features, like stories or new platforms, it’s easy to lose track of great creative that for whatever reason was not given its full chance beforehand. Many brands are starting to recognize that their content archives hold real value, as evidence by Geico’s recent Best of Geico campaign. If as the mantra goes, content sparks joy, then it’s worth refreshing or revisiting and (hopefully) unearthing that joy.

Step Two: Categories

Just as you would go about organizing your home, go section by section through your content and revisit it to generate both insights and fun. Hold off on the most difficult categories until the end—maybe that includes core products, or video, which because of the added cost to produce often carries more emotions with it. As you work through the content files for each group, long-term connective ideas will become clear and ideas that should be revisited will rise up. This is a great time to set aside posts and content that may prove ready for a refresh and can enliven your current efforts at a fraction of the cost.

Step Three: Folding

One of the delightfully obsessive practices in tidying up is a folding plan for every piece of clothing. As I see it, content needs a similarly careful plan to store away. Marie Kondo suggests that clothing should be folded, organized by color and placed in drawers or hangers in a way to be completely visible. The content analogy I’d suggest here is rethinking your naming convention for content. Too often, it’s named by date, campaign and channel. As you plan a refresh, consider naming it by theme, idea and product. With a quick glance, everyone remembers what the file is and no one has to open file after file to find the right reference.

Finally, embrace the posts you love and creatively refresh and reuse them

If you love a campaign, chances are your fans will remember it and even if it didn’t perform as well as you had hoped the first time, give it the chance to shine by a creative refresh. Sometimes a video should only be a simple image post, or you can employ a re-crop and text overlay to turn an old post into an entirely new idea. But the spark that caught you is real, so don’t overlook it! Hold it and find a place for it to shine in your future posts.

More on Orcí:

Orcí, a national leader in marketing and advertising, creates meaningful, informed content for multicultural populations on behalf of top brands like Dole, Honda, Acura, Directv, Piercing Pagoda and others. For the past 30 years, the creatives behind Orcí have utilized multicultural strategies like bilingual production and hyper-targeted audience research to successfully launch more than 30 brands and counting into the Hispanic market.


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