Don't make a meal if no one eats the snack - Christopher S. Penn

Avoid investing in high-effort content creation if the idea gets no traction in low-effort content forms.

Consider our content creation options. Some of our options take relatively little effort and production time:

Social media update (text)
Blog post
Photo
Illustration

Other forms of content require a lot of production time and effort:

Audio
Video
Interactive experiences
Software

All these forms of content begin with an idea, with a story we want to tell. When we’re deciding what our content strategy should be, what formats should we use?

The answer is the now-maligned snackable content. Let’s bring our ideas to life in the formats requiring less production time and effort. If no one appreciates or engages with our ideas in a quick photo on Instagram or retweets our idea, we should reconsider investing more time, effort, and resources in it. Conversely, if we can use our analytics and data to identify our best stuff, we can invest our time, effort, and resources in relatively ‘sure bets’.

Here’s an example from my Twitter analytics, sorted by total post engagement.

I should consider turning the top performing short content – text and photos, mostly – into longer form content because it’s proven popular already.

We can even kick it up a notch by examining our competitors, identifying what’s most popular in their content, and then doing a topically-related but unique spin if we can.