How to Organize Content With Tagging

By now, you’ve researched what a successful social media campaign looks like, you’ve optimized copy accordingly, and you’ve brushed up on how to measure engagement. But successful engagement goes beyond clicks, shares, impressions, and interactions on social media. It’s also important to understand what type of content your audience is engaging with and why. What exactly does your audience like to see from you?

To discover this, you have to go beyond the surface data garnered from engagement with your typical tweet or Facebook post. Labeling your content with metadata tags, or labels in your editorial calendar software, gives you deeper insight on what specific topics and types of content are performing well for your brand. It’s also an easy way to keep your content organized. So, where do you start?

How to properly use labels to categorize content

Labeling categories provide a consistent way to group various pieces of content you create. The easiest way to determine appropriate labeling categories is to ask yourself the four W’s:

• • What is the copy about?
  • Where is the link pointing to?
  • Who is the intended audience?

• Why is the topic key to your brand?

• (Also, What sort of content is the link pointing to? Is it a website landing page, a YouTube video, or an infographic?)

The answers to these questions will help you organize your content around identified topics that are relevant to your brand or campaign and ensure certain types of media (such as blogs, articles, and videos) are evenly distributed across your channels. This can also provide data for a cross-comparison when analyzing your top performing posts.

An example of a good content labeling structure

Let’s say you are a thought leader in the local fashion industry. You’ve written blogs related to current trends, social responsibility in the industry, specific designers, and a monthly round-up of industry-related news. Your social copy includes links that point to third-party sites and pages on your own website. Your content is directed at three personas: clothing designers, students, and general public. You have five main topics that your brand focuses on: street style, makeup and accessories, new and emerging designers, fashion photography and editorial, and social issues in fashion.

The label categories and subcategories are broken down as such:

• Topics (the What): local style, apothecary, accessories, designers, photography, editorial, social issues, and travel

• Subtopics (related to the What): emerging trends, streetstyle, fashion week, skincare, makeup, jewelry, footwear, sustainability, designer responsibility, and events

• Engagement point (the Where): Your website and third-party websites

• Audience (the Who): general public, designers, and fashion students

• Goal (the Why): read, watch, and purchase

From here, you can choose the appropriate label under each category for every piece of content you publish. Most editorial calendar software and reporting tools help you do this.

Bonfire recommends starting with these five categories and listing no more than 10 subcategories under each. This will give you a clearer picture of all the types of content going out, simplifying the mapping and reporting of what your audience is engaging with and why.

Let the data tell the story

It can be daunting to think about all of your content from every channel you publish on, and identifying an organized and effective solution that works. Origami Logic reminds us that your label “naming convention should remain consistent” in order for the reporting tool to pick up the data and “categorize the data into a navigable hierarchy of information.” When organizing your content editorial calendar, look for one that has an API compatible with various third-party reporting tools like Origami Logic.

When you pull a report, the data will start to show you what topics and subtopics your audience is engaging with most. You’ll also discover if your audience prefers links that go out to third-party websites versus your own. As the tagging data starts to tell you this story, you can also add in a geography category and certain geographical tags if you wish to target your content to specific regions. With this new set of data, you can extract the story of what topics and content certain geographies like to engage with.

The more categories you add, the more detailed your data story will be, helping you be even more precise with organizing content in the future.

Related resources:

• Data: The Missing Piece in Your Content Marketing Strategy
• 4 Helpful Tools for Organizing Your Social Media Calendar
• A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing Attribution