How We Make Content

This year, we’ve been producing the same amount of content on social media and in our monthly email than we have previously. The type of content we’ve created, however, has changed and gotten a ton more engagement.

This has happened primarily from a shift in the way we think about what to share, and, quite honestly, practice. (Check out some of the quantitative results we’ve seen here). 

The content we have put out since January truly reflects some of internal ideas, values, and strategies that we embrace. We weren’t consciously holding anything back before, but we realize that the way we think about topics such as client service, art collecting, art pricing and collaboration, is what makes our business unique. It also gives prospective clients and referral sources a keen sense of who we are and what kind of experience to expect with working together. So, we’ve been ensuring our content showcases these sides of our business in various ways. 

Truthfully, producing this type of content isn’t difficult because it is simply an authentic extension of work-related conversations. What can be difficult, is considering how to translate these conversations into small sound bites that resonate with our audience. That’s what takes practice, and, more importantly, reflection and analysis. Producing reels, blogs, IG stories and more does take a bit of confidence and expectation management; not all of it will perform well. Likes, followers and engagement will vary. (Admittedly, going from 15k engagements per week to 10k felt like a failure at some point, but we’ve reframed how this data is interpreted: getting engagement of 50% OVER your follower account is considered a win in social media, and since then, the number fluctuates between 10k and 15k each week.) 

What we have been doing to practice is: 

1) Experiment. We try different types of content, experimenting with face time, voiceovers, imagery, topics, links, collaborators, tags, length, music and more. 

2) Reflect. On a regular basis, we’re looking at different measures of success. This includes views, comments, percentage of non-IG followers who see the post, website visits and more. (One post that did not get a ton of views, for example, generated some of the highest website traffic we’ve seen from a single post, making that an absolute win.)

3) Commit to consistency (with one caveat). We’re dedicated to producing regular content. It keeps us creative, informs how we talk about our work in other channels, and most importantly, fuels our business; we have built more relationships (with new clients, referral sources, galleries, partners and more) this year than ever before. The one caveat here is that we’ve learned: don’t just produce content to produce content. It has to feel authentic and valuable to our audience because forced content simply doesn’t perform. 

Related to all of this is a note about planning. We don’t really plan our content out like any social media professional will tell you to do. Trying to do this in the past has felt less authentic and more forced because the content being published doesn’t reflect current activity. We do often produce some IG reels in batches, publishing them a week or so later, but the timing is always based on what feels right, relevant and current, and it’s not based on any formal content calendar. 

We hope this is helpful and always welcome feedback. If you have questions about how we’re specifically creating any content, don’t hesitate to reach out.