In honor of my Branding You! co-conspirator, Phil Pallen, I am re-posting his fabulous piece on How To Rest In Evergreen Peace via www.philpallen.com
On September 4th, 2014, Joan Rivers tragically passed away. Sixteen days later, she posted on Facebook about the iPhone 6’s “great achievement in design.”
What a disaster.
As you probably guessed, our beloved Joan didn’t rise from the grave in the name of social media. (No guarantees when I kick the bucket.) This is a devastating case of untimely content posting. Gives me chills just thinking about it.
If you’ve got a social media account, you’re automatically a content creator, and this comes with great responsibility. Posting online as a representation of you requires tact and conscientiousness.
You’re probably more aware of your auto-censorship than you realize, and that’s a good thing. When your mom joins Facebook, you immediately check tagged pics for evidence of your body shot adventures in Cancun. If your boss follows you on Twitter, you tone down the “TGIF” tweets. We all have audiences to consider, and timeliness in posts is an unavoidable imperative.
Like I wrote in my book Shut Up and Tweet, I’m a huge fan of Buffer, a free scheduling platform that automatically pushes your content when your audience is most active. There’s zero calendaring involved; you simply keep your posts topped up and rest easy. As demonstrated by dear Ms. Rivers (RIP), this operative is both a blessing and a curse. If Buffer releases your content at a sub-optimal time, your personal brand might just bite the dust.
The best way to guard the integrity of your brand’s content is by ensuring that, more often than not, it’s evergreen. This means constructing your content with enough flexibility to pass as acceptable any time it’s posted.
Imagine if the tweet “I’m drinking a fancy martini right now!” posted to your Twitter account at 6am. Although I personally think day drinking is perfectly acceptable, some may be concerned. Now take the tweet “I can’t wait to drink fancy martinis this weekend!” If that posted at 6am, people probably wouldn’t judge you. In fact, they might think more of you for being a morning person with kick-ass weekend plans.
Is writing evergreen content challenging? Of course it is. And I don’t want you to feel restricted to it either. If you’re doing something amazing, by all means, share it with the world. But when plotting out your personal content calendar, consider evergreen as the majority. It might just add some life to your brand.
