The Shift Toward Micro-Content

How we can to do less to leverage more media!

{ By Chesline Pierre-Paul } 

As an entrepreneur, content-creating encapsulates a lot of your applied energies and focus as it pertains to competitively situating and anchoring your business in the sea of over-visibilized companies. 

To ensure your capacity to optimize how your copy lives and breathes, how your brand behaves as a self-contained sample of micro-culture, how your voice is enticingly and cohesively supported and elevated by the media you leverage, you have to restrategize your internal processes. How you push out content, the pace you build around your content delivery, and the lifespan embedded in each of your content pieces, exemplifies how well leveraged your media assets are.

The time you’ve invested, how digestibly and recognizably well-expressed and brand-consistent your voice is, how consistently your voice is multi-streamed cross-channels straight into the eyeballs of your “smallest viable market” (as Seth Godin calls it), is key. Efficiency thus, is your primest of all relevant considerations when operationalizing that whole process. Efficiency is the pinnacle of optimization. It allows you to re-leverage at will with the least amount of exertion, a recyclable piece of media that is tactically repurposed to elongate its lifespan and re-solidify your voice and its reach cross-platforms, over and over again.

One such practical way of amplifying to the uptenth power your media strategy is the shift into micro-content. It is not just an emphasis on length but on increased digestibility, multi-purpose function, visually and infographically driven and self-explanatory malleable content pieces, all of which is channeled through storytelling as its prime vehicle. What’s great is that you take that one narrative, that one thought, and grant it several lives all colored through the specific behavioral identities each platform dictates (Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn/Twitter/newsletter).

As an expert, it allows you to hold in your brain the one thought, and play with it longer, so that each re-encounter pushes you further into expertise-focused territory. Thus you integrate several angles and dimensions within the one truth which allows you to hone it, and to own it through a form of micro-level thought leadership.

Here are some specific examples of what I mean:

• From Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, to LinkedIn: I split my process into parts: 1) I use canva to bulk-produce the next batch of cross-platform content I’ll push. At this point, I typically go for Instagram-compliant dimensions for them as this is the one I seek to leverage. I focus solely at first on the visual culture (I think in shapes and colors first). As a follow-up, I re-examine my brand-consistent beautified shells and then start populating them with storytelling-based energy and information (ex. prompts, QAs, quotes, overall messaging, etc). On the scheduled publication day, I release my one-model Instagram-compliant media assets using the multi-way publication option on Instagram and have it be simultaneously published across IG/FB/Tw. Then I proceed to simply copy -pasting the captions into LinkedIn as I pair them off with the same IG-compliant covers.

What’s great is that more folx that hail in from different platforms enjoy more opportunities to engage my business through my voice. My social media captions (micro-messaging) are now leveraged into a multi-platform micro-blog. And because I am clear on my client avatar identity, I know that my copy ensures maximum resonance between them and my work.

• Using wavvee: This one is a life-changer. With it you can generate bite-size audiograms with or without captions in a jiffy and have the clips serve as living cross-promotion for your work (from a TV/radio/podcast interview to a workshop clip). I’ve taken it a step further by using it to create a high-impact 3-minute micro-podcast series.

Both the micro-podcast and the multi-platform  social media micro-blog can be repurposed and reinvented as and through the following: a trailer, a sneak peek, a quote, a pitch for a publication asking samples of your work as writer/blogger/content creator, pitches for podcasts and TV networks to land an on-air segment. It can even become part of your media kit or even part of your (free) digital content library. You can use this to bring value to your newsletter subscribers or for your Patreon account, as core or bonus materials. The point being, when you go micro to level up, you learn to optimize virtually anything. You train yourself to see opportunities and exploit them into avenues for your work and voice to be carried out more efficiently and seamlessly all around. 

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