How to Create and Manage Content That’s Meaningful to Your Community and Your Brand

Our second episode features Laurise McMillan, Head of Social at R29Unbothered, a Refinery 29 platform dedicated to empowering Black millennial women. Laurise is responsible for all of the social content on R29Unbothered’s channels, which means a lot of her time is focused on engaging with the Unbothered community and creating guidelines to set the brand up for success.

Watch Laurise’s episode and read on for her tips that will help you get started with creating content that’s meaningful to your community.

1. Crowdsource user-generated content (UGC).

As a business, it’s important to engage with your customers wherever they’re engaging with you. One way to build those relationships is to share content that your audience has posted (this is called user-generated content, or UGC).

“One of my biggest tips for people who are trying to build a community on social media is to use UGC,” says Laurise. “We call for user-generated content by saying, ‘Hey, who has a small business or shop that we can shout out?’ Comment with an Instagram picture and we'll put it on our feed.”

If a customer posts about your business, your products or your customer service, you can build a relationship with that customer by requesting permission to repost their content.

If you’re highlighting specific people in your caption or comment, don’t forget to mention them by adding their username in your post. This way, they’ll be notified and see the tag. Then, you can repost content to your stories, feed or even archive them in your Saved tab.

Take a free course from Facebook Blueprint to learn how to establish relationships with your customers on Facebook and Instagram.

2. Maintain a consistent look and feel for your brand.

Laurise is responsible for setting clear brand guidelines for R29 Unbothered. This helps her keep messaging consistent, especially when there are others on her team that are working on building the brand in other ways.

“A brand guideline is like a Bible,” she says. “It's like a sacred document that is often shared amongst teams that explains how we look, how we don't look, what we do, and what we don't do. For any small team or any small business, that means figuring out what they want to look like, what they want their Instagram to look like and really sitting down to brainstorm with the people involved.”

Facebook Blueprint has developed a framework to help you create a brand for your business, where you can learn more about things like brand purpose, identity, connection and more.

3. Manage your content with Facebook Creator Studio.

Creator Studio is a simple web tool that lets businesses and publishers manage posts, insights and messages from active Facebook Pages — all in one place. The tool is free and comes with your Facebook business account. Laurise started using Creator Studio when she wanted to see how past content had performed. Getting these insights helps her make decisions about what to post in the future.

“Not everyone has the budget to bring on a community manager or someone to handle social analytics,” she says. “With Creator Studio, you can use these free insight tools that are in-app and platform. It also has this really amazing feature that lets you see all of your DMs on Instagram and Facebook in one place. That's great, especially if you're a business that wants to keep track of customer service engagement.”

Get started with Creator Studio by setting up an account, or learn more about its tools and benefits by taking a free course from Facebook Blueprint.

If Laurise’s story inspired you, take your social skills to the next level with our social media management course, created in partnership with online course provider Coursera. You’ll receive a shareable certificate upon completion.