What’s wrong with Content Snacking

If you’re a digital marketer and if content marketing is one of your main focuses, you’re probably familiar with Content Snacking. Content Snacking is an unavoidable way to get the most out of all the existing content produced by your company. From one existing piece of content (for example, a white paper) you can create perhaps six “small” items (an infographic, a quote, a slideshare…), more adapted to the way people consume content on social networks – Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn. These small pieces of content are distributed by marketers on social networks, whether through organic reach or social paid media. The question is: what are the two major advantages of Content Snacking? The delivered content sticks to the ways people consume information, but it is also a good way to recycle existing content.

At Brainsonic we produce about 5000 pieces of content every year: videos, infographics, white papers, blog posts… Some of them are “the master”, some of them are derivatives for content snacking purposes. And it works well. So… the question is: what’s wrong?

First of all, we noticed that to get real efficiency and cost saving with Content Snacking, the “master” and the derivatives must be conceived at the same time. To achieve this, video, infographics, edito experts must come together. That means there must be real change in the way marketers prepare their content roadmap. Each subject must be considered for multiple social networks delivery (facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Vine…), and the way people prepare the content production must be streamlined to enable this. Let’s take an example: if you intend to produce a video, you have to take into account that you’ll record the Vine derivatives at the same time. Not after, because it will be too late. Gathering a cross competency team (video, edito, and image experts) is a key success factor to achieve this.

Also, producing snacked content can’t be enough. Of course it is a good way to create awareness, to get short term engagement of audiences on social networks. But you need more to get a real and durable connection between people and the brand. You need to mix Snack with a Buffet: you also need more elaborated pieces of content that create strong emotions with longer exposure to the brand. To illustrate this, let’s take the example of Vice, the leading new media on the web. Contrary to a lot of media, Vice has chosen to deliver long videos (20 minutes or more) to create a strong link with the viewer. We’re not talking about short and quick-win videos that generate traffic. We’re talking about long and strong impacting videos that have made Vice so successful.

In the vast ocean of snacked content, producing elaborated content is sometimes a good way to stand apart and be unique.

I would like to share this video sponsored by Harman, “The Distortion of Sound”. It’s about music, poor MP3 quality, and artists’ frustrations, the reason being the details of the artists' work disappears after MP3 compression. The video is long (22 minutes). But it is a very good video that creates strong emotion. Content snacking is sometimes like MP3 compression: at first sight it’s what people want, but it has to be mixed with “uncompressed” content to create strong and true relationships.