Social media talk often revolves around algorithms, posting cadence, follower counts, and other ways to game the system. However, this is only a tiny part of the story. What is a content distribution strategy without content? Content is king—and all other pieces mean nothing without a good content production strategy.

Good content makes distribution a breeze

All of the algorithm games cannot make up for garbage content. You can be a distribution wizard, but you are wasting your time if you aren’t making good content.

A clear content vision will help you in every other process step. Targeting your demographics, growing your audience, pacing your distribution, planning your engagement, and every other facet of social media is much easier if you know your message and can articulate it well through video, text, and images.

It’s important to evaluate your distribution strategy and ensure you’re hitting the mark, but all the analysis in the world will not help you if your content is not doing its job.

What is good content?

Good content is content that resonates with its audience in the intended way. For example, it will make your audience laugh if it is funny. It will tug at heartstrings if it’s a more emotional piece. Maybe it will invoke outrage to inspire action. Whatever the goal is, if it invokes the intended response from your audience, it’s a successful piece of content.

The problem with content creation is that it is largely subjective. What one person thinks is brilliant, another person will hate, and all you can really do is predict how it will be received.

The production process is about understanding who you’re trying to reach and speaking their language. From there, you can make some educated guesses on how successful it will be.

Why is content more important than everything else?

Content, at its core, should be a representation of your brand and what you stand for. It should tell a story—your story—and engage your audience. Without good content, social media views are just fluff.

Chasing a million views is meaningless if people get 7 seconds of entertainment with no takeaways.

The views can be a dangerous trap—chasing social media clout is addictive and is an easy way to quantify “success.” However, a thousand properly targeted eyeballs on a powerful piece of content can be much more effective than a scattershot approach to targeting with fluffy content meant to chase algorithmic views. Those views are not telling your story; they are not bringing people into a conversation with you.

Only good content can do that.

The takeaway

Your social efforts are meaningless if you have nothing to say. That’s the bottom line. Content is king, and distribution is just support staff.

Get your story right, and all other pieces will fall into place.