How to categorize your content for feeds

Now that you have an RSS strategy, let’s take a look at what content you might like to syndicate.

Start by listing the target audiences you want to deliver your content to via RSS. Each of your audiences has different content needs, resulting in different groups of RSS feeds that need to be created: the media, your employees, the general public, your existing customers, investors and so on.

You can even go further and divide your master groups into sub-groups, based on their prevailing interests.  Here are some examples of how this could be done.

The Media:

1. Company News release, segmented by topic.
2. Breaking news that you’d like to go to a restricted audience of preferred journalists and bloggers
3. News and expert commentary about your industry
4. The latest product news
5. Interviews with c orp orate officers, developers, analysts and other interesting people the media would want to hear from.  Do this in both text and podcast f ormat
6. Case studies
7. Other press mentions

Customers and Prospects:

1. Customer service updates
2. New ideas and uses f or the product
3. New invent ory (cars, houses, retail)
4. Questions from customers with answers from your in-house experts
5. How-to articles with data that actually helps your readers improve their lives.
6. Peer product reviews
7. Customer product reviews published on other websites than your own
8. Whitepapers
9. Case Studies
10. In the News press mentions

Owners and invest ors:

1. Annual rep orts
2.  Internal rep orts
3. Press mentions about the company
4. Latest comments from customers

Break your content down only as far as it makes sense.  It’s all about giving your subscribers a choice – let them subscribe to the content they need and want.

And it all depends on your business.  You might find that you have only a few audiences and you need to deliver just one or two content types and topics to them.

The benefit of RSS feeds is that you can offer the exact content they are looking f or in a way that they want it –clean, guaranteed delivery of the content they really want to receive.

The New Y ork Times has a page that lists all the feeds available.  So does Intel

Note:

This data is excerpted from the new book, The Power of RSS and Content Syndication in Public Relations that I am co-auth oring with the RSS guru, Rok Hrastnik of www.marketingstudies.net.  The book will be available late this year.

Next week:  Including social media with RSS feeds