DEVELOPING A VISUAL STORYTELLING ROAD MAP: FROM STRATEGY TO IMPLEMENTATION 143 this simple exercise, you’ll better understand the shelf life of your content, which can help in determining the frequency per day and the time of day your content should be posted. You will also learn how to not step on your own toes by overposting so that you can give your content the optimal amount of time it needs to shine. Usually the shelf life of a tweet is considered to be an hour at most, and shelf life of a Facebook post is about 24 hours. Allocating Content Themes and Media Once you have the frequency set, it’s time to determine your monthly con- tent mix. This is where you prioritize by social media platform the most important content themes that go into crafting your visual story. The mix needs to balance what’s important from an ongoing visual storytelling perspective with goals, current events, questions, and general conversa- tion from your customers. Rank these themes, and assign a frequency qualifier to each bucket, whether it’s in terms of the number of posts or percentage of the month’s content. This mix will likely be different by social media platform. It will also likely change each month depending on how much news your company has or the tweaks you’re making in response to fan engagement. When ranking these items, ensure that the mix has a balance to what you want your customers to know about you, versus what they’re looking for. The content should also aim to be mostly upbeat, fun, motivating, and engaging. Remember that people don’t always come online to read the newspaper. Sometimes they want to pet the cute dog too. Once you have your monthly content themes outlined and prioritized, you can use this information as your baseline when you’re crafting the actual visual content. Outlining content themes makes it easy to identify what messages will best be conveyed as photos, videos, infographics, pre- sentations, and/or some other medium. Planning will also make your life overseeing social media easier: you won’t be scrambling to get post con- tent set or have to articulate your vision for content on the fly.