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Owning and Maintaining Content

Responsibility for content doesn’t end when that item is published, it's just beginning. This is where content ownership and responsibility comes in.

Keep your content accurate

One of the greatest risks that we have when it comes to publishing content is that the content:

  • is out of date but can still be found
  • includes inaccurate information where things have changed over time, but the content has not

These situations result in:

  • a poor user experience, leaving our audiences confused or following the wrong information
  • leaving us vulnerable to legal and other regulatory risks and penalties

Allocating a content owner

To avoid these risks, all content created and published should have an owner who has responsibility for:

  • reviewing and updating content
  • removing content when it is no longer needed

This should be:

  • a named person (or small team) who have access to be able to change the content 
  • someone who will set a reminder to check the content for accuracy and make changes

Succession planning

If you assign a named owner for an item of content you should also have a succession plan or back-up owner in place. If the original owner leaves then you have someone in place to take responsibility to manage the content.

Maintaining and retiring your content

The main job of the content owner is to ensure that the content is maintained, and then retired when it’s no longer needed. 

Scenarios in which content might need to be updated include:

  • a change to the information provided
  • the activity, service or initiative no longer exists
  • a change of regulation or process
  • a change of date, time, location or cost of something
  • the tense needs to be changed from future to past tense
  • a change of contact name and/or contact details
  • broken links to other pages that no longer exist
  • a missed error from the original content being identified

You should set intervals for reviewing your content, and stick to them. Review your content and make decisions about it based on the following questions:

  • Is this content working?
  • How could this content be improved?
  • Is this content still accurate and correct?
  • Does this content still serve a known audience need?
  • Does this content still serve a known organisational need?
  • Is this content still needed?

If you choose to retire a piece of content, be careful to check for other places that might signpost or link to that content. This is required for digital content, such as web pages or social media content. You can use Silktide to identify broken links. Offline content might also be referred to in other places too.

Knowing if content is working
Silktide

Updating and removing social media content

Most social media sites rely on publishing a constant stream of content, with their algorithms often prioritising more recent items in a follower’s content feed. Unless older content has gone viral, most of it won’t continue to be seen and resurfaced. Therefore removing and updating content on social media sites isn’t always as necessary, unless:

  • it’s on a site (such as YouTube) that doesn’t display content in a chronological order from most recent first
  • it’s on a site (such as blog) where content is likely to be easily found by search engines and something in the post has changed
  • something in a previous social media post presents us with a reputational risk
  • someone featured in a social media post withdraws their permission for us to use their image and requests that the post be changed or removed