Content marketing and social media go hand in hand.
It’s a synergy that only works because the one absolutely needs the other.
Without content, social media platforms would have nothing to deliver to their audience. And without social media there would be no channels for content to be distributed.
The questions that remain though are what channels should you be using, and what is the best way to be using them? The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) answers this best in their eBook 58 Social Media Tips for Content Marketing.
Here is some of what they had to say:
- Consistent quality of content is crucial. And it isn’t so much about the volume of what you’re posting rather than making sure that what you’re putting out there is well planned, well executed and includes the stuff that people want to be reading – epic content – and seeing – spectacular visuals!
- Get your message out there as concisely as possible. People like short messages on Facebook so cater to that audience in the way that they want. This is not to say long messages doesn’t get read, they do, just make sure they’re compelling.
- Make sure your content tells a story. People are only inspired when the stories that they read are themselves inspiring – compelling. But this also means making sure that the content you’re putting out there is relevant to your brand’s audience – its buyer personas.
- Study your analytics. In order to establish what kind of an impact your brand is having on Facebook or how fans interact with your content, you need to analyse the data available to you. In this way, you can create engagement benchmarks so as to create a standard by which you can measure the success of your brand’s efforts.
- Maintain a consistent brand persona always. An audience can be easily confused if they are being bombarded with different messages. So as CMI says, “it is critical that you present a consistent voice to tell the story of your industry and your brand”.
- Utilise the tools that Twitter offers to expand your reach, like using between 1-3 relevant hashtags in your tweet so that it becomes easier for people to find your content. Or go one step further even and create your own original hashtag for a particular campaign.
- Engage in real time live tweet coverage at events that are relevant to and will appeal to your brand’s audience. This will make them feel that you’ve made the effort to include them when they can’t be there.
- Test your original content on Twitter by tweeting it and monitoring which tweet gets more shares than another. This will provide valuable insights as to what direction to steer your content efforts.
- Utilising a company page to share your content is a great tactic to have it seen by a larger audience, especially for B2B marketers who apparently make up 83% of LinkedIn users.
- Become an active participant of LinkedIn groups as it’s a good way to showcase your authority and expertise in your field. And through conversation and building rapport with other group members, quality lead acquisition stands a higher chance of being achieved.
- Don’t bombard your LinkedIn connections with useless content. It’s a professional social network and you need to adhere to a particular standard. Therefore, ensure that your brand shares only the best content to its audience, and don’t think quantity, think quality always.
- Get your customers on LinkedIn to share their recommendations about your brand. This is just as much content as any other and considering we live in an era where online peer reviews can often be the make it or break it for a brand, share the good stuff that people are saying about you.
There are of course a number of other social media channels that are just as popular as the three mentioned in this blog, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, and more, but we’ll get round to those another time.
For now, the message to take home is that you need to be producing high quality content consistently and to a relevant audience. You also need to be ensuring that you’re distributing that content through the social media channels that will give you the furthest reach to the audience your brand wants.