You’ve written some great content, and you’re ready to post it to your company blog. It’s tempting to think you’re done once you hit “Publish,” but if you’re taking your content marketing strategy seriously, your work has only begun.
Why Social Media Is a Vital Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy
Some businesses still view social media as inconsequential, something extra to take care of in between invoicing and fulfilling orders and serving your customers.
But times have changed — now, social media is serving your customers. And if you’re not participating, your business won’t reach its marketing potential.
Social media turns a one-way marketing conversation into a dialogue between the consumer and the brand.
If a consumer writes a comment on a piece of content your brand posted, you now have the ability to address the comment in real time. This allows your brand to maintain its most important relationship firsthand.
Providing an official and engaged social media presence with great content also allows your business the opportunity to turn regular consumers into loyal brand evangelists, new and old alike.
Not only are you encouraging prospective customers as they engage with your brand, but you are also creating a script that remains an open conversation for those who follow after.
Each conversation is valuable the first time it happens, and it serves a purpose again when a future customer looks at your feed.
Finally, without social media, your blog can become a content wasteland. You need a strong social presence to distribute your new content, build your readership and keep them engaged.
How to Make the Most of Your Content with Social Media
It wouldn’t be an Influence & Co. post if we didn’t give you a few actionable tips to get started. Here are two tips for getting the most out of your content with social media:
1. Utilize the 80/20 rule to get the biggest bang for your blog buck.
Have you ever followed a company on multiple platforms, only to find that it posts the same updates (hashtags and all) on each platform? This is bad form.
But we can let you in on a secret: Because the useful life of the average tweet can be measured in minutes (and most posts on Facebook only live for a few hours), it’s completely acceptable to share and post the same content on all of your feeds, or even on the same feed more than once, as long as it's in an engaging and value adding way.
This is referred to as the 80/20 rule: You spend 20 percent of your time developing new content and 80 percent of your time promoting and sharing that content in new and interesting ways.
You can use the same article as many times as you can creatively rephrase or repurpose your lead-in.
2. Track your efforts to understand where to spend your time.
Like most aspects of marketing, if you can’t (or don’t) measure it, you won’t know how valuable it is.
While “likes” on Facebook and followers on Twitter are useful to track, they’re not necessarily an accurate measurement of your content marketing strategy.
Content and inbound marketing resources like HubSpot allow a brand to track exactly how consumers are finding its site.
Without a tool like this, it’s hard to identify where your leads come from. Not quite looking at a budget that will cover it?
Use free and low-cost alternatives, such as Bitly’s traceable links and Buffer’s built-in analytics. These tools allow your brand to easily access reports and data on how engaged its social networks are with its content.
Social media will become an even more important player in digital and content marketing in 2014.
Making sure your business not only creates compelling content, but also distributes it through social media channels (among other leveraging tactics) to increase your brand’s reach, will be a deciding factor in the success of your content.
