7 Tips for Igniting Your Content With Social Media
Jay Baer uses this analogy to
explain the idea that content is the main substance in any digital marketing
campaign; social media channels ignite that content and help it to spread. What
this means for marketers is that content must be at the core of your digital
marketing initiatives. Content is what people find when searching on Google.
Content is what people share on social media channels. Content is how brands
tell their story and connect with customers. And content is what ultimately
drives leads and sales.
But you can't just create a video,
post it on Facebook, and expect it to generate tons of awareness, engagement,
and sales. You need to put thought and structure behind the content you create
and share on social media profiles. Start with these seven tips for managing
and maximizing content in social media.
1.
Know Your Audience
If you don't know who your audience
is, how will you ever connect with them? Most brands have an understanding of
their audience's demographics - age, gender, HHI, ethnicity. But you have to go
beyond these statistics to get a better understanding of their interests,
needs, mindsets, and behaviors to truly make a connection and become an
important part of their lives.
In addition to the standard methods
of audience discovery - industry research, focus groups, and brand surveys -
you can also use social media data to build
audience personas. Social monitoring software, Facebook Custom Audience, social
referrals to your website, and question-and-answer sites are just a few of the
sources you can use to learn more about your audience.
2.
Provide Value
Your content must provide some type
of value to your audience. That value could be education, increased
productivity, entertainment, or cost savings. To the consumer, it shouldn't
seem like marketing, even though we know it is by nature. It's providing
long-term awareness and brand recall. It's making sure your brand is right
there with the consumer at each step along their path to purchase so that when
it comes time to make a decision, you're the first brand that comes to mind.
Take Charmin's Sit or Squat app, for example. This Seinfeld-ish app allows you to find
which public restrooms in your vicinity are clean (i.e., safe sitters) and
which are dirty (i.e., strictly squatters). Any user can add and rate public
restrooms, include a review, tag various amenities (e.g., handicap accessible,
free), and upload photos.
Charmin isn't selling anything with
Sit or Squat. Not one roll of toilet paper can be purchased through the app,
and they do not try to push any sales messaging. The purpose of the app is that
when a consumer is standing in front of the wall of toilet paper at Target,
desperately trying to figure out if they need grandma-quilted,
ocean-breeze-scented, quadruple-ply, or pillow-top TP, they'll reach for the
Charmin because they remember that Charmin helped them find a clean bathroom on
their last vacation.
3.
Expand Your Conversation
Brands, especially B2B brands, have
a tendency to be egocentric. They talk only about themselves ad nauseam - their
products, services, features, benefits, staff, culture, financials, and on and
on. Customers don't want to hear about this. They're egocentric, too, and want
to know what else your brand can do for them.
To broaden the conversation and take
the spotlight off your brand, you should create content pillars. Content
pillars provide a creative filter and platform that is rooted in customer
needs, brand voice and personality, and business objectives. These pillars
represent a starting point that allows you to live within your brand's core
environment - your products/services - while also stretching into adjacent,
relevant, and credible aspects of your customers' lives. An example would be
Whole Foods talking about fighting poverty in the United States, or General
Electric providing fascinating content with their #6SecondScience campaign. Or
even Method's fun and engaging #DirtyLittleSecrets campaign. These topics are
not directly about their core products, but they are compelling to the brands'
core audiences.
4.
Look Beyond Facebook and Twitter
Creating content doesn't
automatically mean users will come consume it and engage with your brand as a
result. You must draw attention to the content through owned, earned, and paid
methods across a variety of channels, not just the big ones.
Ask yourself how else you can
maximize the value of each piece of content and each campaign: Can you make the
content more visible and sharable on your website? What other social channels
does your audience use besides Facebook and Twitter? Can you use sites that
accept submissions of specific content, like Visual.ly for infographics or
Online-Sweepstakes.com for contests? How much are you able to pay to distribute
your content on sites such as Outbrain or Taboola? Are you using Google+ to
link to content on your website? (If the answer is no, I urge you to start
today. Google+, while lacking in the engagement department, has a major impact
on organic ranking.)
5.
Know Your Dimensions
People
share things not only because those things look good, but because those things
make them look good.
People share things not only because
those things look good, but because those things make them look good. If
your content is cropped inappropriately or appears blurry and pixelated, it's
probably not going to get shared by users on social media channels. Be aware of
how your content will display on different social networks and devices by
understanding the various dimension of each channel, and how your audience most
often finds that content.
6.
Don't Ignore the SEO Impact
It's no longer accurate to talk
about the "intersection of social and SEO." These two services don't
just intersect; they coalesce into a united effort to increase findability
across all digital platforms. Therefore, separating these efforts into siloes
and different departments will not only hurt you today, but certainly in the
future.
Google's
Matt Cutts has indicated
that social signals - Facebook Likes, retweets, pins, LinkedIn shares - don't
directly impact the ranking of content, but they do help to increase traffic
and generate links, which are key factors in ranking. Cutts has also stated
that they are working on weighting the ranking of identities, meaning that a
thought leader in a particular vertical would receive higher ranking for
queries on that subject.
What Google has not openly addressed
is how much weight they are giving to Google+ pages and posts. But they are - a
lot. Enough so, that I had to mention it again in this article. The key
takeaways for Google+: Create a Google+ page. Add publisher markup to your
website. Actively post links back to your site content (at least once every 72
hours). And increase your circle count.
7.
Measure Success
Before creating a single piece of
content or posting one Facebook message, determine the objective of your
content and what metrics you will use to measure performance.
Start by identifying the important
metrics within five buckets: awareness, consumption, engagement, actions, and
SEO impact. While the specific metrics in each bucket will vary based on your
strategy, objectives, and resources, some common ones are:
- Awareness - impressions, reach, mentions
- Consumption - clicks, visits, referrals
- Engagement - likes, shares, +1s, time on site
- Actions - leads/sales, PDF downloads, newsletter sign-ups, site navigation
- SEO Impact - increased organic site traffic and activity, increased organic backlinks, increased engagement on specific content pieces
By learning who your audience is and
how you can provide value to them, identifying additional distribution
channels, integrating SEO, and creating a solid plan for measurement, you can
ensure your content has enough fuel to inflame across social media and other
digital marketing channels.
http://mashable.com/2014/03/06/social-media-content/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss
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