Social media marketing content success isn’t easy and it takes consistency. Here are 7 tips to get you started on your way to a great social media marketing content strategy. Tune in tomorrow as I share some of my favorite tools for implementing this strategy.
1. Create great content
From your customer’s perspective, not yours. I always say the trick to excelling at social media marketing is to align your customers goals with your own. That means giving customers a REASON to convert. For instance, creating content that solves their problems encourages visitors to subscribe to your email list or LIKE your Fan page. Provide enough value and consumers will give you permission to send a couple of ads across their bows.
Good content not only builds your online community, it establishes you as the leader in an industry — the expert everyone turns to for guidance. Plus, content is now the strongest signal to Google that your website is relevant, valuable, and current, which means you’ll show up first in related searches. Content marketing IS the new SEO.
2. Curate content
Finding great stuff to share is almost as important as creating good content.
In fact, Guy Kawasaki puts enormous effort (and money) behind his efforts to find novel content to share across his social networks. Holy Kaw employs a small army of folks who sniff out the weird, strange, and unusual, while Alltop features the best on business, health, etc from other blogs. Curating content propelled Guy Kawasaki’s social media marketing engine that supports his empire consisting of books, speaking tours, and paid gigs all over.
3. Sharing content
Having great content doesn’t help unless you’re able to share that content in a way that engages your target audience. Share your content (both created and curated) across multiple social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, …).
But, sharing isn’t enough. You have to amplify your message by getting users to share, like, and comment on your content, which allows your content to show up on their newsfeed where their friends (who are also likely in your target audience) see it.
Modify the content you share based on the day and time your target audience is likely online to see your updates. Also, pay attention to how folks respond to different types of content sharing. For instance, on Facebook, users likely respond better to a big image with a little text rather than text only. On Twitter, links to better. Don’t get lazy and share your content multiple places by linking the two platforms together. It used to be very common for folks to automatically share their Twitter posts to Facebook, but that’s considered poor sharing behavior now.
4. Measure social media marketing content success
Monitor metrics demonstrating success on various platforms. For your website, that likely means measuring visits, time on site, bounce rate, as well as monitoring where traffic came from and other indicators that your content marketing strategy is working.
On Facebook, look at Insights to ensure you’re sharing when your readers are online. Determine which posts do well so you can create similar posts. Facebook really changed their strategy, making it harder for businesses to get organic traffic, so spending money to promote posts is important and a host of new tools help you optimize your Facebook ad spend.
5. Acknowledge folks who engage with you
Social media marketing content isn’t all about YOU; it’s about THEM. You need to acknowledge the folks who help create content (comments) or share your content (through engaging with your content). A small thank you goes a long way toward encouraging them to engage with you again.
6. Help a friend
Sharing and engaging with the content created by others is a good way to encourage them to share and engage with YOUR content. Reciprocity, which reflects this tit-for-tat exchange, is a strong tool of influence. So, listen to conversations in your topic area and engage with what others are posting — especially influential folks with the ability to reach lots of followers. Getting a single influencer to share your content may give you access to millions.
7. See what competitors are doing
Since you’re already listening, how about listening to what competitors are saying, as well. Sure, you don’t want to be doing a bunch of “me, too” posts, but if they’ve hit on a topic that seems to resonate with readers, you might piggyback on their idea. After all, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
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