It has been said that no content marketing strategy is complete without social media. For many new to marketing social media can be overwhelming. It’s easy to spend hours networking on social media sites and the results can be less than exciting.
However, social media has real power to bring awareness to your content and to your business. A recent report published by Brafton found that 70% of consumers click through to a brand’s blog content after reading stories shared on social media. And once they arrive at the blog they’re more likely to take action, including downloading more content or signing up for an opt-in offer.
Social media not only provides you with the ability to capture a prospects’ attention and drive traffic to your content, it also reaches substantial numbers of people and can increase awareness quickly. Viral content is spread through social media and can change the face of a business practically overnight.
So How Do You Embrace Social Media without Losing Hours of Your Busy Life?
Strategy, strategy, strategy. The key to successfully integrating social media into your content marketing is to have a clear-cut strategy. What are your goals? How will you achieve them? What social media sites do your audience participate in and how do they interact on social media? How will you track and measure success? Many social media sites offer analytic information to business users. Additionally, there are tools available to help you track social media results.
Focused Efforts
Instead of hitting six social media sites and trying to build your content marketing through all of them, consider focusing on one primary site. For example, perhaps after some research you learn that your audience is heavily involved with Twitter. If so, that’s where your attention should be focused. Create an effective Twitter strategy to promote your content marketing. Once the strategy is successfully achieving results, then you can add another social media site.
Remember to integrate your efforts. It’s not enough to use social media to drive content marketing. Create a loop and ask your existing visitors and audience to connect with you via social media. Keep your audience engaged by integrating your marketing efforts.
Next Steps…
- Begin researching your audience and their social media habits and preferences.
- Identify one social site to focus on and begin crafting a strategy to use social media to promote your content marketing efforts.