Many business owners already understand social media's impact on content marketing. Sharing links on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram is essential to exposing your content to the widest audience possible. However, even though marketers may spend hours researching and writing content, the same amount of time should be used to craft and hone a specific social media strategy.
According to a report from Simply Measured, 63 percent of marketing organizations now have social media teams, which was a jump from 49 percent in 2015. It's the job of these professionals to create a strategy that'll bring your content marketing to the next level.
1. The Value of Planning Ahead
While it's easy to post a link to a blog post on Facebook at 1:36 PM on a Wednesday and watch the traffic roll in, posting things at random times robs your content of the potential to reach the widest audience possible. Research your audience to learn when people are using social media platforms the most, and when they'll be most likely to click a link. This helps you schedule content posts in a way that'll use your customers' natural behaviors to maximize the potential reach of your content and get as many clicks on your post as possible.
2. The Power of Research
Though you might have done some light analytics while crafting content, it's important to do some social research to find out what kind of images, headlines, keywords and text will resonate with the audience you want to reach. Though there are many guides and services that help you figure out what social media audiences are responding to, the best method for most social media marketers is simple A/B testing. This technique spots audience trends that broad, non-industry specific metrics could potentially miss.
3. The Growth of Business
Once a social media strategy is established, you might think you can just set it and forget it. However, marketing professionals know that social media is an ever-evolving tool and the social networks are continually changing, which means the strategy must change to reflect it. As the platforms change and shift, it's important to implement business growth-focused measures that are easy to tweak as your content marketing needs change.
Content marketers know social media is one of the easiest ways to attract new eyeballs to content. However, while simply posting the occasional blog post to your social media channels will help content gain some traction online, it isn't the best strategy to produce long-term conversions or turn casual readers into fans and brand advocates. For that, you'll need an experienced marketing professional who can help you craft a concrete social media strategy that plays to your brand's strengths and reaches your marketing goals.
