By Marcus Jensen
While social media is often viewed as a separate strategy from content marketing, in truth, it is one of the most important tools marketers use when deploying their content marketing plan.
As a matter of fact, 90 percent businesses report social media is the most popular content marketing tactic, according to Content Marketing Institute.
Paid advertising on social media is a great way to get the content in the hands of your customers.
However, if you want your traffic to increase and the interest in your company to explode in a viral way, you should encourage your readers and followers to share and recommend your content within their own social media circle.
Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your material to make it more shareable on all social media platforms.
If you implement any of these tips when creating content and posting on your blog, you might be surprised by the number of shares and retweets you get.
In an instant, you will be drawing more traffic from social media sites than ever before.
Why Content Marketing and Social Media are Inseparable
Tweeting Images
A few years ago, Twitter added inline images to tweets, so you do not have to click on a link to see the attached image, but rather the tweet expands.
Marketers quickly took notice, and it turns out that inline images made a big difference. Tweets with images receive more favorites and retweets than the ones with plain text.
As a result of over-saturation of online content, and the increased of mobile web access, attention spans are shorter than ever, which makes content presented in the form of simple text very off-putting.
However, images are not just important to tweets. Marketer Jeff Bullas claims even articles and blog posts with pictures get 94 percent more views than the ones without.
Image Optimization
While we are on the subject of pictures, let’s talk about optimization.
You probably already use stock images for your blog posts, but you have to make sure you are optimizing them for sharing.
Simply putting images on your blog is not enough; you must ensure they are clearly visible when you share them on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Pinterest.
That is why you should try sharing your posts to get a preview of how your pictures look on these sites. If they seem strangely cropped, you may have to experiment with the image sizes.
In addition, you should notice most users wait about threee seconds for a site to load before they click the return button, so if you have large pictures that take more than five seconds to load, you run the risk of losing the customer’s attention.
Content Optimization for Specific Social Platforms
Your target audience can choose from a wide range of social networks and each have their own unique audiences and features.
Ignoring these distinctive features is equal to disaster in terms of social media marketing.
Therefore, taking time to make sure each piece of content published on a specific network is suited for that channel will give you a far greater chance to connect with your followers.
For example, Twitter works better with written material and blog posts, while Facebook is far more flexible, but usually needs the inclusion of video in order to gain more traction.
Adding Share Buttons
You have to realize people might not share your posts, infographics, or videos with their followers, if it is not easy for them to do so.
Copying and pasting an URL onto Facebook can be tedious on a mobile device, and most of the people will not take the time to do it.
There are many plugins such as The Simple Share Buttons Adder, ShareThis, and AddToAny out there that allow you to add a share button to all of your posts.
After that, your followers will only need to press one button to share your content on their profile, and believe it or not, it makes a big difference.
However, make sure you have at least a few shares from the get-go, because when a share button has a significant count on it, there is 60 percent higher click rate compared to a button with zero shares on it.
Sharing Your Content More Than Once
The most obvious reason to share your posts more than once is to drive more traffic than the initial share.
To show reposting helped him increase his traffic, Tomasz Tunguz, a noted expert on SaaS metrics, conducted an experiment on his own blog.
To get an idea on how many people were sharing his posts, he looked at the number of retweets he got tweeting a link to one of his posts.
With each following tweet of an old blog post, he got roughly 75 percent as many retweets as the time before.
Another thing to remember is that, with the Internet, you have a worldwide audience, so it is important to share your content more often to reach the people in different time zones and have different social media habits.
Addressing Current Issues
Do not make your blog posts too generalized; you should keep the related to the current trends and events in your specific industry or modern events.
If your posts are up-to-date and related to what is going on in the world right now, there will be more of urgency amongst your followers to share your content with their friends.
There will also be a better chance that random people will want to click on the link to see more about what it is about.
In the end, rather than making my own conclusion, I will quote a man who is at the very epicenter of content marketing, the CEO of an SEO agency from New York Four Dots, Radomir Basta:
While I strongly advise you to try some of these strategies out, the best advice I can give you is to take time when you are crafting your content. Simply putting words on a page is not enough; you have to make sure that everything you make is interesting, engaging and unique. Quality content will grant you more followers, increase the awareness of your brand and boost your SEO. Do not neglect your keyword strategy! Your basic strategies and optimization have to be bulletproof. It is important for your brand awareness, your rankings and future optimization. SEO and content marketing go hand in hand, and missing an opportunity of banking on good content would be a waste.
