5 Tips for Content Marketing on Social Media

Social media marketing is a “must” for small business today. You simply cannot afford not to engage in it. However, you need to make sure that you’re using it the right way. Rather than utilizing it to create a constant stream of “look at me” promotional posts, it can be integrated into your content marketing campaign quite easily.

The problem here is that many small business owners aren’t really sure how to use social media for marketing purposes in the first place, much less as a component in a content marketing campaign. What should you do? What types of content will work? How do you ensure you’re reaching your audience? What else do you need to know? We’ll discuss all that and more in this article.

Choose the Right Content

First, you need to make sure that you’re using the right content. This touches on a number of different areas – the right content for your audience, and the right content for the social media platform in question, to name only two.

What type of content should you be using? Again, this will hinge on the platform in question. If you’re marketing through Instagram, it could be a behind the scenes photo of your newest product in action, or of your team going to work on a customer’s property with the appropriate hashtags. If you were using Twitter, it could be a link to something more – a whitepaper on your website, for instance. If you’re using Facebook (and you should be), then it could be almost anything, although images get more attention and more shares. Here are some of the more popular types of content to incorporate into social media marketing:

·      Infographics: Infographics can be shared “as is” through most social media platforms. They’re images, which immediately grabs your followers’ attention, and they’re highly shareable, as well. Make sure to include links to your site at the bottom of the image, as well as your company name and logo.

·      Blog posts: Blog posts can be shared through pretty much all social networks, but Twitter and Facebook are probably the best suited for it. LinkedIn can be a good option if you’re in a B2B vertical. Make sure to use an image at the top of your post so that it shows prominently on the network.

·      Reports/whitepapers: Reports and whitepapers can be good content to share on social media, but it’s actually better to share the landing page where your visitors can download the content, rather than the content itself.

·      Ebooks: The same thing applies here as to reports and whitepapers. Share the page where your audience can download the ebook, not the ebook itself.

Share What Your Audience Wants

One of the most important parts of using social media correctly is to ensure that you’re sharing content that your audience wants. In most instances, they want images. Even on Twitter, images are king, and you can boost retweets by up to 150% if you include an image in your message. Images can be funny, thought provoking, informative or entertaining.

In all instances, make sure that the image ties back to your website – a watermarked URL on the image if nothing else. Not only will using images more frequently help boost the number of shares you see, but it will increase engagement, as well. You might be surprised at how many people comment on the pictures who never would have bothered on another type of post.

Don’t Market Heavily

Yes, social media marketing is a powerful tool, but it’s more like a scalpel than a sledgehammer. You can’t really hit your audience over the head with direct marketing message after direct marketing message and expect them to stick around. You need to become adept at marketing obliquely – marketing around corners, if you like. What does that mean?

Simply put, it means that you need to learn how to market without being overt about it. Keep the heavy-handed sales tactics for other avenues, and focus instead on being an important part of the community. Share posts that contain important information for your audience. Share information from other sources (not direct competitors). Share humorous content. The point is that you need to be “social”, and that implies doing more than just hammering out marketing-related ad after marketing-related ad.

Combine Content Marketing with Social Ads

Pretty much all social media platforms these days offer some form of marketing. Facebook is the most prominent (and the most useful), so we’ll focus on that. You need to combine content marketing and social ads. This doesn’t need to be a costly endeavor, though. A quick boost for $10 can put your content in front of thousands of new potential customers. Increasing that boost to $20 can have even greater ramifications.

Use boosting and social ads strategically, interspersed within your wider social media marketing campaign. Use these tools to amplify the reach of your content marketing efforts, and you might be surprised at just how quickly your audience grows, and how little you have to spend in the process.

Know Your Audience

Sure, you probably have an idea of who makes up your audience, but you need to take things a step further. Your content needs to be written for a specific buyer persona – you’re essentially writing directly to this fictional person. That can carry over to your social media efforts. Know your audience, and share posts that resonate with them. Use buyer personas to help ensure that your content reaches farther and resonates more with each member of your audience.

These five tips will help you get more mileage out of both your content marketing and your social media marketing efforts. However, don’t believe that they’re all you need to be doing. Online marketing is constantly evolving, and you need to stay at the leading edge in order to ensure that you’re still reaching your audience.