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How to Leverage Social Media for Effective Content Marketing

Content marketing is the foremost step taken by digital marketers to woo their target audience. The idea behind this is to offer relevant, valuable and quality content to your visitors so that your message does not go unheard. An intrigued visitor will make repeated visits to your website and will not shy away from becoming your customer in future.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a way to get closer to your potential customers to gain their interest and become valuable for them. A content marketer will never provide excessive information to its customers but only what is necessary and that too in phases. To say the least, if your content is effective, there is no power in this world that can stop you from getting higher ranking on search engines. As a marketer you must understand the paucity of time with your consumer. If you share usual boring and preachy content, your audience is very likely to reject you.

You can market your content through various online mediums like website, blog, email, video, newsletter, eBooks, discussion portals and social media. In this article, we are going to discuss how social media can be used to market your content.

Social media – a powerful medium for content marketing

Social media is an epicenter for sharing information with friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Consumers believe that the content shared on social media is rich, genuine and testified by their friends. Which is why, the sharing chain grows larger and becomes viral at the spur of the moment.

Moreover, it is a place to relax, serving as a casual platform to engage with your target audience through communities and one-on-one interaction. Social media helps you to gather data and find out interests of your target audience through tools like Buffer. This ultimately facilitates you in designing a targeted campaign. Let us discuss the potential of different social networking platforms used by marketers today.

Facebook 

Facebook still remains the top networking platform in the world. Invite your target customer to like your Facebook fan page but with a promise to share something useful with them. Every brand is running towards Facebook and get liked. But these likes turn unlikes if your profile stays stagnant.

How to use Facebook for content marketing

• Use Google Chrome built-in Power Editor to create lookalike audience list from your existing Facebook followers. Lookalike audience is the one which is similar to your existing customer base with similar interests, likings and demographic characteristics.
• Share content like an eBook or a case study which you do with your existing customers and you’ll see magical results.
• You can promote your content through Facebook Ad with limited time availability. Facebook Ads targeted at your lookalike audience also let you generate a significant list of subscribers. So, if your content is good, people targeted will subscribe and subscription will give you an opportunity for personal interaction with your audience. Another advantage of Facebook Ads is that you can retarget your lost visitors.
• Many a times, visitors browse your site but do not visit it again. To target them again, tools like Adroll let you place a pixel on the landing page of your website and Facebook Ads of your content is displayed when they sign in next time. Thus, it increases the exposure of your content among lost visitors.
• Marketers are progressively using hashtags to listen to their followers and admirers on Facebook. Following the brand hashtags gives them the consumers perspective about their brand. They can interact and answer to the queries of their admirers.
• People are easily attracted towards emotions, jokes and thought-provoking content. And images are the best bet to increase engagement. Use personal, interesting and stimulating images to grab the attention of your fans.
• Audience Insights feature helps you to know your consumer behavior, interests and their location that assists you in making a customized content for them. A Facebook marketer is enabled to go through the profiles of his followers to understand their likings and design a relevant campaign.

Twitter

Twitter is a remarkable platform for marketers as it is the fastest way to communicate with the followers. The content posted instantly goes viral. Marketers quite often using action hashtags to engage their followers like #subscribe, #vote, #like etc. Hashtags are engaging and fun. It helps marketers to increase their brand popularity, generate leads and increase traffic to their website.

How to use Twitter for content marketing?

• Many marketers use a time-bound content sharing strategy triggered by retweets by interested consumers. You can also use targeted tweets to send to a specific audience based on their geographical location. What’s more, sharing images on Twitter leads to increased click-through-rate and significant increase in retweets.
• To ensure that your content is seen by your followers, you can share the same content a number of times in small intervals. It can significantly increase traffic and fan following.
• Tools like Twitter Counter help you to track follower growth so that you know when the time is just right to repost the same engaging content.
• Marketers also use A/B testing to know what content pulls the visitors more to their website or blog. Such experiments help you to reframe your content to suit more to the target audience.
• Followerwonk is an interesting tool used by many businesses to schedule a set number of tweets at desired intervals in a day. It also analyzes the time when most of your followers are active.

Pinterest

Image pinning is what leads you to winning on Pinterest. Marketers are using innovative ways to engage with their fans on this fairly new social networking site.

How to use Pinterest for content marketing?

• Different pinboards can be created for segregating your content. Pinboards use interesting imagery and infographics to increase click-through-rate.
• Fans can be asked to opine on new content pinned with the associated image on your board. Visitors have the option to repin your content to increase exposure of your content.
• Images can be embedded with call to action links like subscribe, sign up and more to invite customers to your blog and website. Marketers generate a considerable lead from Pinterest by sharing quality content like eBook, white paper and case studies.
• Inspire your visitors through images that trigger thoughts, ideas, discussion or create awareness.

Google+

Google plus has a lot to offer to engage with your target audience. A Google+ profile lets you create circles, communities and facilitate A/V interaction though Hangout. If wisely used, it is probably one of the most effective networking platforms.

How to use Google Plus for content marketing?

• Make sure that your profile is filled with genuine information and a proper display images reflecting your business interests. It could be your company logo or some interesting graphics.
• The reason why it is important is because Google gives a lot of credibility to the author of the content through its Google Authorship feature. Claim the authorship of your content and the Google will market it for you. It not only gives you higher ranking on Google but also serves as a proof of authenticity of your content.
• As more and more people share content substantiated by an author with a display picture in SERP, it makes a lot of sense for content marketers whose primary agenda is to be noticed by the target audience.
• Your content on Google+ is composed of articles, blogs, news, sharable images and videos. Google+ allows you to segregate your content as per the target audience in a particular Google Circle. This lets you customize your content and reframe it to sound relevant to your readers.
• Comment and interact with your customers to give them a sense of belonging to your brand.
• If they criticize you, assure them that you will improve your services.
• Hangout is a video conferencing service by Google+ that can be viewed by your followers to witness an interview or a conversation. Hangouts can also be used for personal level interaction with the followers. It acts as a highly shareable video content with auto upload on YouTube.

Conclusion

To survive the competition in an era where quality content generation automatically gets more priority by search engines, it is important for the marketer to focus on the content quality and selective sharing of content.

Another essential task is to integrate all social media profiles so that customers don’t find it difficult to engage with your content on the platform of their choice. Do remember the fact, it is easier to create profiles on social media but it is equally difficult to get any benefits from it unless you actively use it and interact with your customers.

Depending upon your business, you can think of innovative ways to create content. But your chief objective is to make it useful and shareable. Aim to become the talking point among your customers.