Kristen
Vaughn / March 10, 2020
We know that a successful social media
strategy requires delivering high-quality and engaging content to users.
But can social media actually be used to help
you improve the content you’re creating and offer even more value to your
audience?
Absolutely.
It’s so important that content
and social media feed off one another and work together in this
nature.
This is what sets truly great digital
marketing strategies apart from the rest.
While there are endless ways that social media
can be used to improve your content marketing efforts, this post will explore
four of the most impactful ways to improve your content with social media.
1. Better Understand
Your Target Audiences
First and foremost, social media is one of the
most powerful tools to get to know your audiences.
If you aren’t using social media to gain
insights into the daily lives of your customers, you aren’t doing it right.
You should know and be able to easily answer
the following:
·
When are your
customers online?
·
What types of content
do they like?
·
What content do
they not like?
·
What other brands do
they interact with?
·
What content are they
sharing and how?
All of this information can and should be used
to guide your content marketing efforts.
With a solid understanding of when your
customers are most active on social media, you can determine the ideal time to
share your content, ultimately, boosting reach and engagement.
If you know what types of content your
customers like and don’t like, you can avoid spending endless hours
crafting irrelevant
content that is likely to fall flat.
Or, you can better position a content piece
that you know is valuable with a catchy headline that will grab your customers’
attention.
These are just a few examples, but you get the
point. Let’s jump into another way content can be made better with social
media.
2. Use Social Media as
a Listening Tool
Social media should be used to monitor things
like:
·
Mentions of your
brand.
·
Conversations around
keywords and topics.
·
Industry happenings.
·
Competitive activity.
·
And much more.
Monitoring this valuable information is one
thing. However, social
listening requires analyzing all of this data and applying it to your
strategy.
Acting on these findings will help improve
your digital marketing strategy as a whole but, for the sake of this article,
we’ll focus on how it positively impacts your content.
Content serves many different needs. Whether
the goal is to drive traffic to your site, boost
keyword rankings, or enable your sales team – at the end of the day,
content needs to be aligned with your audiences’ needs or it won’t drive business
impact.
This is certainly not a simple task, but
social listening helps make it easier.
Monitor key activity on social media to
determine:
·
What information your
audience is looking for.
·
What questions they
are asking.
·
The major challenges
they are facing.
Then use this information to shape your
content strategy for the better.
3. Curate Content
Don’t bore your audience. Content becomes
awfully dull if you’re only talking about your brand and delivering one voice
or perspective.
This is where content curation helps spice
things up.
When done properly, content
curation helps interact with key members in the community, engage
thought leaders and industry experts, and deliver unique perspectives and value
to your audience.
Use social media to curate perspectives from
other industry experts and thought leaders in the space. There are many
effective ways to do this.
Here are a few of my favorites:
·
Round-up pieces
·
Tips/Predictions
·
Quotes
·
Statistics
·
Examples
·
Top resources
·
Use cases
Bonus: Social media can also be used to craft user-generated
content. I’ve found this tactic especially helpful to boost content reach
and show appreciation for new and longtime followers.
By successfully curating content, you will
find yourself building extremely valuable relationships with other folks in the
industry, while simultaneously reaching new and highly targeted audiences.
4. Help Users Digest
Your Content
I debated using a “shocking” statistic here
about how badly our attention spans have shortened or the continued trend of
users scanning articles rather than reading them.
But I’ve had enough of the scary statistics.
What do we actually do about it?
We, as successful digital marketers, must find
a way to help our audiences easily digest our content.
We cannot continue to serve
content exclusively in the same way, and simply accept the fact that less than
half (sorry, I said no statistics!) of users are actually reading it.
Social media is an incredible tool to help
solve this problem.
Consider this:
You’ve spent 10 hours crafting a 3,000+ word
piece of content that covers all of the details on a given topic.
Let’s say machine learning is the topic to
make this example more tangible.
The content asset you created provides an
overview of:
·
What machine learning
is.
·
Why it’s so important.
·
Its major benefit.
·
How it’s evolved over
the years.
·
Common challenges that
businesses face.
·
How it works.
·
Frequently asked
questions.
·
Choosing the right
machine learning tools.
·
And so much more.
It’s safe to assume that most users will not
get through every word of this asset.
Some users may only be looking for information
in one of the many sections you covered.
Creating social media-friendly content around
the asset can help make it much more digestible for your audience.
For example, put together a short video recap
of what’s in the post and share it on social media.
There’s also an opportunity to break the content
up into extremely digestible and shareable assets.
For example, you could create short videos
covering each section of the piece and share it across social media channels.
The key is making sure that you are serving
content to users in multiple ways so it can be consumed based on their unique
behaviors and preferences.
Final Thoughts
In the same way that you are using content to
improve your social
media strategy, you can use social media to improve your content
strategy.
It’s worth noting that this involves alignment
across an organization.
It requires getting the rest of your team on
board and ensuring social media marketing and content marketing teams are on
the same page.
When both teams understand and appreciate the
ways in which they can support each other, the overall digital marketing
strategy will see impressive results like expanded reach, additional traffic to
your site, boosted engagement and so much more.
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