Getting the Most out of Your Content: How to Integrate Your Social Media and Content Marketing
There are a lot of ways to engage potential customers online, and two of the most effective ones are social media and content marketing:
Social media marketing involves engaging with your audience and promoting your website through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many more. The goal of social media marketing is to gain fans, interact with your visitors and, ultimately, get visitors to your site and convert them into customers.
Content marketing , on the other hand, is about adding useful content, such as blog posts and articles, to your website to demonstrate your knowledge in your area, entertain your audience, build credibility, gain subscribers who will visit your site regularly, give Google more ways to find your site, and build trust with your audience so they are eager to become customers.
If you’re not gaining much attention through either of these approaches, one of the issues may be that you’re looking at them as separate, when these two strategies should really be undertaken in conjunction. Content marketing and social media should not be thought of as individual methods of marketing; instead, they should be seen as part of one overarching project to drive customers to your website and keep them coming back. When you understand the synergy between these strategies, you can massively grow your website traffic.
Share Your Blog Posts
The first and most obvious way to get the most out of your content and drive more traffic to your website is to share your content on your social media accounts. Sharing your content across your accounts gives your audience more interesting articles to read and encourages them to visit your site to see more. Once you get your followers to your site, you can continue to build their interest in your brand, so they take the required actions to become your customers.
To show off and share your content, you can choose to manually post your content on the accounts of your choosing. However, this can be time consuming and frustrating, as you probably don’t want to post your content on social media as soon as you create it, but instead share it when it’s most likely to generate interest. To do this more easily, there are a number of plugins and programs you can use.
One way to connect your blog to your social media and post automatically is through IFTTT.com, which has a recipe for connecting your WordPress blog to various social accounts. A YouTube video on how to do this can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErtDuBoAQY. WordPress plugins are another great way to automatically share your blog posts to social media. This article discusses 10 that are worth looking at: http://wpdean.com/wordpress-plugins-for-social-media-automation/. Here’s another article that provides some useful thoughts on WordPress plugins as well, with a detailed analysis of Twitterfeed, Jetpack, and SNAP: https://www.jeffalytics.com/best-wordpress-plugin-social-media-auto-posting/. In case you still can’t find the service that fits your needs, here’s one more discussion of auto posting services available: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/distributing-blog-content-autoposting-services/.
Alright, so there’s obviously a lot of ways to post your fabulous content automatically. But, there’s more to think about than just posting your content to your own pages on social media. It’s also important to look for specific groups that are most likely to be interested in your content. To keep track of what your fans are interested it and get them to read your awesome content, you might want to join a Facebook group, a Google+ community, or use social bookmarking sites like Reddit.
Write for Your Audience
Instead of making sharing your content with the right audience an afterthought, you can take this one step further and make this the starting point for coming up with content. In other words, when you first set out to write any new article, you should ask yourself who it is for and where you’re going to share it. That way, you’ll only put the work into blog posts that you know there’s a specific audience for, so you can practically guarantee their success.
For example, an article on Bruce Lee will be highly popular if you share it to a Bruce Lee Google+ community. As well as writing content for one specific audience, you can also use your content to reel in entirely new audience members and bring them to your website. Combining different niches, for instance, is a great way to write something new and get lots of hits. If you have a fitness website, for example, you can write about fitness and martial arts and then submit that to martial arts groups, or you can write about fitness for entrepreneurs and share this to entrepreneur groups. Either way, thinking of your angle and where you’re going to share your content before you release it will guarantee ROI for your writing efforts!
If you have any questions or ideas about getting the most out of your content through social media, please let us know in the comments below. If you want to book a free consultation to discuss how using social media and content marketing can earn you more customers, please contact us.