Whether you are jumping on the content marketing bandwagon or are trying to figure out a way to leverage all of the digital assets that your company has acquired over the years, the next problem after content creation will be in the actual promotion of your content. How do you get the word out to your customers as well as prospective clients?
Obviously, you begin by organically promoting it to your current client base through your website, newsletter, or whatever social media properties you might own. The reach of your website and newsletter, however, will be limited to your current customer base or those that already know about your brand. While search engines might pick up your content and display it for relevant searches, we all know that there are no guarantees and we have absolutely no control over how much traffic we can gain from search other than optimizing our content from an SEO perspective.
Social media, though, opens up potential doors to have our content seen – and shared – by huge communities that number in the hundreds of millions of users. These users also include content creators and media publishers, the same entities that could potentially create an invaluable backlink leading their viewers to your content which will further help your content be seen by search engines.
If you’ve simply been automating the publication of your content to social media across multiple networks without doing any optimizations, you miss out on a plethora of opportunities. Similar to how you use SEO to optimize your content, there are similar things you should be doing to optimize your content for maximum reach in each of the unique social networks that exist.
Today I published a guest post on the leading content curation software company Curata’s blog which deals with how to effectively use social media to promote your content in 11 effective ways that you might not already be doing enough of.
Check out the entire post here: 11 Effective Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Content
Are you already doing all of these? Which new methods did you discover?
Ardith Willner says
Hi Neal, I ‘found you’ thru Social MediaSuccess Summit 2014 – and was really impressed by all your information! Thanks for such a great presentation.
We live in Santa Cruz, and are 10 months of preplanning our business. I feel social media could really be a valuable tool for us to use.
It seems complex to get started….??? I hope this doens’t sound too naive, but in your teaching/services do you accept clients to get them up, and then teach them how to maintain all the various platforms them self???
I am not quite sure,but am very interested.
Namaste,
Ardith
Neal Schaffer says
Hi Ardith, thanks for the comment. Yes, I help clients in many different ways. Please go to my Contact Page and fill out the form informing me of your specific needs and I’ll get back to you. Best, Neal
Soumya Roy says
Neal, just read your post on Curata and really loved it, very informative, to the point and actionable.
We are a bootstrapped startup company and we work on education sector. We are about to start content marketing as we are looking for expanding our immediate reach. We are already on top of Google for our keywords and getting regular leads from search engines and the conversion rate is also good (can be improved and we are working on that) but right now we are looking for a bigger market and also planning to start selling online courses.
For a startup, the main problem is getting quality resources at reasonable prices and to retain them. We can not bear huge salaries like big brands and as an entrepreneur it is not possible to work on everything all the time. And over automation and tools can do more harm than good.
If you don’t mind and can put some lights, I would really love to know your inputs on the same topic from a startup point of view. How a startup should plan their contents, promotions, lead generation and branding using social media…
Regards
Soumya Roy
Neal Schaffer says
Hi Soumya, thanks for your comment! Yes, startups will be challenged to embark on a content marketing program. SEO is much easier, but actually if you hire an SEO company there are always things they will do for you on a monthly basis. Social is no different, but harder to outsource. However, if you are a startup and really don’t have the resources, you might want to consider outsourcing as part of your plan. There are ways of balancing insourcing with internal quality control to create a robust program on a tight budget. Ping me if you’d like any help in doing so 😉
stephaniecline1 says
I have read new thing in your article but tell me one thing how can we apply SEO technique while writing the content on social Media what aspects should be follow?
Neal Schaffer says
While writing content you should focus on ensuring that keywords that you use for your website SEO are included in your copy for social.
RKumar says
In 2015, we analyzed that Social Media will be on boom and twitter will become like Facebook and Pinterest will give more traffic. Very Nice Article. According to me, you do not have to be an all rounder, you have to specialize yourself and set your goal when you going to start SMO. Target your visitors and do engagement.
Neal Schaffer says
Thanks for the input and advice!
David says
Hi… Neal I came across maximize your social for the first time and will really look forward to hear more from you. Really nice website and yes definitely recommend your services to my seniors 🙂
Neal Schaffer says
Thanks David!