You’ve got a good grasp on this content marketing thing. What about social media? Are you dominating the social scene in the same way that you’re able to dominate content marketing?
In some minds, there’s little connection between social media marketing and content marketing. Yes, they’re both marketing, but how do they connect in an integral, powerful, and exponential way?
I would go so far as to say that you can’t have a successful social media marketing approach without great content marketing. You want your content marketing to feed and fuel your social media efforts. Together, social media marketing and content marketing are greater than the sum of their parts. They build on each other.
That’s why I’ve come up with this tactical and focused list to help you enhance your social media content with your other content.
1. Post an old article with a fresh title
Don’t let your old posts languish in the backwaters of the Internet. Post them again.
To keep it varied, use a new title when you post it on Twitter or Facebook. Even The New York Times does this. The same article is posted with different titles or preview text.
2. Post your SlideShare presentation
SlideShare is killer when it comes to social media posting. It makes a significant impact on LinkedIn, which owns SlideShare.
Posting SlideShare presentations has the added benefit of visual impact. You also don’t need to post presentations that have actually been presented – presentation-format content is all that’s required.
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3. Analyze and reshare your most shared content
Use BuzzSumo to find out which of your content has the most social shares, and share it again.
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4. Find the most-shared content on your subject, and share it
Social media is about sharing stuff, even if it’s not stuff you published. After all, that’s the point of curated content.
How do you find the best content to share? You search for the content already performing well. Here’s where you can use the power of BuzzSumo again.
Search for the subject matter about which you want to post:
Identify the most-shared content:
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Share that content. To get retweets, “likes,” and shares on your own social accounts, all you need to do is share the content yourself.
5. Turn a popular article into a YouTube video
If you want to get more social media shares, then post more videos. If you don’t have more videos, convert some popular content into a video.
It’s not hard to do. In fact, there are some ways to do it yourself in just a few minutes. Once you’ve got a new video, share it everywhere.
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6. Turn bits of your articles into images
Every article can be turned into hundreds or thousands of social shares. One powerful way to experience the exponential effect is to transform quotes from your articles into images. Here’s what you do:
Find a quotable section from your article.
Convert it into an image yourself or using an automated service.
Post it to social media with a link to your article.
The content has visual appeal, it’s shareable, and it’s unique.
You can use a free quote app to do this for you. I used Behappy and made this image from one of my Quicksprout articles in 15 seconds:
Recite makes more visually appealing quotes. This one took five seconds for me to make:
7. Unleash a burst of posts when you publish a new article
Another way to dramatically boost the impact of a single post is to release a flurry of social media posts every time you publish a new article.
You can raise the level of excitement with each social post. Here are some phrases to increase eyeballs on it:
## Retweets already?! Check out our latest post!
This article is only # hours old, and already gaining major visibility.
Have you seen the latest from [business name] yet?
Every subsequent post increases the visibility of an article. The impact declines as time goes on, but it’s still there.
The more you post about something, the greater your likelihood of improving visibility, click-throughs, visitors, and conversions.
8. Host a Twitter discussion centered on a particular blog post
Twitter chats have a proven ability to increase engagement. As Social Media Examiner explains:
A Twitter chat is a public Twitter conversation around one unique hashtag. This hashtag allows you to follow the discussion and participate in it. Twitter chats are usually recurring and on specific topics to regularly connect people with these interests.
The angle on this strategy involves hosting a Twitter chat around a specific article.
The social buzz itself is beneficial, but you can increase the power of that social activity by sending signals to your website. If the Twitter chat centers on a certain subject – your controversial article, for example – then you can improve both your website’s traffic and your social shares.
9. Add text to your images
When your content gets shared on social media, it’s going to come with images. Most social platforms automatically import these images. The better the images, the more likely your article is to get shared. Here’s how you can get a bigger impact: Add text to the image.
Kim Garst provides this advice and example:
Take a look at the images below. They’re two separate styles of blog graphics for the SAME article. The top photo makes sense when it’s seen on the blog itself. However, when you take the photo away from the post, there’s no frame of reference for it.
Although her advice is for Pinterest, it works equally well for other social platforms.
10. Add “tweet this” to your content
Twitter is all about bite-sized and compelling bits of content. A “tweet this” plug-in is one of the best ways to promote such sharing.
Find your most quotable lines that fit the character count, and add “tweet this” to promote sharing.
11. Add a Pin It button to all images
Pinterest is one of the leading social platforms for visual content. Put a Pin it button on every image to get it circulating on Pinterest.
If you use Pinterest Analytics, you can gauge the impact of these Pin it buttons to discover the number of impressions and click-throughs it’s giving you.
Conclusion
One of the challenges of social media is that it’s easy to get distracted by the sheer quantity of social platforms. When this happens, it’s easy to neglect quality posting.
The best way to do social media is not the shotgun approach – spraying a bunch of updates all over the place.
Instead, improve your quality. It can be hard to improve quality if you’re trying to manage Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, Periscope, and whatever else.
Choose one platform and focus. Your social media strategy and content marketing strategy can come together in one forum. Once you master one platform, move on to the next one, and so on.
As you improve as a content marketer, you’ll improve as a social media marketer, too.
Not sure which social networks will help bring you closer to your content marketing goals? Find the answers you need in our Social Media Survival Guide.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
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