Content marketing has become one of the most important facets of any inbound marketing campaign.
More companies are focusing on not just providing regular content on their blogs, but making sure that their content is of high quality, informative, helpful and relevant to their readers. However, even though content marketing is currently one of the most popular and effective forms of inbound marketing, the best content in the world isn’t going to make a difference if no one is reading it.
This is why most businesses are no longer picking and choosing inbound marketing strategies – instead, they are using major inbound marketing strategies such as social media marketing and SEO in conjunction with their content marketing. The use of social media in particular is a great way to promote your content and to gain exposure for your blog.
1. Choosing the Right Social Media Channels
The very first thing you need to do is choose the social media channels that will best benefit your brand. There are a ton of networks to choose from, which means that you should consider the audience that you are writing for. For example, if you are writing for professional business types, then LinkedIn is an excellent choice. If you’re writing for middle-aged stay-at-home mothers, then Facebook is a better option. The following are a few of the major channels that you should look into in order to promote your content:
- Facebook – Facebook is practically a necessity considering the fact that it currently has a worldwide user base of roughly 1.3 billion people. You can post links to your content through your Facebook page that your followers can not only go to, but can also “like” or “share” which helps bring awareness to your content.
- Twitter – Twitter is quickly gaining momentum as a must use social channel with over half a billion users. Twitter should be used to post brief information such as links to your content, which can be re-tweeted by your followers.
- Google+ – One of the biggest benefits of using Google+ is its authorship tool, which lets you claim ownership of all of your content, thereby helping to improve your blog’s search ranking.
2. Add Share Buttons to Your Content
In addition to advertising your content on your social media channels, you should also place social sharing buttons directly on the page your content is on. This allows regular readers to share your content to their social network with a click of a button, eliminating any work they would have to do, such as copying and pasting the link and going to their social profile in order to share the piece. In addition to adding social share buttons to the blog, add them to your email newsletters as well.
3. Entice Your Followers
Just adding links to your social channels won’t ensure that followers will actually click on them. You have to actually promote your content, not just link to it. This can be done in several ways;
- Use an image – Some social channels, such as Facebook, allow you to use an image when posting a link to your content. Images receive way more engagement on most social networks than text – just make sure that the image is relevant to your content and that you use effective text to accompany it.
- Ask a question – Use a question to hook your followers into clicking the link in order to find the answer within your content. For example, “what is the most effective way to get your followers to read your content?”
- Be personal – Simply asking your followers to read your new blog post, or asking them for feedback on your content, can be a great way to get them to do so. Just don’t take this route every time or it will seem like you’re taking advantage of them.
4. Paid Advertising
While posting links to your content on your social profile’s feed is a great way to get followers to read your content, you can also pay for social media advertising to get even more exposure. The following are just a couple of ways you can do this:
- Targeted Facebook ads – Use a variety of criteria, such as users that like blogs, WordPress or more, in order to promote your content to specific targets.
- Promoted Tweets – Promote your tweets by targeting users by geographic location, gender, interest and more.
- StumbleUpon Paid Discovery – Buy clicks at low prices from socially engaged visitors using StumbleUpon.
Writing good content is important, but so is obtaining readers. Using social media to gain exposure for your company’s content is great means of finding them.
