The growth of social media in recent years has been astronomical. Generally, any company that doesn’t have strong social media marketing lacks the ability to connect with its audience in a way that drives engagement.
Social media connects any given brand with their users on platforms that the customer is comfortable and familiar with. For brands that want to disseminate their content and messaging to reach a larger group, social media is key. For that reason, content marketing and social media marketing often go hand-in-hand. Your content can be the best in the world, but if it isn’t marketed right and doesn’t get to read, what purpose does it serve? For a lot of companies, social media gives content marketing the legs it needs to reach the right users at the right time, facilitating brand engagement.
At the end of the day, the content you create must be shareable in order for it to generate results. So, how do you create content that users WANT to share?
Include Statistics
It’s been proven that content containing quantitative data gets shared more frequently than content that lacks it. Whether it’s a blog post, or a simple post on a platform such as Facebook, including a relevant statistic drives clicks and increases engagement. Including hard data in your content makes your piece stand out amongst the rest that is likely cluttering up a news feed.
The idea behind data-driven marketing has a lot to do with reasoning. It goes way beyond making blanket statements or recommendations with seemingly no validity behind it. Including a statistic with that recommendation, however, sheds a whole new light on the expertise at hand, adding a real trust factor. As users, we want to read content that has significant value. Once we find a piece of content truly valuable tends to be the point at which we share it in our respective social communities.
Build Social Media Buttons
An active blog is an incredibly effective and necessary component of most content marketing plans. If your business has experts that can speak to different subjects related to your industry, housing that content on your site’s blog is important. An incredibly simple and efficient way to help increase the shares that blog content receives is to incorporate social media signals into the layout of the Web design. Whether it’s on the side of each article or at the bottom of each article, a simple icon for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram can make it that much easier for users to share the content. If a potential customer reads an article and they like it, helping to facilitate the process of sharing it will make them that much more likely to actually follow through and do so. You want to make it as easy as possible for users to share something that they like.
Actionable Insights
The content you create should leave the user with a clear direction as to how they can take what they just read and implement it. Whether it’s actually taking the action themselves, or recognizing that they need to hire someone to take care of these services for them, there needs to be a next step. Think about the type of content that you most frequently see as you scroll through the news feeds of the social platforms you prefer. Generally speaking, how-to posts or tutorial videos perform great because users want to share it with their friends, families, or co-workers also on the platform. Identify the true value that your brand can offer, and determine how you can present that to your users in a way that they can really use.
Use Vivid Imagery
Too much text is overwhelming to readers, so including vivid images in a post can do a lot for increasing engagement and shareability. A post with only text can easily be overlooked, however, including an intriguing image can capture the eyes of any user as they scroll down the site. Use high-quality photos that are related to the content at hand to further reinforce a point. A lot of the time, a great image can truly convey certain messaging without any words.
By focusing on creating an interesting experience for your users on social, you’ll find that your content performs better and leads to increased engagement. Whatever your industry may be, your content marketing and social media marketing should have some cross-over and collaboration to ensure that your efforts are as efficient and effective as possible.
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