Why Use Social Media for Content Marketing?
Here’s why social media and marketing work best when they work together.
An old-style, “push” marketing campaign stresses quantity over quality. The techniques assume that if we send you a big enough deluge of hard-sell messages in a wide enough range of formats—some day, eventually, you’ll pay attention.
We all know how much we hate being on the receiving end of those campaigns. So how should we expect our members, clients, prospects, or contacts to respond when we’re the sender (or maybe the perpetrator)?
Social media opens up a different kind of opportunity for anyone who prefers genuine conversations and networking to quick, transactional selling. The accent is on building a strong professional relationship, sharing ideas and resources, then gradually figuring out how to work together toward a common set of goals. When the business relationship takes shape, it’s built on a much more solid foundation.
But you’ll only build genuine, lasting relationships on social media by putting forward real ideas and knowledge. That’s where content marketing comes in. By repackaging the content you already have in hand and distributing it on a range of social platforms, you create an online persona that your target audiences can relate to.
Your blog will probably be the fulcrum of your content marketing strategy. It’s more detailed than the Twitter tweet or LinkedIn post that sends new readers your way, but a quicker read than the case study, white paper, or downloadable resource on which it was based.
But posting your blog is just the first step—if all you do is build it, they will not come. Depending on your audience and message, content marketing uses some of the following platforms to draw a wider audience:
- LoveIt
- Quora
- You Tube
- StumbleUpon
These “spokes” of your social media wheel will only support your campaign if you fortify them with quality relationships that are mutually beneficial—which means you have to do more than send out automated responses, promotional messaging, and cheery, generic notes that say nothing about what you do or what matters to you. Your social media strategy will only succeed if you consistently build it on three elements: engaging, informing, and retweeting.
