Social media is an essential piece of your business marketing strategy. The social platforms help you to connect with your customers, increase awareness about your brand, and boost your leads and sales.
One of the best ways that allows a business to reach out to their customers and to gain the attention of more people/potential customers is by creating interesting and informative content. Here are three tips that emphasize why you need to produce quality content to ensure social media is good for your business.
Tip 1: Sharing content can be automated
Thanks to tools like Hootsuite, Sendible, Social Sprout and Buffer, you do not have to worry about manually going to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and copying and pasting materials from a document or spending hours setting up your scheduled posts. You can automate your posts to publish up to six months on Facebook. This means that you can set up your Facebook account to post six to ten or more times every day, but you do not have to babysit it because you have fed the content in.
The best part is that a lot of these automation tools use bulk feeds. Meaning, you can format your content in an Excel file and convert it to CSV and plug into these tools. You do not have to input the content one by one. Talk about saving a lot of time while also maximizing your reach.
Tip2: Your brand gets natural repetition through multi-platform marketing
If all your social media accounts on all four major platforms look like each other, you get many bites at the apple. You really do. When people run into your brand on Facebook, there is a chance they might run into your brand on Instagram or Twitter.
If there is enough graphical similarity between your brands, then they can see that you are all over the place and they can converse or engage with your brand regardless of where they are on the internet.
Eventually, this builds a tremendous amount of familiarity and people might become so comfortable that they join your mailing list when you call them to action. The best part to this is that it happens naturally by you simply creating accounts on all the major platforms. Your brand speaks to people who are interested in your niche, regardless of where they go.
Tip 3: Save money through content re-purposing
Make no mistake about it, content generation is expensive. Even if you hire highly qualified, talented, skilled, and experienced people from countries with huge numbers of people who speak English as a second language, you can still be out thousands of dollars every year. High quality writers from places like the Philippines, Pakistan and India, may be cheaper than American or British writers, but their costs still add up over time.
One of the things about social media marketing that really excites me is the fact that you can create content and re-purpose it into many different formats. This reduces your cost.
If I hire a writer from India and pay that person $350 a month, I can get a fixed amount of content. At this point, I can choose to pay that person another $350 to get even more content, or I can take whatever content they have produced and turn them into videos, infographics, or strip them down into questions for tweets.
I can turn them into diagrams, I can take the voice-over of the video that I produced and turn it into a sound file. I can even make a slideshow of these materials. Once I have all this re-purposed content, then I can share them on format-specific platforms. For example, I can share the slideshows on Slideshare. I can post the infographics on Pinterest.
I can post the product shots or general product pictures on Instagram. I can post the questions on Twitter. I can also post the videos on YouTube. Best of all, I can post all the formats on Facebook. Do you see how this works? When you do this, you buy content once, re-purpose it, and share it so you get a higher chance of getting traffic or visibility with that re-purposed content.
You are not creating content constantly. In fact, the name of the game is to produce as little content as possible but market these high-quality pieces widely.
This is how you maximize their value. The old idea of constantly publishing content just to get a few eyeballs here and there is dead. Seriously. That is a one-way ticket to the poorhouse.
Your better approach would be to make that content work for you by converting it into many different formats. You then share these different formats on platforms that specialize in those formats.
I hope these 3 tips are clear enough to set about the challenge of getting your social media marketing right.