Social Media Marketing: Finding Great Content
Social media marketing can only be successful if you have great content.
Marketers are always looking for tips and tricks to boost their social media marketing efforts. Well, while there are many steps one can take to enhance one’s social media marketing, the only true key to success is finding content that followers and fans not only want to see, but want to share. Content is king when it comes to a successful social media marketing campaign, and today we have a few great tips to help you find that content and boost the loyalty of your fan base.
Have a look below for four great tips when it comes to seeking out great content to showcase in your social networks.
1. Keep an Eye Out for Big News
Millions of people download apps and monitor news sites every day to keep up to date with the goings on of the world. With such a vast audience already tuned in, you can always be sure to increase your audience engagement when sharing news content. But be careful: sharing top stories is all well and good, but you should be sure that these stories are relevant to your niche. If, for example, you run a marketing agency that specializes in mobile apps, you shouldn’t be posting news about farming subsidies increasing with new laws passed in Congress. While this may be intriguing content for some, it is not an issue that that audience will be looking at you to find. And furthermore, it is not something your target audience will necessarily want to hear about. So take advantage of sites like Mashable, AllTop and major new sources to feed relevant content to your networks and boost your fans’ loyalty to your brand.
2. What’s Hot on Social Media
It never hurts to follow pages and brands that share relevant content. In a study done by Dan Zarrella at HubSpot, he notes that while 22 is the observed maximum number of tweets per day that a brand should be sharing, if your content is relevant, there is no maximum. So when it comes to social media marketing, you should be paying attention to the most popular content of the day. Whether it is top news on your LinkedIn page to share to groups, trending content on Twitter, or highly shared articles or posts on Facebook, popular content exists for a reason: people want to read it. So find what’s hot and share it with your followers.
3. Find Your Top Sources
You should always have a set of blogs, websites or social media sources that you check regularly for great content. This takes quite a bit of time and research. The initial step will be a widespread search with your keywords, followed by some filtering to find only the best sources of content you have seen on the web. Of course, promoting your own content is always the goal, but social media marketing is also about sharing great content. So do the research and find some sources for content, then get sharing. AllTop, noted above, does exactly that. Like many news aggregators, AllTop pools together all of the top news from the day from a variety of sources and shares it in one space. Aggregators are a great place to find relevant content, so find the best ones for your niche and check them daily.
4. Create Content
Of course, the best thing we can do as marketers when it comes to social media marketing is share our own content with our networks. This is much easier said than done. Sourcing content and sharing it is far simpler than taking the time to develop our own blog posts or images, and posting them to our networks. But the payoff is much greater in the end. If we can develop original content (and don’t forget, this content can be derived from other sources we have read) then we stand to reap much higher benefits when that content is shared to our social networks. Again, the two things to keep in mind when drafting content is interest and relevance. In order for our content to be shared with our audience, we are going to want that content to both appeal to the interests of our audience and be relevant to our social communities.
Where do you find the best content? What social media marketing strategies have you implemented when it comes to sourcing content? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
