Content is the fuel that feeds almost every aspect of digital marketing. Everyone who works in SEO, social media, design, development, or content creation has to consider content first. The problem is that each department can easily fall into a pattern where they are only looking at content from the perspective of their role instead of looking at how it can benefit the whole. As social media marketers we should consider how our content strategies impact the overall digital strategy. I have listed here a few things to consider when creating your social media content strategy so that you have a well-rounded strategy.
Are your social profiles setup correctly so that they impact SEO?
This is something that gets overlooked a lot by social media marketers. Setting up your social media profiles is important and setting them up so that they are accurately tied to your website is even more important. Making sure that your profiles are accurately setup for search is especially important if you are trying to get Google to index your new website or blog.
In order to make sure that your social media profiles are setup accurately, make sure to do the following:
- Create a Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest, and YouTube account
- Make sure to claim and verify your Facebook and Google Plus local business listings
- Host all of the videos on your website on your YouTube page
- Make sure that your YouTube page is linked to your Google Plus
- Be sure to link out to all of your social media pages on your Google Plus, YouTube, and Facebook accounts
- Verify your Pinterest page to your website
- Complete all of your company information sections on your social media pages correctly and uniform across all channels
- Link out to your social media from your website
- Update your profile pictures
If you start pushing out content on your social media profiles before these steps are complete, you are not creating a conversion funnel. Making sure that the foundation of your social media presence is ready before you start pushing content out is imperative, especially for SEO.
Are you working with your web content team to align and achieve goals?
Social media is all about community, engagement, and sharing. It would be impossible to always be delivering the most trending and interesting content on your own website. That does not mean, however, that you can’t utilize third-party content to direct people back to your website. Instead of just sharing interesting content or your own content, mix it up and get creative on how to drive traffic back to your site. In order to do this, follow these steps:
- Connect with your on-site content team and find out what kind of content is being published and when
- Connect with your SEO team and find out which pages on your website they are trying to promote
- Curate content based on the type of content that they are trying to promote
- Use tools like Start A Fire to add the webpages from your website that you are trying to promote as suggested content to your third-party pages.
- Share your trending content and monitor the traffic it drives back to your website
This is what it looks like:
Adding these types of conversion funnels to your social media content strategy will help improve the engagement on your social content, help your build a stronger community, and benefit the content and SEO teams. This is a much better strategy than just pushing out content for the sake of doing so.
Are you tracking your results properly?
At the end of the day, if we are not setting and tracking goals, then we don’t really know how or if we are benefiting any part of our strategy. In order to make sure that we our content is producing result we have to track, measure, and reevaluate regularly. Some things to consider when tracking your work:
- Make sure that Google Analytics is setup on your website
- Use Google URL builder or URL shorteners to track performance within Google Analytics to avoid inaccurate data or “dark social” traffic
- Setup an easy to manage social analytics dashboard to monitor performance across all platforms. Business Dashboard Cyfe is a great option for this and you can create a dashboard similar to this one:
All of these are things to consider before you start working on your social media content strategy. At the end of the day every company is looking at the bottom line. If your social media content strategy can benefit the overall digital strategy and you can prove it, then you can prove ROI and your budget will just keep on increasing. Start here and make sure that the foundation in which you are working is setup properly and then move forward with your strategy.
