Content converts. Content that’s unique, useful, and engaging that is. And isn’t that what you want your social media strategy to do? You want it to convert more awareness about and engagement with your brand. You want it to convert more traffic to your website. You want it to convert mere brand follows into trusting and loyal relationships.
Well, without quality content, your social media strategy is pointless.
Content makes the online world go round. We’re all consumers, and we love to consume content—from political tweets to Jimmy Fallon YouTube videos to Leonardo DiCaprio memes.
So if you want consumers to consume your brand via your social media strategy, you better keep content marketing in mind.
Know Your Target Audience
When you truly understand your audience—demographically and how they use social media—you can know what keywords to utilize in your content, what social channels to share your content through, good times to share, and their preferred content types. Once you know who your target market is and how they operate, you can then begin delivering value. The more value you provide your audience, the faster your social reach and presence grow.
Listen to Your Audience Via Social Media
Social media is a consumer’s outlet. We use it to ask for solutions to our problems, complain about a bad restaurant experience, and share interesting videos with our friends. Use this to your brand’s advantage. Find out through your customers’ posts and comments what their problems are, what topics they like to talk about, what types of content they prefer engaging with and sharing, etc. Doing so lets you know what content topics to address, types to create as well as which platforms they’re active on so you can know where to post the valuable content you’ve created for them.
Use #Hashtags and a Conversational Tone
Use them. Use them both every day.
Hashtags help you socially promote your content, track your promotions, target specific audiences, and start a social conversation. And it takes five seconds to come up with and type your hashtag phrase. Simply take a word or short, powerful phrase from the piece of content you’re sharing and put a hashtag in front of it.
The right tone you use with your content is important as well. Don’t be a stiff, unfriendly brand; be a conversational one. With the content you write and the social posts you share, be sure you have a voice that matches your brand voice and shows your unique personality, but is also conversational and engaging for your audience.
Expose the Human Side of Your Brand
Photos and videos are the most popular types of shared content. They’re effective ways for your brand to more easily communicate with your audience and show the human side of your brand. These highly shared content types put a face to your brand, which consumers more easily relate to, and depending on what you post, they can also help show that you have a fun, goofy, creative, and/or charitable side. So don’t be shy, start sharing company photos and videos.
Ensure Your Content is Seen
Your content won’t be consumed and bring you all the benefits you desire unless it’s seen by your audience, meaning frequency and timing are your helpful friends. When you want higher levels of engagement (and who doesn’t?), you need to know how frequently you should post content to each social media site and what times are best to post. If your research concludes that your brand should post 5-8 times on Twitter and 2-3 times on Facebook a day, then you can plan out how much content you need to be creating each week and how much outside relevant content you need to find to socially share as well.
Maintain an Editorial Calendar
Organization is key to successful content marketing and social media marketing strategies, and an editorial calendar gives you the needed organization for both. It allows you to track when your content will go live, when it will be shared, where it will be shared, how often it’s being shared, the number of clicks it receives, where the clicks came from, etc., all from one convenient place that every team member who needs to know can access at any time.
A good social media strategy benefits your brand in various ways. But when you couple it with a good content marketing strategy, your advantages skyrocket.
About The Author: Greg Shuey is a co-founder and COO of Stryde, an audience driven content marketing agency. To learn more about Stryde or download their latest eBook, “How To Choose The Right Content Marketing Agency”, click here.
