Find out why you need to incorporate social media posting into your content marketing strategy
Making sure your content is found by your audience is vital for any marketing endeavour. Among SEO and advertisements, social media is one of the best (and most cost-effective) ways of doing this.
In 2019, more than 90% of millennials and 77% of Generation X were active on social media. And to add to that, 54% of browsers used social media to research products.
It’s clear that social media dominates our online use, making it one of the most prominent platforms for engaging with customers about your content. If you’re wondering how does social media support content marketing, keep reading.
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How does social media support content marketing?
Both social media posting and content marketing activities such as blogging and free tutorials can help raise your online profile. It doesn’t have to be one or the other; any good marketing strategy will include a combination of these approaches.
Find out how social media supports content marketing below:
1. Helps you reach your audience (and attract more)
Building a following on social media allows you to retain your audience by relaying your content to them. Content that is relevant among users will be shared to reach more people. Social media marketing is an effective way for users already following you to be updated when you output new content.
Additionally, building your social media presence ensures your content is reaching an audience on top of your regular visitors.
Social media and content marketing complement each other to build a rapport between you and your audience. Your content, whether that be blog posts, articles, or other forms of media can link to your Twitter and Facebook pages while those platforms can be used to promote your content.
Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can greatly boost your website’s traffic when utilised properly. Building an audience who then retweet or share your blog posts leads to more clicks on your website.
2. Builds a connection with your audience
A robust social media presence builds trust among your audience. These platforms can be used to build a community that is loyal to your product and content, whose influence will attract more people.
It’s important that you use the right kind of engagement when building your online presence on platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, which is why social media marketing is no easy commitment. With the right communication, you can build a loyal community among your followers which can only be a positive for your website.
Cultivating an audience and community also helps steer the direction of your future content. Understanding what your audience likes and why they follow you helps you create content that they will continue to consume.
3. Generates honest feedback in real-time
There is a reason why more and more companies are relying on social media platforms like Facebook for feedback and customer support. When used to their full potential, they can act as direct communications between you and your users.
There is no better way to gauge the opinions of your audience than through social media, whether this is critical or suggestive. Use this feedback loop to your advantage and manifest it within your content.
Simply put, responses and engagement metrics obtained via social media tells you how to make your content better. Users may also share their opinion on what you should write about next, giving you ideas for future content.
Your social media platform is not meant to be a one-way stream for content to be pushed out. Monitoring its reception helps you narrow down amendments and areas for improvement. You may find that content on your website is no longer relevant or fits in with your brand, or it may simply be missing things that should be there.
4. Lets you sculpt your brand voice
How you communicate and conduct your social media presence helps carve out your brand voice. Developing a niche and narrowing down your brand’s personality helps cultivate a target audience. How you market your content on social media should distinguish it from your competitors.
Your website is where your content is expressed in its entirety, but your social media page should capture the ethos of your company through a few words and (mostly) images in a tone that demonstrates your brand’s style.
When you’ve narrowed this down, you can extend this to other pages. Your voice and style should be consistent across all platforms. It should also be adaptable to change in order to remain relevant, which brings us onto the next topic.
5. Demonstrates your brand’s adaptability
Your market environment will change over time, and so will your content. Your social media platform should show your brand fitting seamlessly into a dynamic market environment that is always changing and evolving.
Keeping your content and brand personality relevant is crucial to retaining your audience, and is demonstrated best through your social media marketing efforts.
The way your brand delivers content may not be viable permanently. Similarly, your brand’s style and voice may lose its relevance. It’s important that you continue to adapt this as your company, the market and your audience evolves, and that your social media platforms clearly reflect this. They won’t stay the same, so neither should your brand.
How are social media and content marketing different?
While social media and content marketing promote each other, they are still two different entities.
Content marketing is your brand’s strategy of delivering content relevant to a product or service for the benefit of potential customers. This could be blog or article posts, videos, or other forms of informational pages. Regardless of what form of media it is, the content is there to add value to the product and help the customer.
Social media covers certain mass-appeal, up-to-the-minute channels through which your content is distributed to find more customers. The purpose of a company using social media is to raise brand awareness among potential audiences, in addition to cultivating its existing one. Discussion and activity around the brand and its product, service or content is how marketers increase public awareness of a company.
For any new brand that wishes to provide more value to their customers, the lack of social media marketing would make it very hard for them. Social media has been a vital component of digital marketing for years now, and will continue to be.
✏️ Discover more about how to put together a content marketing strategy on the Copify blog.
Header image: Erik Lucatero
Embedded images: Nadine Shaabana, Hybrid, Jonas Leupe