If you have spent quality time creating content you think is great, then it is also time that you start raking in the benefits of content marketing. Now content marketing using free options such as SEO, social marketing would be the preferred way to go for individuals like you. It may not be viable to spend money on paid as for your blog or site promotion just yet.
Gamut of social media platforms to tap
Social media is the hot buzzword today and has been for quite some time. Promoting your content though on the usual Face book, LinkedIn and Twitter is just part of a larger canvas that you have at your disposal and you need to know about the rest.
Here is how you can go about the whole process of leveraging your content so as to promote it on social media platforms.
- It all starts with the content itself. What you create has to be intriguing, relevant, and unique with catchy titles as well as images. Now that you have these, you are ready to share it with the world. You have tools to check the effectiveness of your titles and how a bit of tweaking can make them stand out and get noticed.
- Content has to be such that it makes life easier for customers. They should feel motivated to go online and carry out their transactions, especially when it comes to service industry like banks.
One example of this is the initiative of Barclays to enable customers who are not that tech savvy to go online. Their Digital Eagles project has led to the accessibility of in branch customer services for many of their customers at their homes. The project is also remarkable from the “human touch” perspective.
- Make it easier for people in social media to share your content. Add relevant and crisp Meta tags so that the gist of your content is displayed correctly. Make use of tools to check out if your content pages are optimized as they should be for display on social media.
- Make it also easy for your visitors to share your images. You can use tools like SumoMe that enables your visitors to just hover on the image and share them.
- Ensure your content is optimized properly for display on mobiles. Today, 20% of the traffic is generated from mobile devices and you cannot afford to ignore them. Brands like Mashable are making use of content curation on Scoop.it to gain visibility through the creation of apps for iPad users.
- Create snippets that your visitors can share through Twitter. Here too, you have apps like Clicktotweet that you can add to the blog or site and help your visitors.
- All new content that you have created should be shared multiple times so that they get noticed. Make a schedule such that you are able to share it since you do not want to miss out on any visitors who may not be online when you post your blog on say Twitter.
- It is also advisable to identify the optimum time to post your content. You can make use of a tool like Buffer that will enable you to schedule posting of content at different times to that you are able to target a broad spectrum of your audience. There are other tools like Socialbro and Face book Insights that are useful as well. You need to try out different times and days to find out what works the best though.
- Reach out to communities other than popular social media platforms as they too can generate traffic. One example is Scoop.it that curates content. This is where many people post their content for many others to follow and share it among various social channels. The idea is to get more and more visibility and through that even more shares. Instead of doing it all by yourself, you are making use of popular community boards to do the needful for you.
- It is advisable to know about the bloggers in your niche and leverage that information. You should read as well as share other posts and also comment on them. Ensure you specify the Twitter handle of that blogger. People will return such gestures and it is a win-win situation for everybody.
- Use social bookmarking effectively through sites of high profile such as Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg. This too involves some effort from your side to read, comment on other posts within these sites but is well worth the investment.
To summarize, it can be said that great content requires the exposure and visibility it deserves. Forbes for instance has managed to incorporate these ideas into their social media strategy and boosted readership tremendously.
You too can gain a lot from the above mentioned steps and lend a huge boost to your blog or site in terms of visitor as well as search engine attention.
