6 Ways Social Media Will Enhance Your Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the fastest growing methods of digital marketing. It provides a great way for you to engage with your customers and to get found on the major search engines. However, social media is often [view]ed as a separate strategy from you content marketing, when in truth, it should be one of the primary tools you utilize when deploying your content marketing strategy.

Paid promotion on social media is an incredibly effective way of getting your content into the hands of your customers. But if you want your traffic to spike and the interest in your business to explode in a viral way,  it’s a great idea to encourage your readers and social media followers to share your blog posts with their own social media circles.

Luckily, there are ways that you can improve your blog posts and other content to make them more shareable on social media. If you implement these tips when creating content and posting on your blog, you might be surprised by the number of shares that you get. In no time, you’re sure to be pulling more traffic from social media than ever before!

1. Optimize Your Images for Social Media

Hopefully, you are already using stock images on your blog. Adding images is a great way to break up the monotony on the page and add some visual appeal. It can really make the difference between a boring and unappealing blog and a great one.

However, even if you are using stock images, you might not be properly optimizing them for social media sharing. Simply placing images on your blog isn’t enough for social media sharing — you have to ensure that your images will work well when they’re being shared on the major sites, like Facebook or Pinterest.

Try “sharing” your posts on your social media pages to get a pre[view] of how your images post to these sites. If they are cut off or seem to be strangely cropped, you may need to experiment with the sizes of the images that you use. You want the entire image to show up when it’s shared on social media so that it doesn’t look “strange.”

Another good idea is to add text to your images, such as the name of your website and the name of your blog post. You can still sprinkle in regular stock images throughout your posts, but having at least one image that is optimized in this way can be great for social media sharing. There are a lot of free tools — both online and off — that you can use to easily add text. These types of images work great on Pinterest but work well on all of the other major social media sites as well. Plus, they’ll help ensure that your website name is remembered, even when people just scroll past these images on their newsfeed. It’s a great way to make your website name a household name among people who are interested in your industry.

2. Add Buttons for Social Media Sharing

People may not share your posts with their followers if it isn’t easy for them to do so. Copying and pasting your URL into a social media page can be tedious on a smartphone or other device, and some people might not want to take the time to do it. Use a plug-in to add social media sharing buttons to all of your posts. Then, your readers will only need to press one button to share your post with all of their followers. Believe it or not, this can make a big difference. Plus, it makes it easy for you to track the number of people who have shared your posts, which can help you make helpful tweaks to your future blog posts and content marketing campaigns.

3. Address Something Current

Don’t make your blog posts too generalized. Keep them modern and related to current trends in your industry or current events. If your posts are related to what’s going on right now, there will be more of an urgency for your followers to share your posts with their friends. There will also be a better chance that people will want to click on the post to see more about what it’s about.

4. Reward Your Readers for Sharing on Social Media

There are tools out there that can allow you to reward your readers for sharing your posts with their social media followers. For example, you can host a raffle and allow your readers to get “tickets” for the raffle for each social media share that they do.

5. Share on Your Own Pages

Some people may not even think about pressing the social media share buttons on your posts, but if they see a post on their newsfeed from your social media account, they might just click the “share” button there. Without flooding the newsfeed, use your social media pages to “plug” your new blog posts and old favorite posts.

6. Write the Best Content That You Can

Take your time when crafting your blog posts. Simply putting words on a page isn’t enough — you have to ensure that your content is engaging, interesting, unique and entertaining. It has to teach readers something that they didn’t already know, make them laugh or otherwise keep them entertained.

Source: www.forbes.com